My concern is there is a reason the manufacturer sets the engine up as it leaves the factory and what are the long term issues with remapping ?
Perhaps other members have more knowledge / personnel experience.
How does this effect a vehicle warranty ?
When a manufacturer designs a vehicle they have to ensure it can survive in every environment in which it’s sold.
Vehicles are built to cater for owners who miss or massively extend service intervals, who start their car from cold and thrash it then turn it off without letting it cool down. They build them for people who don’t replace worn components and who use the cheapest and worst fuel and oil available. In short, they build them for people who are the opposite of me and you, in respect to their cars, people who abuse them. The manufacturers also build their vehicle to be down on power to account for the extreme operating conditions vehicles face around the globe. To suit these conditions an all round safe compromise between performance, efficiency, longevity, and commercial restraint is produced.
A few examples are:
•Fuel Grade – Poor quality fuel massively affects how a vehicle runs, example markets are Ireland and Australia. Equally high quality fuel can cause an engine to run badly if it isn’t mapped to do so, example markets are Japan and the UK. We remap your engine to run on fuel we find in the UK, this massively improves the power, torque and fuel consumption of your vehicle by creating more accurate fuelling. This doesn’t mean you can’t use a higher or lower fuel, just that your car will run better on the fuel we receive in the UK.
•Operating Temperatures – A car that is bought and used in the heat of Africa, America or the Far East is mapped to perform equally as well in the icy colds of Northern Europe. Air density increases and decreases in these differing temperatures and so massively affects parameters such as AFR’s (air-fuel ratios). Again we remap your vehicle to work for an optimum for our environment; this doesn’t mean you can’t subject your vehicle to a two week driving holiday in the South of France just so that it will work to an optimum here.
•Emissions Directives – There are hundreds of different regulations across the globe that vehicle manufacturers have to adhere to, from stringent CO2 laws in the important market of California to the stringent noise regulations of China and Switzerland, and everything in between.
•Commercial Restraints – If your car was more powerful in Japan than it is in the UK you’d be pretty upset, equally if your vehicle was more powerful than an identical car in L.A they’d be pretty upset. It would also be an administrative nightmare for manufacturers to produce slightly differing derivatives for each market place so they produce one vehicle for all and this is what leaves room for improvement.
Due to all of these points your vehicle is a diluted version of what it could be. We make some gentle increases to a few key parameters which produce some extreme improvements in performance, bhp, torque, fuel economy and emissions.
