Ignitor Repair: Beware of autoecu.com

[Marc Goldburg]

The ignitor/ECU on my 98 Triumph Sprint failed last fall. Since a new
one was $800 (ouch) and used ones were going for $350 on eBay, I
figured I'd try to get my old one rebuilt. Based on a recommendation
from a motorcycling bboard, I sent the ECU to autoecu.com in
Tennessee. There are probably capable and honest ECU rebuilders out
there, but IMHO autoecu.com is not one of them. Think twice before
sending your ECU there.

I called them to check whether they worked on motorcycle ECU's; they
said that they did. So I shipped them the ECU at my expense. They
charged a $55 diagnostics fee to confirm that the ECU was bad, and
then said that it would be $264 to repair mine. Fair enough, I told
them to go ahead. I got the ECU back a few weeks later, plugged it
into the bike and the bike wouldn't start. At that point, I was able
to borrow another ECU. Since the bike started right up with the
borrowed ECU, I knew that there were still problems with my ECU. So I
shipped my "repaired" ECU back to them, again at my expense, for
warranty repair. Six weeks later I got the ECU back; the bike still
wouldn't start.

I needed to get the bike back on the road, bit the bullet, and bought
another ECU at that point. The bike started/ran fine with this new
ECU. I figured that I could at least get a refund for the $264 repair
fee from autoecu.com. No such luck.

autoecu.com would not issue me a refund unless I again paid to have
the unit shipped to them for testing. I wasn't excited about spending
more money shipping the ECU to them given that (a) I now had a
replacement unit and (b) they wouldn't guarantee a refund if I did
ship it back to them. I offered to send them a video of me swapping
the still-broken "repaired" unit with my working replacement unit so
that they could see that the repairs had been ineffective. I also
offered to send them a video of me destroying the unit that they
repaired, to ensure that I wasn't trying to scam them for free
repairs. I even offered to ship it to them at my cost after they
refunded the repair cost to me. But they insisted that I had to ship
the unit back to them at my cost before they would consider giving me
a refund ... which I wasn't going to do.

Along the way, I started searching the web for more background info on
autoecu.com (which I should have done at the outset). Turns out that
when they were doing business in Florida before moving to Tennessee,
they had a long string of complaints at the Better Business Bureau
there for improper repair work and refusing to give refunds.

autoecu.com may have some satisfied customers, but I'm not one of
them.

[willi...@comcast.net]

Good info, Marc - thanks for posting. BTW, what were the symptoms with the original ignitor that lead you to believe it was faulty? Complete failure, or something else?

Bill