I have been given one of these from a neighbour who had it on his brothers car which he sold so it was going spare. He runs one on his Passat 130bhp tdi and swears by it.

I was dubious but we stuck it on to my golf, 52 plate 130bhp gt tdi with 130K on the clock and im amazed, it has actualy transformed the car, made it a hell of a lot more responsive and teh best part, did oldham to wrexham and back today and stuck the cruise on after about 20 miles to see what the economy was like as its meant to increase it, well it returned 75MPG! Even got 60mpg going to glossop in rush hour! £40 fuel has done 440 miles and i only put the chip on after a 200 mile trip to bromsgrove and back so im amazed as its meant to put more fuel in!

Downside is a little soot build up when you floor it which i was to expect, but the millers diesel plus additive is meant to solve this nad make the fuel burn better.

Who else has used one, what do you think and what are the long term problems with kidding your engine about the temp?

There was a massive thread a while back featuring some bad Teds arguing about engine re-mapping. I do not recommend a search.
I believe the arguments against a beefy re-map are that you’ve stuck some serious power into the engine but you might still be driving round on the shocks, brakes, tyres and transmission of your typical family hatchback. So it’s only part of the story in modding the motor.

Of course the chip you’re talking about seems relatively restrained so that shouldn’t be a big problem. Impressed it works tbh – I’d assume a £20 chip would be bollox.

I suspect your calculations are optimistic, but I have 2 vag tdi’s with ecu remap and they have substantialy increased power and power delivery. Not seen a massive improvement in mpg but the seat Ibiza has done 900 miles on £108 of diesel on a combination of motorway, urban and raggin it.

That site says it just connects to the inlet temp sensor. so probably just adjusts that one reading to affect fueling. That is some seriously sucky way to tune an engine.

Skip it IMO.

Just NO

That site says it just connects to the inlet temp sensor.

Ugghh the old power resistor of justice.

It doesn’t differentiate between petrol and diesel.

You’re running around with the choke on, that seems to be all.

How can running around with the choke on improve economy? However I’d still invest in a proper ecu map not a bolt on. We had one a mitso warrior and it was shit!!

Oh and if you crash open the bonnet and “pull it off” otherwise insurance fail!

I’m dubious of these remaps, you can’t get more for nothing / or less. Sure you can alter where the power is delivered or tweak parameters to get a slight increase in power or an improvement in fuel efficiency but the claims are usually closer to 20% improvements.

Considering car manufacture sell cars of performance and economy it seems strange that they would leave that much room for improvement via a simple task of re-flashing a chip with some slightly different code. It seems like the magnet scam to me . Dose anyone here really know about them? Some independent laboratory tests rather then my “mate stories”?

What i want is science not a big, “oh no dont do that, i paid £300 for a propper remap and wish id spent £20” every forum has that on it.

Its a resistor thats all, but it increases economy wildly so how is that bad.

Science please, not oh no dont do it!!

75mpg?

I seriously doubt that. Where’s your working out? If that’s just a quick look at the trip computer on the motorway then I can get 65mpg out of our petrol Focus, so I don’t believe a word of it.

Come back when you’ve got accurate records based on at least 5 full tanks of fuel worked out from the trip meter and the amount of fuel that went in, then we can talk…..

The science bit is easy. Go and read how engine management works, then consider the effect of simply altering a reading from one (of the many) sensor(s). You will to come to the same conclusion.

There was a thread on the FIAT Punto forum a while back. It basically concluded that you’re best off leaving it to the Nova/Corsa driving chavs. Loads of science there too, CBA to find it though (googling FIAT Punto chipping should be good enough).

I’m not sure how simply chucking more fuel in can help? That is after all what the resistor is doing. A decent remap however should offer some gains from factory set up. But if you want to save fuel drive slower

I’vemate, no, seriously I’veamate that tunes SMART cars.
He bought this ECU remap setup from a tuning company in Germany who’d been developing the early 599cc engined ones. Evil Twin they’re called. Anywhoo’s I’ve driven both a mapped and non mapped 700cc cars he’s had and there is a massive differance in stage 1 remaps to standard. Ok it’s never going to set the lights alight but the remapped version was quicker, easier to accellerate, smoother gear changes (auto remapped at the same time, a big problem with auto SMARTS) and.. yup you guessed it more MPG, ok not a fat lot more he said but C15% more. So combined with the better driving experiance the £200.00 it cost was way worth it (in his opinion) Oh yeah.. these maps are supported by MercUK too.

