I get sent screenshots of various “news” a lot and here’s an interesting one. It’s quite a long, but if you read through it, it’s a story of WHAT NOT TO DO, and obviously a shop that you shouldn’t patronize.
1. This shop doesn’t do any tuning, has never done tuning, has never so much connected a car to the a laptop, he’s merely a middleman that hooks people up with the tuners that they know, and they get a service fee. Their business model is to get at lest a group of ten so that the tuner who will fly here is “sulit” for their time and effort, from which they add on and pas to the customer, and this is still without any Dyno session, which has to be scheduled again separately with another separate shop, at additional expense to the customer. Confusing? Most definitely, it’s hard enough to schedule with one person let alone 3. And that is the first problem here, you’re a middleman and not the boss, so you can’t dictate the time, circumstances of all the people involved.
2. Reflashing/remapping Hyundai vehicles isn’t as easy as plugging in an OBD cable to a laptop, the Ecu has to be removed from the car, opened up to be able to access the data
And that’s where starts to panic. In all the years he’s been hooking up tuners and customers, he hasn’t bothered to learn how to do it. And it’s not easy, and one wrong slip and it’s bye bye ECU. Our first time to do do, it took us half a day just to open it CAREFULLY, but now we do it an around an hour. The Indian tuner arrived with a broken hand and there is definitely no way he can open an Ecu with just one hand.
3. It took two days to tune a single car, this is somewhat nobody’s fault but it wasn’t explained properly why it takes two days. The equipment used to tune is made by Alientech, which we also use, an Italian company, and chances are, it’s the first time his editing software has seen a local spec Ecu data. When the Ecu is opened up, reading the data is no problem, but to be able to edit it, you will need something called a definition file, think of it as a table of contents that tells you which table is what and the location, page 2, 7, 45 etc etc.
This definition file has to come from Alientech and they operate on European time, thus the discussion about the time zone. By the time they answer the request for the definition file, chances are it’s after shop ours already local time.
The previous Korean tuners already have the table contents so they can tune immediately as soon as they download the contents of the Ecu. But it’s by no means a fast process and 3-4 hours per car is the average from start to finish to Dyno. Hence why they need a week to do 10 cars, 2 cars a day. This part the middleman doesn’t know, and never bothered to find out, this pissing everyone off cause the schedule is now out of whack.
As for the part about reading a Korean tuned Ecu and “copying” the contents, well it’s not as simple as that. You can have two ecus with the same part number but different calibration files inside, sort of like android 6.0.0 and android 6.0.2 and you cannot just copy one into the other, and that’s why it failed.
4. Results aren’t up to snuff. Yes 12-15hp for a diesel Accent is LOOOWWW. For comparison, here’s our recently tuned diesel accent with a 43whp gain
Even the gasoline Accent which got 8-10hp is still low. Here’s one we did with Unichip and we already got 14hp, and remapping is supposed to get more than Unichip
This I blame squarely on the disabled Indian tuner. Either he lied to the shop about his capabilities (and the middleman doesn’t know he’s being lied too, or more likely doesn’t understand what’s involved) hasnt tuned much Hyundais before (a check of his Facebook page shows mostly isuzu, some VW, Range Rover) or just plain incompetent and the shop got taken in for a ride.
as far as price goes $380 is equivalent to p20,000 and without the Dyno. Which makes our P25,000 all in price a steal by comparison because you’ll need at lest two Dyno sessions for the baseline power, another for the tune, and maybe a few more for the adjustments.
So moral of the story is, if the shop doesn’t have a Dyno, they have no business offering performance enhancements and you should stay far far away lest you get STUNG bad. I wouldn’t worry about the reputation because he doesn’t have one to begin with.
Speedlab Performance 