Agreed 1000% these cheap no name performance chips and even handhelds for the most part do absolutely nothing or dont do alot since they are generic tunes. One genesis to the next is going to be a totally different monster and a generic tune may work ok on one and absolutely suck on another car. Spend your money on having someone do a real custom pcm/tcm tune. Also as illustrated above, many of the "chips" have nothing more than resistors in a box doing god knows what to your car. Coming from the chevy LS motor world handheld programmers and "chips" are no no's and will get you laughed at for the most part. Even doing
mods like intake and exhaust are non productive without tuning specifically for it.
Agreed on the GForce chip and no name performance chips. These things are a joke, just say "No". As far as handhelds, it is unfortunate that we don't have something decent available. I agree that all cars won't behave the same with a canned tune (
mods, fuel, elevation, factory tolerances etc.), however platforms like this one with a Mass Airflow (MAF) Sensor will take to simple
mods much better than cars with a Speed Density/MAP sensor (like the Chevy LS). While some basic knowledge transfers from platform to platform, tuning one platform vs. another can be very different. Since we don't have the ECU cracked, we don't completely understand how it works. But, we do know it has a MAF sensor.
I had a Mazdaspeed3 a few years back and I had a Cobb AccessPORT handheld with AccessTUNER race. For savvy users like myself, we had access to all the tables available inside the ECU (MAF, Load by Gear, Air/Fuel, Boost, Drive-by-Wire etc) and could program our own tunes from our PC. The Mazdaspeed DISI was one of the most sophisticated platforms out there and this allowed me to study and understand how modern ECUs work and how they respond to modifications. Many of us worked together online and shared tuning experiences and tuning maps. Even Cobb hung out on the forums with us and gave input and direction where they could help.
Owners that didn't have a good tuner for the Mazdaspeed platform were still able to get some decent gains with simple bolt-on
mods without tuning because we had a MAF sensor.
Here is how it works in general for cars that have a MAF sensor and MAF table in the ECU:
- When you make changes to allow a motor to flow better (intake/exhaust), the ECU is able to compensate for it if the mods are somewhat simple (intake/cat-back etc.)
- During "closed loop" everyday driving, even though the MAF calibration will be off and the intake will be flowing more air than is measured, the ECU will compensate keeping the proper A/F ratio to whatever the factory table targets are. The feedback is all done with the O2 sensors and the ECU "learns" the corrections across the MAF curve. These are call "fuel trims". There will be a fuel trim for each bank in a V motor with two cylinder heads. Fuel trims can be positive (need to dump more fuel to meet ratio) or negative (need to pull fuel to meet ratio).
- During "open loop" WOT activity, the O2 sensor is no longer used for A/F ratio feedback and the ECU depends on the MAF curve to understand how much air is entering the engine. Now that we have more air flowing than is reported by the stock MAF curve, the car doesn't know any different and still dumps the same amount of fuel. Since the factory WOT A/F curves are typically very rich for safety, the end result is typically a nice modest leaning out at the top end of the curve (when using proven and tested bolt-on hardware). Even DI fuel curves will be dog rich at the top of the A/F curve. They will be silly rich, I have seen 9's and 10's on the Mazdaspeed until proper tuning is done.
With all that said, I just bought my 4.6 recently and I have no experience with bolt-ons for on this platform. I am a novice tuner/mechanic, not a designer/fabricator. Honestly, I might not do anything to this car since there aren't any proven options with manufacturer and customer dyno sheets to back up the gains (from what I have found at least). From what I have read, only a few folks out there have done any fabrication of intake and there isn't any good scientific data to back anything up. Without a chill box and/or proven air intake temp readings, a custom intake may just be robbing power in day-to-day real world conditions. However, I have no reason to believe that if we had a properly designed intake (with chill box) and a good cat-back (perhaps with 2nd cat delete), we could potentially see a 20-30HP RWHP gain without any tuning on this platform. IMO, all we need is an intake with the proper R&D that would prove we can raise the airflow in a nice safe and steady fashion across the curve while keeping intake air temps stock or lower. If that was available today, I would throw one on this week and slap on an free flowing exhaust with DynoMax VT's. For now, I will just stick to wash and wax
However, the thread with the Bilsteins from Korea has perked my interest a bit.
