Charlie, I apologize now will you fix my ecu

[carl]

Charlie, I'm sorry for not originally telling you the full story on how the Gothman got locked up.As I said in previous emails and conversations it was done to protect the innocent. A nice person who thought they were doing me a favor. I just wanted to experiment with a different factory tune. There was no malice against you the tune you did for me was great and I appreciated the favor. As I've said from day one I'm willing to pay to have you fix my mistake. I also am willing at no charge to do a full track set up including a corner balance/alignment and ride height set up (5 hours of labor) on your car or any friend of your choice at no charge. I appreciate your help. thanks carl

[ZTEC]

Carl, I wish you were closer for the suspension tuning . Hopefully Charlie will take care of you! There is so much Bvllshlt in this community with this and that it must get frustrating but in the big picture we all share a similar passion and I really hope it gets back to why we love this car so much and all the annoying "Noise" gets drowned out by the sound of our exhausts blazing down the track! Good Luck Lotus Brother
This a great place in Savannah by the way and your post made me think of it!

[apk919]

Originally Posted by ZTEC

...

How 'bout this?

[Chococar]

[FIRME]

Everyone, hold hands together and lets all sing:

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah!
O Lord, kum ba yah!

Seriously though, hope all is resolved soon enough by two good people.

[carl]

how about if I sweeten the deal and through in a kidney. carl

[rsnookjr]

This is really none of my business but it was made public in this forum by Carl and this is the second thread he started on the same subject.

It does appear that Charlie has adopted a "zero tolerance" strategy when it comes to dealing with someone elses lack of integrity. Possibly borne of the old adage: Screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me.

You can claim that it was done to "protect the innocent", but it still impuned the business practices and technical ability of Charlie on a forum in which he has cultivated a very high level of respect for his work. It appears that it was done because you could not admit from the beginning that you had screwed up and pay the going price to fix it. Instead you made it look as though it was Charlie's fault and he should be responsible for fixing it in the eyes of this forum's participants. Kind of a "Team Building" exercise for Carl's point-of-view in order to pressure Charlie.

There is a price for bad decisions and you are now paying it. I admire Charlie's unwillingness to give in to this. I would not give you a second chance to impune my good name or character either. If he has no more dealings with you, you can't blame him or drag him into the fray of any future problems you may encounter whatever they may be. That apparently is the only way that he has a chance to protect himself from your wreckless behavior.

I don't mean to be harsh on Carl, but Carl still doesn't seem to understand or he would quit starting new threads for Charlie to ignore. Carl made the decision that broke his ECM when he allowed someone to attempt to modify Charlie's tune, and Carl made the decision as to how he would deal with the problem his first decision created.

You may wonder how I learned such a lesson. I am thankful that I learned it much earlier in my life, and it wasn't near this expensive financially.

[CalBears92]

Carl, why don't you just buy another Gotham? You didn't pay for the first one anyway.

[gameson]

I think the problem is that Carl has a dead weight ECU. Getting another Gotham means getting another ECU, and if I am not mistaken, an ECU costs US$1000+, so that means Carl will have a $1000 dead weight lying around if getting another Gotham, hence he is asking for a fix.

[CalBears92]

actually, carl's car is running. he has 2 ecu's.

[carl]

Originally Posted by rsnookjr

This is really none of my business but it was made public in this forum by Carl and this is the second thread he started on the same subject.

It does appear that Charlie has adopted a "zero tolerance" strategy when it comes to dealing with someone elses lack of integrity. Possibly borne of the old adage: Screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me.

You can claim that it was done to "protect the innocent", but it still impuned the business practices and technical ability of Charlie on a forum in which he has cultivated a very high level of respect for his work. It appears that it was done because you could not admit from the beginning that you had screwed up and pay the going price to fix it. Instead you made it look as though it was Charlie's fault and he should be responsible for fixing it in the eyes of this forum's participants. Kind of a "Team Building" exercise for Carl's point-of-view in order to pressure Charlie.

