Thread: are these industrial engines suitable for automotive use?

Thanks dougal.

I remember reading a thread on here a year or two ago about driving up sand dunes and there was every opinion under the sun as to whether it was torque or power which would see you through. It’s probably a bit of the chicken or the egg in this situation. If you’ve got enough torque you won’t need the extra power to pull you through.

Whilst I am not looking to repower either of my discos or any vehicle for that matter curiosity still has me trying to understand how this can be done once diesel electronics are involved.

For example, if one was to take any of the motors listed earlier in the thread eg jcb/isuzu/dura torq then what would be involved in getting JUST THE MOTOR running in relation to electronics.

If it was a petrol motor you could throw the oem ecu away and use one of many aftermarket controllers. But when it comes to diesel I’m assuming this is a different story. Is there a generic aftermarket ecu able to run a diesel motor with user configuration?

Companies which are offering tune maps for diesels, have they gone off to land rover and said ‘look, here’s a wad of cash now give us the IP on your black box’? or have they got the source code or paid a licence fee software to access the ecu?

Some modern diesels are the same weight as the rover v8 but can put out more torque and power than the V8, as well as use less fuel than a 300 tdi (I used exactly 10.1 l/100 km doing 850 km around town in the last couple of weeks and has done so for the last few years, and it gets better out of town). Now that diesel is the fuel of choice for mainstream vehicles, diesel motors are going to be a dime a dozen.

There have been a lot of threads about the ls motors but they sure as hell aren’t a wise choice for a daily driver – think conversion $ and fuel $ (maybe if you like to drag people off at lights they’d be ok????).

As long as you've got enough power and torque for what you're doing, the rest is academic.

But for diesel ECU's, there's not yet a standalone generic controller. But we can't be that far off as most commonrail engines appear to run similar hardware so control wise they're getting more alike all the time.

All those tuners are running one of two ways.
1. Some smart cookie has extracted the factory map and tweaked it, he onsells it and other poeople take your money to write this new map into your engines ECU.
2. Your current map can be extracted from your ECU, tweaked to your desires and then reloaded.

The first approach is a one-size-fits-all approach that could work or could be useless for you. The second approach revolves around finding someone with the gear and knowledge to do this.

There are a lot of hacks out there tweaking diesels, one of the euro forums I visit has people talking of A/F ratios of 13:1 on a diesel. Given that stock diesels run about 22:1 at the richest, 18:1 is a reasonably safe bet for more power without melting pistons, 16:1 is where you start producing nothing but smoke, 14.55:1 is stoich. 13.1 is absolute muppetry that's going to melt your pistons, fill your oil up with soot and **** off every other neighbour and road user with your black smoke.