I've been doing some research to upgrade the Dakota to MSD and I don't like what I'm finding. The MSD unit we'd use is a DIS-4 Plus Digital Ignition (PN 62152). I have MSD on my jeep and love it but don't think it's that feasible on the Dakota.

So far what I've found is that the 4.7 Dakota has a coil for each cylinder, where as most Distributorless vehicles I've seen have two coils for each head. What that means to us is we'd need two DIS-4's costing only a little over $1,000 (tax & shippingnot included). Once installed, if an error code pops up we'd need four adapters to remedy.

I haven't asked MSD tech line yet but I'm sure that's setup needed. So has anyone done this mod yet?

 

I currently run a DIS 2 on my Talon. The car from the factory has 2 coils. It works just fine, even though the factory ecu uses a waste spark setup. I swapped over to a custom coil on plug set up. So, now I run 4 coils, still no issues.Even a 4.6 DOCH Ford (mustang cobra) runs 2 coil packs, and would utilize a DIS 4.

There would be no need to run 2 units...based on previous experience.

 

Well the Dakota apparently has a coil for each cylinder and the DIS 4 can only accommodate4 coils (or 4 trigger wires and 4 channel wires), thus requiring 2 MSD units. Unless you could change your coils, but that would probably cost as much as one unit itself and make it difficult to return to stock if you needed. I think for the DIS 4 you can disable a few wire and it's back to stock which is good if your unit goes bad (which I've had happen on the MSD-6 Offroad)