There is a price for bad decisions and you are now paying it. I admire Charlie's unwillingness to give in to this. I would not give you a second chance to impune my good name or character either. If he has no more dealings with you, you can't blame him or drag him into the fray of any future problems you may encounter whatever they may be. That apparently is the only way that he has a chance to protect himself from your wreckless behavior.

I don't mean to be harsh on Carl, but Carl still doesn't seem to understand or he would quit starting new threads for Charlie to ignore. Carl made the decision that broke his ECM when he allowed someone to attempt to modify Charlie's tune, and Carl made the decision as to how he would deal with the problem his first decision created.

You may wonder how I learned such a lesson. I am thankful that I learned it much earlier in my life, and it wasn't near this expensive financially.

I appreciate your desire to educate me on integrity however you are a bit off on the facts.

First, I never tried to screw Charlie. I wanted to have that ECU re-flashed with a Lotus factory 255 tune just to try something different,by a dealer, who will remain anonymous. That's the innocent party I'm trying to protect when I first called Charlie and told him that my Gotham ECU got re-flashed by the dealer and the car won't start. I was wrong initially in implying that the re-flash was a standard dealer act. I've since admitted my sin publicly and asked for Charlie's forgiveness. I've also offered to pay Charlie to "unlock" the ECU from day one.

Second, I never impugned Charlie's technical ability.

Third, I never said it was Charlie's fault that my ECU is locked up.

Fourth, I never attempted to modify Charlie's tune. I tried Lotus factory tune downloaded to my ECU. I fully expected that I would lose the Gotham tune, What I didn't expect was that my ECU would become a paper weight and that some special "kernel"( as Charlie called it) would lock up my ECU.

I guess if Charlie wants to punish me for making my mistake by not "unlocking" the ECU that is his right and perhaps that does reflect on his business practices....he has the power to make my misjudgment a $1000 mistake (the cost of the ECU). I've offered to pay for his time to unlock the ECU and I was just hoping that Charlie would do me the favor so that I could get a functioning ECU with no traps so that I at least could have it flashed with a regular lotus program.

Almost daily I get emails from members of this form wanting tech help.many of them I even have come to my home to fix or sort out here cars. I'm the guy that people come to at a track event for help which I'm always happy to provide. I spent over 20 years in my own business and was successful because I practiced" reputation takes a lifetime to build and a minute to lose".. carl

[charliex]

oh dear, i see we're on it again, thanks for the support chaps.

carl as usual is leaving out some key elements, so lets try once again.

flashed with a gotham as a favour to jack, for a couple of catch cans thats i haven't used, which are sitting next to the rather large greddy catch cans i bought from carl for the price he asked for with no fuss, returning to carl. Favour #1

asked to do it one day turnaround even though i was heading out and priority return and i paid shipping, this i did even though i had to put off other stuff, favour #2

phone calls back and forth over the dbw issue carl is having with his car, around 6 hours in total, ecu is returned to me for another reflash and check even though i've told him over and over its not a problem with the ecu, again he wants it immediately, again i'm leaving for california, it turns up late afternoon, i hold off my travels , check it (nothing wrong with it) and ship it back to carl, at my cost and overnited again, finally persuaded carl its not a problem with the gotham and he gets his dbw warrantied by lotus, etc, but in the meantime hes told a bunch of people that its an issue with the gotham, Favour #3

i have to remove the plate and go over the ecu then re-rtv it again, it takes about 1 1/2 hours to do this properly.

get a call from frank telling me about the dealer problem and the car not starting and what happened, next day get a email from carl telling me the dealer screwed up and accidently overwrote his ecu with an S program, i told him i already knew what happened, remeberring i offer to fix accidental for no cost.

carl and the dealer wanted to overwrite it with the older cup 255 program, lotus puts the protection in that stops the car running on a mismatched model, ask shay2nak since he went through the same thing with his S, so the dealer should already know this. From his post my feeling is he's alluding that only i am saying the kernel version protection code is in there, even though he is well aware of it since i've talked it over with him before. I believe it is also listed in the lotus technical documentation so that dealers don't accidently reflash an ecu with the wrong firmware.



