The best magazine
Here are a few things that you should consider when shopping around: Price - You will find prices ranging from the 100 'meet you in a layby' type setup through to the 600 'high quality' cleverly marketed premium options.
One will be good, the other will be awful, a little common sense tells you that you wont get much from a man in a van in a layby with a laptop for 100.
But that's not to say that the premium option is the best either, you need to look at what you get for your money and find something that suits your budget.
Ask questions- Make an appointment to visit the tuners workplace and take a look around, ask any questions you may have and don't be afraid to ask how they do things and what after sales support they offer.
Check how long they have been in business and what qualifications and experience they have.
Check that they are insured to carry out this type of procedure in case anything goes wrong.
At this point you will quickly work out if the tuner is a professional or an individual working from the back of a van, if it is the latter, keep looking as you wont get a good quality end product from any form of mobile tuner.
What you actually get for your hard earned money- In a perfect world, all tuners would invest in the best tools, the best equipment, pay the highest wages to the best software developers and all have in-house tuning and testing facilities i.
e a Dynamometer (rolling road) or Dyno for short.
But the tuning industry is far from perfect, with the majority of tuners in it for one reason, which is profit.
This means that they don't strive to be the best that they can be and cut corners by not investing in the necessary equipment and staff.
This element of the buying process is the hardest for the consumer to evaluate as even the cheapest companies also claim to be the best..
...
So how can you tell what you are getting for your money? All will become a lot clear if you read on...
A Comparison Between Low Quality and High Quality Software Below we have 2 examples showing the difference between an average quality ECU remap and a high quality ECU remap.
The first car is a VW Golf diesel with the 140bhp PD engine.
This is a good example as this engine is widely used in many makes and models and is one of the most popular engines that we have tuned over the last 6 years.
Example 1 This car came to us after having a remap carried out by a local tuning company for 249, however they did nothing more than email his software away to be modified, 15 minutes later the remapped software was back and installed onto the car and the entire process from handing over the keys to driving away was complete in less than 45 minutes.
Initially he felt that there was an improvement in the cars performance, but after a week or so the difference became less noticeable, so he decided to return to the tuner and was told to give it a few more weeks to 'settle in' (a line commonly used by amateur tuners).
A few weeks later nothing had changed, so he returned to the tuner and they took the keys from him and drove the car up and down the road a few times and reported back 'that feels perfect, nothing wrong'.
Not convinced that this was the correct method to test the car, the owner asked us to carry out a power test on the Dyno.
This was the result: On first view, things look ok, The car is making a healthy 160bhp and 270 ft/lb of torque.
That's a gain of 20hp and 20 ft/lb over the manufacturers official power outputs.
However the tuner had promised a gain of 45bhp and 50 ft/lb of torque.
So we had a look at the data contained inside the ECU and were not shocked to find that all had been altered were 2 parameters, more fuel and slightly more turbo boost.
That's pretty much what to expect from a 15 minute file that was sent by email and had no real development, tuning or testing.
The next step was to return the software back to its original settings and re-test to make sure that the lack of power gain wasn't being caused by an underlying fault, here is the results of the 'standard' power test: The Dyno test of the car in standard form provided a very accurate result of 140.
4 bhp and 240 ft/lb of torque, that's within 0.
1% of the manufacturers official output figures.
This test showed that the customer did have cause to question the power gains from the original remap that he had paid for, and despite being informed that the remap needed a few weeks to 'settle in' he had lost faith in the original tuners abilities and practices and decided to contact them in the hope of a refund.
The customer's quest for a refund was a lost cause, the tuner refuted the evidence from the power graphs and refused to offer any form of explanation as to why they had not achieved what they had claimed was possible.
The customer put this down to a bad experience and returned to us to start all over again So now that we knew the engine was putting out the correct standard figures, we set to work on creating something that the customer would be really pleased with, after an hour or so we installed our software into the ECU after optimising 36 different parameters as opposed to the original tuners 2 changes.
These were the results from our stage 1 remap: This graph shows the difference between the first remap and our stage 1 software version that we installed.
The numbers speak for themselves, with a gain of 24bhp and 35 ft/lb of torque, or 44bhp and 65 ft/lb of torque above the cars standard power output.
The torque curve is also a lot flatter and the engine doesn't produce 'peaky' power.
The customer reported much better drivability at lower throttle positions and despite a big improvement in power, we managed to gain an extra 6 MPG.
This was certainly a case of 'Buy cheap, buy twice'.
Example 2 Below is another example of the difference between our software and software from the same tuner from our first example, this time on a 240bhp Seat Leon Cupra 2.
0 TFSi.
The Graphs show 3 lines, the original power output, the 'other tuners' output and our stage 1 output.
The left hand graph shows power (bhp) and the right hand graph shows torque (ft/lb).
The figures speak for themselves: Standard:..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
236bhp and 218 ft/lb Very healthy standard figures.
Other tuner:..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
253bhp and 262 ft/lb A gain of 23bhp and 44 ft/lb Our stage 1 remap:..
..
..
...
294bhp and 291 ft/lb A gain of 58bhp and 73 ft/lb To conclude, there wasn't anything particularly wrong, or bad about the other tuners work, it certainly wasn't going to cause any problems.
But it could have been so much better if they had based their priorities on quality and not just cost.
Good quality software costs thousands of pounds and takes months to develop, at SEDOX we are proud to offer high quality, professionally developed software, but we cant claim to be the cheapest! I hope this guide has been of some help when deciding where to go for your next remap.
Source: ...