Over the last couple of months I’ve been helping out a fellow Holden\Pontiac owner in the USA who has been building himself a unique crewman & was starting to hit a wall getting the various factory modules working. Luckily for Josh, I’ve been playing with my own & customer converted 6L80’s vehicles for a few years and making them work where others can’t.

Josh’s VZ Crewman originally started as a RHD LS1\4L60e based car before he did the LHD conversion, full body rewire & engine harness conversion to run the LS3\6L80e, not to be done there, he then added in nanny options like Traction control & 4wheel ABS. Surprisingly the 6LT VZ Crewmans don’t get either from factory! So he did exceptionally well getting that in & working.

His 1st hurdle was he had an early 07 ECU with a late 2010+ TCM, in factory programming these are incompatible because Holden never had a factory 6L80 until VE, then there is CAN data differences between early/late year modules. While I can make them work, running a later ECU Operating System brings in added benefits with the likes of larger injector support, rev matching on downshifts improved idle control routines etc.

The later TCM also adds in additional parameters for Temporary Tapshift mode, which is a feature that we didn’t get until the VF Paddle shifter steering wheel cars were released, however all the options/parameters for these features is in the code from around 2011 onwards. None of which is currently defined in any of the common tuning suites on the market. However the factory also turned off some parameters in the later year code that was on in the early i.e the speedo output pulse.

Which comes into the next problem. While I predominantly use EFILIVE, Josh only has access to Hptuners, so a lot of the parameters I was needing to change to Josh’s tune files required me to either make changes to my own car to test & then read out with HPT. In the end, I just converted these custom options from Efilive’s CAX format into the format that would import into HpTuners & then I could make changes directly to Josh’s file.

While there is probably a good hundred hours or so going through code & testing on my own cars I have not charged Josh for any of my time, however he returned the favour by sending me some old unused ECU’s to help facilitate wasting more of my time trying to get the E40 ecu’s to work with the 6L80e.

Plus all these new parameters I have can & are already being used on local cars I work on. Anyway if you’ve read this far & not watched his video yet, give it a watch & a like.