But it’s your dollars, like anything you have to way up whether it’s a viable purchase..
Ya pays ya money..yadda yadda

TheBrick – I’m dubious of these remaps, you can’t get more for nothing / or less. Sure you can alter where the power is delivered or tweak parameters to get a slight increase in power or an improvement in fuel efficiency but the claims are usually closer to 20% improvements.

Considering car manufacture sell cars of performance and economy it seems strange that they would leave that much room for improvement via a simple task of re-flashing a chip with some slightly different code. It seems like the magnet scam to me . Dose anyone here really know about them? Some independent laboratory tests rather then my “mate stories”?

Modern remaps do work, although the figures promised can be a tad optimistic. I have a Superchips remap on my 2.0TDI Seat Leon (140bhp) and the change in driving characteristics of the engine are quite significantly. If you boot it all the time economy will suffer but in ‘normal’ driving I get no less than before I had it done..

There are lots of reasons why manufacturers de-tune their engines – insurance groups, reliability, emissions targets, varying fuel quality in different countries. For example, the BMW 320d and 318d are in essence the same engine but with different maps and slightly differing ancilliaries.

The chip described here though, just fools the engine into thinking it needs more fuel/air mixture and just chucks it in when you boot it.. not the best way of doing it!

@bland, science usually involves running tests on subjects, we ran a test as said above on a mitso warrior, the one we bought was shit and at the time a waste of £200, that scientific enough.
@ the brick, remaps do work when done properly on the ecu, however to achieve the extra 45 bhp on mine it also had the prodrive exhaust fitted. I can most certainly vouch for the fact it improves performance massively (especially around the mid range) as I owned the same car, one with performance pack on and one without. However it does not improve economy in this scenario, possibly the opposite due to “having it under your right foot”!

+25bhp?

Really?

Measured on an engine dyno by an independent company?

Or measured on a chassis dyno to give wheel hp and engine hp ‘calculated’ (i.e. guessed at)?

This chip doesn’t put more fuel in – it just leans the mixture out by reducing the ohm’s read from the sensor via a resistor.

This may well make the mpg go up, but at the expense of any longevity of the engine and will in no way increase power (most likely decrease if put on a RR which they are banking at £25 nobody will).

It also won’t differentiate from different ambient temperatures, so you fuel and power will more prone to fluctuate on a warm or cold day.

Seriously, spending £10 on a book about engine management would be a much better investment than this product. It would save people £15 immediately and a lot more in the long run.

If I was going to remap my old TDi, it would be with the aim of more low range torque, not speed.

Bland, my car puts out a real +50hp to a measured 240hp. That took a lot of careful ECU work, and then it was set up properly on the dyno to get the best results. I have the before/after graphs, together with the in-progress ones showing the effects of the final tweaks to iron out flat spots and increase responsiveness.

The guy who had it done paid £850 for the 2-day job (the receipt came with the car’s papers) and it’s definitely quicker/smoother than the original. It’s even 10% more economical, though this just means it hits 30mpg rather than 27. What it doesn’t feel like is a tuned engine, just an improved version of the original. There’s no clouds of soot on acceleration (often the case with tuning boxes, they just chuck in more fuel), and there are no problems with the EGR (again, this can suffer with cheap tuning boxes). You may also have an issue with your injectors over time (you can damage them if there are boost spikes).

My car’s now done 130k miles, 40k of which were with the engine work. If you can get these sorts of results (or better) for £20 then good luck to you.

it just leans the mixture out by reducing the ohm’s read from the sensor via a resistor

Leans the mixture? It’s a diesel.

The cheap chips do not do your engine any good at all. Your ECU is a complex system of sensors and feedback, and what you’re doing is hacking it in the worst possible way.

