Late 80s TBI

Is there something undesirable about late 80s TBIs?
I’m looking around for a mild project truck and there seems to be a lot of them from ‘86-‘89. Seems I heard some rumblings at one time about those TBIs not being desirable.

most don't know how to work on them. i have a 1991 that is for sale in truck section. dropped price to 4000k. lots of new parts. was my daily driver for a good while. got a 2012 ram 4dr as i got it cheap. if you follow the factory service manual when you have a problem, it leads you to it. gm had tbi and they sold a lot of trucks. why do you think a lot of the people say to change it over to carb. won't say they are scared, but just that they don't understand them. i would drive mine any where. it even went to clay city, ky for the early swap meet.

You been reading that on facebook? Most on there are pinecones.

i think it is on rc central that a guy has a complete post about understanding and how to work on them if needed. i think mr jones is/was a mopar mechanic for years. i started at a dodge dealership in1979 thru 2001. so i take it with a grain of salt with all these RMU grads saying what they say about tbi mopars.

I had a 90 with tbi and put 140k(had 60K when i bought it) on it and the only issue i had with it was a clogged fuel filter. Nothing wrong with them.

my little 86 lazer [daytona] had a TBI on the regular 2.2, and it worked great. never had any problems, and it had over 100k when i sold it.

Is a HP modual made for it? Or is something made where one can change parameters?

The late 80s TBi either worked well, or it worked very poorly. If it worked poorly, since it was "new technology", everyone heard the horror stories, but few every heard (or cared) of how many worked without issues. The truck guys were much worse then the car guys, most didn't like the lack of carbs, or the "computer" at all, in any form, couldn't patch it up on the side of the road was the most used statement. Funny thing, I don't remember having to patch up many Mopars on the side of the road ever, unless I broke something by abuse.

Performance was pretty lame during that time (late 70s & early 80 lean burn HP applications, anyone?), the EFI was "very new", (introduced in 88/89, pretty much across the board). Most factories made yearly updates to improve performance, but offered very little in the "adjustment" the computer process.
At Chrysler at the time, more performance was adding turbochargers to the cars, but the truck guys were stuck with what they could get from Mopar Performance (or was it still Direct Connection at the time?). Chrysler was offering the 75K miles full drive train warranty, so the last thing they wanted was someone messing with their tested computer settings.

Yeah they flat out SUCKED. No other way to say it
I fought several. They seemed to be better as years went by, the 90s and 91s were definitely less headache then the 88s. I had an 88 d100 w/ 318, and no matter what I did with it, it was my worst mileage I've owned to date. Dis better with a 78 d 300 dually and a 79 full time 4wd, and I spent so much money "good after bad" trying to improve it, I'd have been money ahead to swap back to a carb. I sold that truck as a result. Always something wrong with it. EVERYTHING in comp/EFI system replaced multiple times. My son's 90 w250 wasn't much better, his 89 ramcharger was bad enough it did get converted to carb and runs SO much better than it had ever been.
Worse than lean burn. Too bad because the rest of the trucks around that crappy system were pretty good.

I had a 91 B300 360 with the Holley throttle body injection that had over 300K on it. The only real problem I had is with the O-rings on the injectors. They would leak dumping fuel. Pretty easy fix though.

I don't understand why people hate the TBI system on the 1988-1991 Dodge Trucks.

One of the biggest weaknesses of old Dodge trucks was the carburetors. Back in the day, Dodge Trucks were known for poor drivability, stalling and hard starting issues.

The TBI system was primitive but it was a huge improvement over the stock 2bbl and 4bbl carbs in terms of drivability.

The problem with the TBI system is that it can't be modified for performance. If you wanted a big increase in power - you had to rip out the TBI and install a 4bbl intake & carb.

Back in 1986, my parents bought a new Plymouth Reliant. It had the 2.2 engine with TBI (I believe 1986 was the first year for EFI on non-turbo 2.2 engines).

It was was pretty reliable and a lot better than the carbureted 2.2 engines. The 2bbl carbs on the older 2.2 engines were a nightmare.

right dead on about those electronic carbs !
my old man had an 82 K car with the 2.2 and the carb on that thing was ALWAYS acting up !
he finally traded it in for a 1984 caravelle that had the turbo 2.2.
that thing ran surprisingly well ! got good gas mileage as well, providing you kept your foot off the firewall.

We bought 4 Turbo Lebaron GTS cars in a row, one after the other. We probably drove the 4 cars nearly 150,000 miles each, over the 10 years we owned those 4 cars. Tough little cars that were really fun to drive, with lots of bells and whistles to play with. Between my wife and I, we probably seldom got much over 25 mpg out of them, seems the foot was always into the throttle pretty hard.

The last carburetor equipped vehicle we had here was my 50 Dodge 4x4 that got wrecked in 2011, it was the last hold out for about 5 years after everything else was EFI. It too would have been EFI if it wasn't so hard to do back in 2000 when the truck was first built. The first EFI vehicle we bought was in about 1990, an 85 turbo charged Chrysler E class.