Chpping and warranty

[penrecon]

I'm gving some thought to having my car chipped - mainly for economy improvement, but I'm wondering if there are likely to be any warranty implications - can anyone shed any light on this?

[ScottyUK]

I used to be the TT Owners Club representative with Audi UK so I had numerous discussions with Audi about this.

In the UK, any performance modification is not sanctioned by Audi UK. Therefore even if you get a dealer to chip your car and they tell you the warranty is unaffected then don't believe them. Ask for it in writing and see what happens.

Some companies including dealers offer a 3rd party warranty as an addition.

Some tuning companies push their chip is warrantied but this normally means they'll correct the code and not anything screwed up on your car.

The final point is probably the most important though.

Any modification in itself does not affect your warranty. It's only if something goes wrong that this becomes an issue. Firstly the warranty may only be impacted for things associated with the mod. i.e. putting big brakes on does not mean you lose the warranty for your CD player. Secondly for Audi to say that your modification negates the warranty on a particular component, they have to demonstrate that the problem was caused by the modification.

Of course it gets quite grey as if they do prove this they may charge you for their time and effort in proving it which could get expensive.

99.9% of the time there's no issues at all. However never say never.

[penrecon]

I used to be the TT Owners Club representative with Audi UK so I had numerous discussions with Audi about this.

In the UK, any performance modification is not sanctioned by Audi UK. Therefore even if you get a dealer to chip your car and they tell you the warranty is unaffected then don't believe them. Ask for it in writing and see what happens.

Some companies including dealers offer a 3rd party warranty as an addition.

Some tuning companies push their chip is warrantied but this normally means they'll correct the code and not anything screwed up on your car.

The final point is probably the most important though.

Any modification in itself does not affect your warranty. It's only if something goes wrong that this becomes an issue. Firstly the warranty may only be impacted for things associated with the mod. i.e. putting big brakes on does not mean you lose the warranty for your CD player. Secondly for Audi to say that your modification negates the warranty on a particular component, they have to demonstrate that the problem was caused by the modification.

Of course it gets quite grey as if they do prove this they may charge you for their time and effort in proving it which could get expensive.

99.9% of the time there's no issues at all. However never say never.

Thanks for your reply. basically I suppose more or less what I expected, so the risk of problems is very low. I wonder if and if so, under what circumstances a deaker might check the ECU map for changes?