It's a difficult and varied industry. With the advent of OBD flash mapping, especially diesels, the industry has a really wide variation of what is on offer, and also what is good. The reality being there are very few real tuners left, but rather car park "tuners" who have no knowledge of what they are doing other than to turn a laptop on, download - email file - receive email back - upload and then swipe your credit card for £200-300. Even the bigger tuning outfits invariably do no tuning, but follow the "bolt this and that on", and then upload Stage XX map. No tuning, and often no checking or dyno.
In many ways there is good reason for all this, ECUs are so incredibly complicated. It requires far more knowledge of just basic tuning i.e. AFR, ignition, boost. If I equate the 16vt Coupe, that to me is similar to a basic standalone like Emerald, DTA etc. It has a file size of 32kb, not overly complicated, but still requires good understanding to do it well. Consider the Coupe 20vt, a vastly more complex ecu and difficult to tune well especially to higher power level, it has a file size of 64kb. Now consider a modern car where we have file sizes of 2mb!! You then have to consider that Bosch, Marelli, Siemens, Denso, Ford Visteon etc, all work in different ways with very little common within the fundamental architecture. They also require different hardware for communications, many cannot be done via OBD. Chipping is not what it used to be!
For something like the Multiair, it will require me to remove the ecu, open it up and read out the data via BDM. The process of removing and opening an ecu can be very difficult and time consuming, and there is always an element of risk when opening the ecu (requires heat gun) as the ecu can be damaged during this process. Couple this with the time taken to tune the car (and I don't just mean a generic car park tune), and then for me I always test/tune on the road and dyno, it is by no means a straightforward task! If I was undertaking these daily then yes it would be possible to reduce time and costs somewhat, but I may see only one or two a year.
Yes indeed, I don't think Flea needs to bother with us impoverished owners of Italian cars any more
Dave, come now, I still spend a huge part of my time with Coupes, all around the world!
This week alone I have tuned two UK Coupes, and have some great build projects on the go. Of course I am a specialist tuner with other marques, and I field an inordinate number of calls, messages and quotations daily so I am always time poor. Only one day off this year so far!
