Summary

Disabling VATS (Vehicle Anti-Theft System) and AFM (Active Fuel Management/Displacement on Demand) are two simple and common tasks you’ll need to perform when fitting an LS engine into a different chassis while retaining the factory ECM, or fitting an aftermarket cam to an AFM equipped LS engine. In this webinar we’ll show you how.

00:00 - Hey team, Andre from High Performance Academy, welcome to another webinar and in this webinar, we're going to be looking at how to remove the active fuel management or displacement on demand or disable I should say and likewise VATS which is vehicle anti theft system.
00:17 This is a GM product but it's something that is very straightforward and very quick and hence this webinar itself is probably going to break a record for our fastest but it is also a topic that we do consistently get requests about so we decided that we will show you how to do this.
00:36 So first of all, lets deal with VATS, the vehicle anti theft system.
00:41 Something that if you are tuning a factory car in 100% factory guise, you absolutely do not need to worry about and the vehicle anti theft system is just a basic immobiliser system that is going to do exactly what you would think.
00:57 If you have your car broken into, you don't have the right key for the car, it's going to disable the engine and it won't start.
01:03 That's great, if it is in the factory car, however with the LS engine being so commonly used in engine swaps, this becomes problematic because when you take the wiring harness out and the factory ECU and you swap that into another vehicle, you're going to find that unless you have every single part of the component, componentry and the body control module, it will not start and particularly if you don't know what's going on, this can be challenging to work your way through so that all comes down to this factory vehicle anti theft system.
01:37 I don't quite know what the state of play is now but here in New Zealand, there were a few shops that were actually offering VATS removal, they'd normally couple this with removal of, or disabling the catalytic converter fault codes as well and the secondary oxygen sensor fault codes and they were charging quite good money, probably around $700 - $800 USD for that service and people doing engine swaps were sending out their ECUs before the swap was complete so that the car would start.
02:08 And when you see what's involved, it's probably a little bit questionable what they were charging.
02:14 But let's jump into the laptop software here.
02:17 And we've got loaded up a file for our own Holden Commodore which is a VE SS that runs the L98 engine, this isn't a displacement on demand engine, for the next step it doesn't matter, still got all of the relevant elements.
02:32 But if we want to get rid of our VATS, what we want to do is start by going up to our OS or operating system and we see under operating system here, we've got VATS patch one and VATS patch two and at the moment they're enabled, simply all we need to do is come down, click disabled on both of them, write that file to the ECU, job done, it is literally a two second job.
03:00 Most people running the HP Tuners software will be current and I can't even quite tell you when this happened, it might be about the time they went to the MPVI2 interface which we're now on MPVI3 but if you're running on very old software, this wasn't the place to find that, it was actually under system but basically everything looks essentially the same, you're just looking for that VATS patch and you can enable or disable that.
03:30 So there's our first step.
03:33 As I mentioned, this is going to be a rocket fast webinar so I'm going to suggest now, because we do have a little bit of latency with this webinar as well when it's going live, if you've got any questions on this, get these in quick because it isn't going to be a lot of time at the end for you to type in those questions and get them through to me, in saying that as well though, it is really really straightforward stuff so I can't imagine there's going to be too many questions over that.
03:59 So that's VATS, that's how to disable it.
04:02 Next we've got AFM or DOD, active fuel management, displacement on demand, this was GM's way of trying to improve fuel economy and essentially the ECU has the ability to hydraulically disable some of lifters in the engine which cuts it down from an eight cylinder to a four cylinder.
04:21 It does work, I can't quite give you statistics on the fuel savings but it does work, it's pretty well proven to work but it comes with some pretty big drawbacks.
04:32 In stock form, you don't really notice this too much, it's done during cruise conditions but you will absolutely notice this after you've fitted a freer flowing aftermarket exhaust and frankly the car will sound absolutely terrible and that's not really why we put an aftermarket exhaust on our cars.
04:53 The other element here is that if you are going to fit an aftermarket cam to the LS engine that is fitted with active fuel management then you will absolutely need to delete this, both in the software and hardware.
05:07 We're not talking really about the hardware today, but if you do want to do a cam upgrade, there's actually quite a bit of work involved because you will have to fit conventional rockers, sorry lifters and that involves removing the cylinder heads from the engine and the valley plate from memory as well also needs to be changed.
05:26 So there's plenty of information if you Google DOD removal out there on the internet that will take you through the steps involved but we are dealing with the software side of things.
05:36 So let's back into my laptop and what we want to do for DOD is we'll head over to our engine tab here and let's just start where we would normally start which will be on general.
05:48 What we actually want to do is come over to the fuel tab which is where we're going to find this and under the fuel tab, we want to be on this lean/fuel savings tab.
05:59 Now as I mentioned, the particular engine in our Holden Commodore is an L98, this does not have the displacement on demand or active fuel management active, the L76 I think it is, which is for all intents and purposes identical, does so at the moment what we see is displacement on demand here and we can see that it is disabled, no big surprise here but if you are running an engine that has displacement on demand from factory, this is what it's going to look like, so it'll be enabled.
06:32 The process, again incredibly simple, it could not be simpler, you do not need to be a tuner or a rocket scientist to click on that drop down menu and change it from enabled to disabled.
06:44 That should be all we need to do but the other thing that is worth doing here is maxing out the enable vehicle speed, so we can set that to 512 km/h and unless you drive off a cliff, chances are that you're never really going to have any problems with hitting that sort of speed.
07:02 Our job is done there, again save this file and write it through to the vehicle.
07:06 Just again to reiterate, when you are doing the cam upgrade on those engines though, it isn't just the software side of things, you also need to physically change out those displacement on demand lifters for conventional lifters.
07:21 That's it, that is all there is to it, one of the simplest, or two of the simplest tasks that you can form but these are as I mentioned, questions that we get regularly.
07:31 So I will jump across and see if we do have any questions, and we don't which is kind of what I expected.
07:40 Remember though if you are watching this at a later point in our archive and you do have any questions on it, please ask your questions in the forum and I will do my best to answer them there.
07:49 Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week.