You CAN get more power and possibly more economy out of an engine, but with a proper re-map, where someone’s taken time to analyse the behaviour of the engine and tweak the manufacturer’s settings to get improvements without messing anything else up. Using the mechanisms that the car was designed to use.

im amazed as its meant to put more fuel in

It puts more fuel in when you ask for it. When you drive, you don’t control the speed of your car directly, you control how much fuel is being put in. More fuel = more power = more speed. So driving at 60mph requires a set amount of fuel, regardless of how your ECU is mapped. When you talk about more power here you mean a higher MAXIMUM power, which means that only when you mash the pedal more fuel is being put in than before.

Re fuel economy – this is a complex issue. Diesel efficiency is affected by the injection timing, amongst other things. More advanced injection means more power and more efficiency (up to a point of course) but also more noise and more NOx pollution emissions. When the car’s cold, it’ll advance injection timing too, so this might be what you’re experiencing. The exhaust will run hotter if you drive like this all the time, so it might lunch your turbo, you never know 🙂 It also might stop EGR which is another pollution reduction strategy.

Diesel remaps always claim to increase fuel economy, but it’s hotly debated. The best bet seems to be either injection timing as above or more low-down torque, which would allow you to use higher gears more often. Not really an issue on motorway cruises tho.

^^^^ science ^^^^ there

you’ve stuck some serious power into the engine but you might still be driving round on the shocks, brakes, tyres and transmission of your typical family hatchback.

155bhp is hardly going to break a ‘family’ car – it isn’t even a 10% increase in power.
🙄

I had my Golf V6 remapped (custom remap with rolling road tests before and after) and got about 10% more bhp but the main difference was it just revved better (hard to quantify in a sentence, but is so much nice to drive).

Anyway, big downside is insurance – I declared it and my premium doubled and most insurers will no longer touch a modified car – so it gets harder and harder each year to find anyone who will quote (other than specialists who charge a small fortune).

Remap cost £300 ish 7 years back – cumulative hike in premiums must be about £4k by now!

Why on earth would you want to make a family car faster? Surely the extra insurance premiums would cancel out any gains in economy, and presumably the car is already capable of travelling at the speed limit.

Now a chip to make the rear bigger so I could get more bikes in, that would be interesting 🙂

I think the chip just makes your mileometer run faster so you think you’re getting better mpg.

Weird, but I have this little button on the console of our XF that says “dynamic mode” on it.

When I push it … I assumed it altered the mapping of the engine (either that or the bloke under the bonnet started peddling a damn site faster) as it sure goes a fair whack quicker.

Kind of figured if the manufactures are doing this sort of thing, the aftermarket brigade would be over it as well.

Did have a tuning box fitted briefly to a previous X3 2.0d (ended up trading it a month after fitting) Plugged into the wiring harness and had an adjustable level of stupidness from economy to detonation.

Had it set at the lower / mid range and got a few more MPG (according to the clock), and a significant increase in performance (mainly mid range (overtaking / motorway entry) where it normally lacked). Made a fairly tiresome vehicle much more drivable.

Remaps can work very well as they’re designed for maximum real world performance and economy, not headline 0-60 times and those silly artificial economy tests which determine CO2 output and thus your car tax. VAG are particularly notable for compromising real economy for lower claimed CO2 figures.

The ‘dynamic’ mode button will more than likely just change the pedal map rather than actually increasing power. A normal pedal map will allow for a smooth increase in fuelling as the pedal is depressed – the sport (or dynamic or whatever) mode will make the pedal travel to fuelling ratio much sharper at the bottom end so that you get more fuelling when you start to depress the throttle pedal.

So in a way it does increase the power at that specific pedal position, but 100% throttle will still be the same fuelling regardless of the mode. If that makes sense?….

VAG are particularly notable for compromising real economy for lower claimed CO2 figures

How does that work then?

(and remember the govt tests are not claims of fuel economy)

As has been said before, those boxes contain a reisitor and not much else. Cost about 20p i believe. Tricks the ECU into putting more fuel into the engine, which as far as desiel is concerned means more power. They work, but its mixed bag as you dont realy know how the ecu is mapped thoughout the rev range, it wont smooth out the peaks and troughs within the power delivery.

