Standalone ecu on a Toyota Crown JZS171 - Don't be scared!
We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have gained over the years and something that is obvious and relatively simple for us may be extremely confusing for somebody else!
One of those things we come across regularly is fitting "standalone" ecu's to cars with automatic gearboxes and cars where plug and play options do not exist. The plug and play ecu has been a hot term over the last 10 years or so and owners of more oddball cars think their options may stop there.
Here we are going to cover a car we have seen rise in popularity recently that has a large amount of confusion surrounding it. The Toyota Crown JZS171, it comes with the fantastic 1JZ-GTE VVTi engine from the factory coupled to a very capable automatic gearbox. Many owners think their options are limited to a little more boost on the standard ecu or a nasty piggyback like a greddy emanage or similar. Did you know for a little over £2000 you can have a feature rich standalone ecu supplied, fitted and tuned on your crown? Leaving you to fit pretty much any turbo and injector combination to extract all of that juicy horsepower keeping the factory electronic throttle and automatic gearbox.
A car that looks this cool with a wealth of tuning options should not be restricted to the standard ecu!
Our choice blends value for money with a rich feature set, an incredibly hard to beat ecu on the market today which is the Ecumaster Black, capable of satisfying 99% of Toyota Crown owners.
The basic package we use is the ecumaster black ecu with a boost control solenoid, high speed intake temperature sensor in the boost piping and add a wideband lambda sensor into the exhaust for closed loop fuelling control and logging. We leave the stock ecu in charge of controlling the automatic gearbox and electronic throttle. This eliminates the maf sensor for those of you who want to run big top mount turbos with either atmospheric or no dump valve for that fantastic turbo chatter. It gives us full control of the engines fueling, ignition and boost control allowing us to properly tune the car for all setups from mild to wild.
The automatic gearbox stays functioning just like it does from the factory, the only compromise is the loss of traction control everything else will function as it does from the factory so there are no loss of luxuries that will ruin the car on the road!
We bring the extended wiring into the cabin so the new ecu is neatly and safely inside the car
To keep everything working correctly so the stock ecu doesn't get too suspicious that it has lost control we share some signals with the standard ecu and some we take away from it entirely. If you are handy with a bit of wiring you can use the below spreadsheet to wire one of these to your Toyota Crown yourself!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wt-iNVF6JwJgVUJcCCMI7l3iJxXcz5ELGjLxkEbbVPA/edit?usp=sharing
and if you managed to get that far you can start it and check everything over with this base map we are providing to your for free below!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j6kLjq-b1E2u2JJkxc2Fuc_guxsvc8LX/view?usp=sharing
This base map should only be used to start your car and check, it is not considered safe to use straight out of the box. Of course check injector and sensor settings match what you are using, we accept no liability for any damage you cause using this base map as is!
Chris Webb
I am going to attempt to use this idea on a Corolla for a temporary solution to our auto trans until we do the 6. Speed swap! Thanks for the information