so my bad business practice is to (a) flash the ecu for a set of catch cans instead of just charging him $1,200 (b) pay for all the return shipping (C) spend hours on the phone arguing back and forth about a broken dbw controller and trying to explain why he's getting a throttle code. (d) agreeing to recheck the flash on the ecu here in vegas and do it same day because he thinks its broken, and return it priority.

on top of all this carl has been constantly bad mouthing me over this, he initially did it with someone he hadn't realised was someone i knew quite well, as well as a few other people, even though the paperweighted ecu has zero to do with me, after he posted last time about being sorry and accepting his fault, he continued to bad mouth me and tell people that they don't know me and shouldn't be so quick to defend me.

Interestingly he says he wanted to protect the dealership that screwed up his ecu,but he seems to have no issues throwing me to the wolves, even though i have done absolutely nothing wrong here.

As i said if it were business, I'd have charged him full price for the flash in the first place, charged for shipping in full, charged to check that the ecu was in fact working when the dbw was at fault. etc. This is nothing more than just trying to coerce me into doing something he wants by trying to sway opinion via the forums.

i've been over all this with him many times, i'm sorry he keeps dragging it out again and again, each time with a distinct lack of information.

I don't do favours for people that continue to bad mouth and spread disinformation, its just that simple, normally i'd go well out of my way to help people out, my car is offline again as my ecu is in canada, which happened last week too, i have a bunch of dead ecus that i swapped out with people who broke theirs, since i can usually work with them still, but not always.

i'm sure competitors etc can point at this and say look what happens if you buy a tune from charlie, however the key element here is 'buy', if i do you a favour and you go off and bad mouth me and my work, guess what i'm not going to be wanting to do any more favours with you, and i'm probably not that interested in doing further business with you either, i don't think this is unreasonable or unfair. I certainly don't tell people i'll fix things if they shut up about it, or leave it off the forums, nor will i bend to this sort of forum blackmail. You can bad mouth my work if theres something wrong with it, and i will fix it, i won't 'blacklist' you, i've had a few people start threads about stuff in the tunes publically and i've done my best to resolve them to their satisfaction, also publically.


as i'm often told, no good deed goes unpunished., incidently after the cost of the priority shipping it'd have been cheaper to not do it in the first place and just buy the catch cans, nevermind all the time spent and subsequent headaches its caused.

[larez2]

carl, bro, i'm sure you're a nice guy, but you gotta let this go.

[mrluky]

If a brouhaha is boiling, I'm on your side charlie.

[RoadDad]

I may really be showing my ignorance here (which is common and widespread) but could Carl take the ECU to a dealer and have it over written with the proper version program? Or does the protection kernel permanently disable the ECU?

[Vampyre]

^ As far as I know, you can not have mismatched stuff

"lotus puts the protection in that stops the car running on a mismatched model"

[RoadDad]

Originally Posted by Vampyre

^ As far as I know, you can not have mismatched stuff

"lotus puts the protection in that stops the car running on a mismatched model"

Correct. But can the "mismatched stuff" be taken care of with another rewrite by the dealer of the ECU back to the Elise/Exige/ExigeS original program?

[Tracktimeplz]

You know what, im tired of this, and someone needs to say it....


deleted personal attack

[Bavarian Motorist]

Originally Posted by mrluky

If a brouhaha is boiling, I'm on your side charlie.

Hey... look. I quoted you... Whatcha gonna do about it?

[carl]

Originally Posted by RoadDad

...but could Carl take the ECU to a dealer and have it over written with the proper version program? Or does the protection kernel permanently disable the ECU?

From this experience we couldn't get it to work once the kernel disabled the ecu. We tried to reload a stock US S program 3 times and it still was dead. The way I understand it is if you flash a US lotus program over the gotham it locks up but I may be wrong. Bottom line I give up, doe's any body want to buy a locked ECU for $450. Carl