I've sifted through a good portion of the archives to find cases of warranties being voided because of the installation of a tuning chip because I am considering purchasing one. I have only found one actual case where the installer dropped the guys ECU as well as an article that completely blasted the benefits of installing one. I would like to know if anyone has heard of any other horror stories and/or peoples experiences (who have chips installed in their S-40)with their dealerships when bringing their vehicles in for routine maintenance. My goal is to determine the probability of something actually going wrong to see if the chip is still worth purchasing. My gut feeling is that the chip is very common, and that the risk it brings is minimal. I just want to make an informed decision. If any of you have any insight, it would be greatly appreciated.

TME 'did' my ECU nearly 2 years ago and I am very satisfied with it. No errors, no service problems. Dealer doesn't even notice it's been modified.

On the S/V40's you don't have to worry about the transmission getting overloaded as both the manual M56 and automatic AW52 are identical to the gearboxes found in the S/V70 and now S60/V70 where they have to cope with much more power from the 5-cyl engines..

In the case of my T4 the ECU tune actually fixed several of the well-known early-T4 problems like odd idling behaviour when hot and such.

I can only describe the T4 behaviour.. A tuned 1.9T (or 2.0T) still won't have the most power up high in the rev range, but around the middle, unlike the T4.

Power delivery is smooth and moved a little downwards in the rev-range, which makes it easier to drive in busy traffic.

It's a great feeling to drive at about 50% throttle in 3rd gear, let the revs climb to about 3500 and then steadily increase thottle to about 80%, see the boost rise and feel it really grapple for grip (LSD to the rescue). Then you're catapulted away.. Overtaking time is measured in 3 or 4 seconds!

I do recommend getting a good exhaust as well to really get the full benefit of the power increase across the whole rev-range. The stock exhaust becomes a problem above 5500 rpm under boost where it tends to bog down.

I always run my T4 on 98RON octane and drive it hard (it regularly sees 130+ mph) and so far it seems to like it just fine.

I have not had my 2.0T 'done' yet, but I probably will.

Bye, Arno.