ECU Remapping: A Buyers Guide
Chances are, if you’re reading this, it falls into 2 categories, firstly, you may be in the early stages of browsing the internet with the intention of purchasing a remapping for your car, or you may have already done so. but have had problems. since the process was carried out and someone is looking for someone to fix things. Here are some things to consider when buying:
Price: You’ll find prices ranging from 100 ‘see you on a break’ type configurations to 600 cleverly marketed ‘high quality’ premium options. One will be good, the other will be horrible, a bit of common sense tells you that you’re not going to get much out of a guy in a van at a rest area with a laptop for 100. But that’s not to say that the premium option isn’t the best either. better. , you need to look at what you get for your money and find something that fits your budget.
Ask Questions – Make an appointment to visit the tuner 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 something goes wrong. At this point, you’ll quickly know if the tuner is a professional or an individual working out of the back of a pickup truck; If it’s the latter, keep looking as you won’t get a good quality end product with any form of mobile tuner.
What you really get for your hard-earned money: In a perfect world, all tuners would invest in the best tools, the best equipment, pay the highest salaries to the best software developers, and all have in-house tuning and testing facilities, is Say, a dynamometer. (rolling road) or Dyno for short. But the tuning industry is far from perfect, with most tuners in it for one reason, which is profit. This means they don’t strive to be the best they can be and cut corners by not investing in the necessary equipment and personnel. This element of the buying process is the most difficult for the consumer to assess, as even the cheapest companies also claim to be the best… So how can you know what you’re getting for your money? Everything will become much clearer if you keep reading…
A comparison between low and high quality software
Below are 2 examples showing the difference between a medium quality ECU remap and a high quality ECU remap. The first car is a diesel VW Golf with a 140 hp 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 we have tuned in the last 6 years.
Example 1
This car came to us after a remapped for 249 by a local tuning company, however they did nothing more than email their software to modify it, 15 minutes later the remapped software was back and installed on the car. car and the whole process. from handing over the keys to check out was completed in less than 45 minutes. Initially he felt there was an improvement in the cars performance but after a week or so the difference became less noticeable so he decided to go back to the tuner and they told him to give him a few more weeks to get it’ asentara’ (a line commonly used by hobbyist tuners). A few weeks later nothing had changed so he went back to the tuner and they took his keys, drove the car up and down the road several times and informed him “that feels perfect, nothing’s wrong”.
Not convinced that this was the correct method to test the car, the owner asked us to perform a power test on the Dyno. This was the result:
At first glance, things look good. The car makes 160bhp and 270 ft/lbs of torque. That’s a gain of 20 hp and 20 ft/lbs over the manufacturer’s official power outputs. However, the tuner had promised a 45bhp gain and 50 ft/lb of torque.
So we took a look at the data contained within the ECU and were not surprised to find that everything had been altered: 2 parameters, more fuel and a little more turbo. That’s about what you’d expect from a 15-minute file that was sent via email and had no actual development, tuning, or testing.
The next step was to return the software to its original settings and retest to make sure the lack of power gain is not due to an underlying fault, here are the ‘standard’ power test results:
Dyno testing the car in standard form returned a very accurate result of 140.4 bhp and 240 ft/lbs of torque, which is within 0.1% of the manufacturer’s official production figures.
This test showed that the client had reason to question the power gains from the original remap that he had paid for and despite being told that the remap needed a few weeks to ‘set in’, he had lost faith in the original remap’s abilities. the tuners and practices and decided to contact them in hopes of a refund.
The customer’s pursuit of a refund was a lost cause, the tuner refuting the power chart evidence and refusing to offer any sort of explanation as to why they had failed to achieve what they had claimed was possible. The client chalked it up to a bad experience and came back to us to start over.
So now that we knew the engine was producing the correct standard figures we went to work creating something the customer would be really happy with, after an hour or so we installed our software on the ECU after optimizing 36 parameters different instead of the original tuners 2 changes.
These were the results of our stage 1 reallocation:
This graph shows the difference between the first reallocation and our stage 1 software version that we installed. The numbers speak for themselves, with a gain of 24bhp and 35ft/lb of torque, or 44bhp and 65ft/lb of torque above the car’s standard power output.
The torque curve is also much flatter and the engine does not produce “peak” power. The customer reported much better drivability at the lower throttle positions and despite a big improvement in horsepower we managed to get an additional 6 MPG.
This was certainly a case of ‘Buy low, buy twice’.
Example 2
Below is another example of the difference between our software and the same tuner’s software from our first example, this time on a 240PS 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 graph on the left shows horsepower (bhp) and the graph on the right shows torque (ft/lbs ). The figures speak for themselves:
Standard:…………………….
236bhp and 218ft/lb
Very healthy standard figures.
Other tuner: ………………
253bhp and 262ft/lb
A gain of 23bhp and 44 ft/lb
Our reassignment from stage 1: ……..
294bhp and 291ft/lb
A gain of 58bhp and 73 ft/lb
To conclude, there was nothing particularly wrong or wrong with the work of the other tuners, it certainly wasn’t going to cause any problems. But it could have been so much better if they had prioritized quality and not just cost. Good quality software costs thousands of dollars and takes months to develop. At SEDOX we are proud to offer professionally developed, high-quality software, but we can’t claim to be the cheapest! I hope this guide has been of some help in deciding where to go for your next reassignment.