I want to buy an ECM from a car that, as far as I can tell, was only ever sold in Australia. I can find a couple of them listed on ebay.com.au and gumtree, but nobody advertises international shipping. Besides contacting the sellers individually and begging them to ship to the U.S., is there a good way to buy stuff from 'straya, besides knowing someone there who can forward it to you?
The backstory, in case anyone is interested:
I'm working on swapping a 2.4L Ecotec into a Chrysler Conquest. I want to run the engine on a factory computer, which means I have 2 choices:
- E67 ('06-'07): No flex fuel support for Ecotecs
- E37 ('08+): Virtual flex fuel
I want flex fuel, so I'm planning to use an E37. I'd prefer a real flex fuel sensor, but virtual flex fuel is better than nothing.
I also have a 1st-gen Chevy Volt, and happened across a forum post about converting those to flex fuel. Turns out, it's trivially easy; basically, you just need to wire up the sensor, enable it in the tune, and populate sane values in some tables, using a factory flex fuel vehicle with the same ECM as a reference. That ECM is the E78; it was used on the Volt, Cruze (including turbo) and some V6s and V8s before they went to direct injection.
So, the E78 is a computer for controlling port-injection engines with sensor-based flex fuel and as a bonus, it can also do turbo boost control! Sounds like exactly what I'd want for my swap project, so even though it seemed like a long shot, I tried researching how hard it would be to get an E78 ECM to run my 2.4L Ecotec. One of the first things I found was this: https://www.eficonnection.com/home/product/gm-e78-ecm-programming-harness. That shows that the E78 was actually used on a 2.4L Ecotec: the '13-'16 Holden Malibu! For some reason, probably cost and emissions, the Australian version of the Chevy Malibu kept the old port-injected 2.4L Ecotec instead of using the direct-injected version that the US cars got, and used an E78 ECM to control it. So, I want one of those computers to play with. I'm not sure whether I can make it work, but maybe some segment swapping between the Malibu OS and a Cruze OS would get me the perfect setup for my swap.
