Tuning boxes any good?

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Tuning boxes any good?

Post by osx »

Thinking of trying one of these as installation is quite simple and they are relatively cheap especially if they deliver the economy gains they claim. Has anyone tried them?
Last edited by osx on 15 Nov 2014, 20:55, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by vborovic »

I think you've just opened another long discussion, so I'll just lay back and enjoy ... :) ...
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by daviemck2006 »

I've been thinking about one too so I shall follow this thread too.
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by Peter.N. »

I fitted one to my 2.2 C5 because of its dreadful fuel consumption, went like a train but made no difference to the consumption so I got rid of it and bought a 2.0.

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Post by osx »

Didn't expect it would make a difference to mpg with an automatic gearbox but if it improves performance I might give it a try
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by Lighty »

These "chips" plug into the fuel rail pressure line, so they do not possibly have the ability to safely make your car faster or better on fuel.
A proper remap can do both these things for not much more money, and at least your engines safety is not brought into question.
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by Peter.N. »

The theory is that if it increases the torque at low engine revs you can use a higher gear thus reducing the revs, but as I drive mine with a glass slipper anyway it didn't make any difference.

The majority of the 2.2 engines have a very poor fuel consumption compared to the 2.0. and no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why, the odd one seems to be OK. I can only think that its something to do with the mapping, has anyone had a remap and noticed an improvement.

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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by osx »

Lighty wrote:These "chips" plug into the fuel rail pressure line, so they do not possibly have the ability to safely make your car faster or better on fuel.
A proper remap can do both these things for not much more money, and at least your engines safety is not brought into question.
They provide an easier, less expensive (unless a remap is £50) and reversible way to improve performance. As for engine safety, most remapping companies will not offer any warranty for high mileage cars or ones without a full dealer service.
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by vborovic »

You do realize that a proper and reliable tuning chip costs way over 200-300 GBP? Everything below that is a waste of time, money and the health of your car's engine ...
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by osx »

What do you mean with reliable? It is a chip, no moving parts, flashed with some simple instructions. I would say the more complicated and more expensive it is, the more unreliable it becomes.
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by vborovic »

Although the terminology states "chip" tuning, what you actually put in the car is not a chip, but a micro-processor (with some smaller components to help in the engine management process) ... among which there are big differences (speed, stability, raw power of data processing, temperature resistance, etc ...) ... reliable chips will take real data from the car (since they're in the bypass communication channel) and will recalibrate on-the-go to have optimized data sent to the car ... cheaper ones use more of a brutish method to force the car to make more power, with disregard to the driving factors involved (sure, you step on the gas pedal because you want to accelerate, but the ECU is not that simple) ...
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by osx »

What microprocessor would the most expensive of these have?
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by vborovic »

ARM Cortex III @ 48 MHz, or something very similar ... hence the end product price
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by osx »

Not very high end is it?
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Re: Tuning chips any good?

Post by vborovic »

You don't really expect a quad-core Intel i7 4 series inside (or similar)? For what it needs to be doing, the mentioned Cortex is a fine piece of hardware ... compared to some other lower end chips, it has 2-3 times more processing speed, which should be more than adequate for the car parameters live remap in each second (actually, far less) of the drive ...
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