performance chips... add 20hp???

[dondiggity]

do these really work? are they just resistors and if so, does anyone know what size a 97 grand am 2.4L would take? thanks

Don

[-Jayson-]

you cant chip that car, im pretty sure its OBDII, and those computers use flash memory instead of a chip, so no chip for you!

[Jet-Lee]

check out the delta chip.....they claim that one can be made for ANY vehicle.

[SaabJohan]

You can "chip tune" any car that have an electronic control unit for the engine. What you do is that you simply replace the original hexadecimal code in its memory to another code that suits your requirements, or, well, you modify the code slighly (ignition and fueling maps for example) and put it back.

This can be done by programming the ECU or by replacing the chip (usually an eprom or eeprom).

Well, the replacing part is the easy part, the hard thing is to find out what the different part of the code do, and what you should change it to.

With a NA engine the powergain is usually small, just a few percent.

[Neutrino]

Well as Johan pointed out reflashing is quite a common procedure especially for performance cars as long as the tuners have the factory ECU figured out. In some cars the gains can be quite good. But i would also like to point out that tuners don't do not even 1% the R&D the manufacturers do for the programing and often those gains are made at the cost of safety. They ussually advance the timing and lean out the mix which can easily lead to detonation.

On top of the reflashing techniques you also have chips that can act as a piggyback and falsify the data received by the ecu making it more agressive in its commands.

[-Jayson-]

well hes got the same engine as i do. And so far i havent found any company that can reflash the ECU to give you performance gains. They can adjust speedometer and all that, but no NA performance gain reflashes. Ive been looking for about 3 months now. Their is a company, HPtuners, who shortly will be coming out with software that will allow for full tunning of the Joby cars.

And i noticed in your post you asked about resistors, if your talking about those ebay scams, stay away from them. All they do is tell the Air intake sensor that more air is going into the engine than what really is, this dumps more fuel into the car. TO much extra fuel can do whats called washing the cylinders where the extra fuel isnt burned up and can wash the oil off the cylinders of the engine and cause major damage.

[SaabJohan]

Some tuners develope their own development tools, while some steal from the car manufacturer or from the people that make their own tooling.

Tuning software can also sometimes be stolen from the car manufacturer, it can be some sort of testing software with more power, sometimes it stolen from other tuners. Some tuners also sell their software to others.

Most of the work done by the car manufacturer is in the software, and not in the actual maps, and luckily it's here that we find most of the safety features.

There is someone that can tune the car if you really want it, if there is no chip availible you can get a software custom made just for you, but then it cost quite some money.

First, find out what engine management system your car has, brand and model type. Then you can try to find out which company are good on that particular system, some systems are very easy to manipulate while some are very difficult, for example Saab Trionic 8 and Bosch Motronic ME7 belongs to the difficult ones.

[Neutrino]

I'm still not very happy how many tuners work. True their capabilities varie greatly. But there are quite a few reasons I don't like tuner reflashes.


They tune on a dyno for an hour or two. That is all good and fine if your car runs under the same load and same conditions all the time which will never happen.

Manufacturers on the other hand tune on dynos in temperature humidity and barometric variable chambers to account for all the conditions the car might encounter. Then they spend months tuning the car on roads in various places to accound for real world conditions. Heck they spotted carrera GTs in the death valey undergoing testing.

Basically i find the tuner's maps to lack the flexibily to cope with all the posible variations that a car can encounter. I know the ecu's sofware will try to attemp to adapt, but with one dimensional maps often pushed to the edge of safety to extract extra performance, the software might just fail to compensate.