As for why manufactures dont do this from the off, its down to money. The manufactures just want to able to take turbo from batch a and stick it onto engine from batch b and get power x from it. The software is generic to make stated figures. By way of example, last time i mapped my own car, i used a custom from a car with identical set up. Power was down by around 5%, although torque was up. To acheive teh same power i had tweak the fueliing/ignition slightly. Manufactures aren’t going to twaek each car induvidually to achieve the best results.

I think it’s also down to reliability. Engines are over-built, because they don’t want 10% of them going pop at 150k miles or whatever. However if you decide to mess with it and it goes pop, you’ve taken responsibility yourself.

The science bit is…

Fuel air mix of a diesel is metered out by the ECU after it has measured air temp, RPM and air pressure in the manifold, from these measurements it determines how much air is going into the cylinders. It selects the correct amount of fuel to add for that amount of air. By confusing the resistor for air temp your ECU calculates the wrong amount of air and so meters inthe wrong amount of fuel. In a diesel, without a throttle, the power of the engine is limited by the amount of fuel and air going into the cyl, more or less, and so if your standard mapping is a bit lean in a few spots (to present maybe a better emissions profile or lower smoke output, or protect the clutch/fly from excessive torque) and your resistor richens those bits up which gives you more oomph at the expense of the earlier points.

The resistor also affects teh point at which the fuel is injected on a modern car, which also affects torque and emissions, and may also affect the allowable boost level.

So what you’re doing is baffling the ECU into producing a dirty excess of fuel. It could be incorrectly timed, damaging and polluting, but it will work. Doesn’t make it ideal of course.

Most manufacturers don’t have time to individually map each engine, or create an engine block/setup for each power level, so they just make one and push it harder on the faster versions.

A common one on one of the cars I drive is it has a flapper style air flow meter, people would adjust the spring tension to lean out the mixture, but then forget that that advances the timing too and end up smashing pistons to bits with knock.

Anyway, big downside is insurance – I declared it and my premium doubled and most insurers will no longer touch a modified car – so it gets harder and harder each year to find anyone who will quote (other than specialists who charge a small fortune).

My insurance premium going from a bone-stock car to a highly modified, 50% extra power, different engine, standalone engine management, gearbox, turbo, intercooling, brakes, shocks, wheels…. version was approximately £100 (petrol, turbocharged), 150 with a guaranteed valuation. You’re not looking hard enough 🙂 Of course the direct lines of the world won’t insure you, but there are a good number of cheap modded car companies who will, and cheaply.

it just leans the mixture out by reducing the ohm’s read from the sensor via a resistor

Leans the mixture? It’s a diesel

His car maybe (missed that – why would anyone want to “tune” a derv?!). However the product itself is not specifically designed for diesels.

Will any of these chip/flash updates provide ONLY economy improvement for people who say they don’t want or need all that power anyway? They all sell themselves on “more power” as if that’s what everyone wants. I don’t want it, my tdci Ford has plenty to get me prosecuted, – I’d be happy with 30-50% power reduction if I could get better MPG.

missed that – why would anyone want to “tune” a derv?!

Same reason as any other car. The people I rang about it said my 140 would go to 190bhp, and still do 50+mpg. Hard to argue with figures like that 🙂

Will any of these chip/flash updates provide ONLY economy improvement for people who say they don’t want or need all that power anyway?

And that’s the reason I was on the phone to them in the first place. VW Bluemotion diesels are apparently mapped differently to improve economy, I wanted to know if there was anything they could do to improve my economy other than the fairly vague and unsubstantiated claims on their website. They were only interested in more power really.

From working on similar projects, the Bluemotion will be calibrated to within an inch of it’s life for fuel economy during the NEDC cycle (the official cycle EU cars are tested on). Although there might be some gains available for real world economy, again they would be pretty small before you start getting into power loss or severe driveability/noise issues. Pretty much all of the current ‘eco’ versions of diesels out there are at the limit of fuel consumption for what you can get out of the technology they use. To get further increases you will have to wait until the next gen engine models start to be used.