For the Derv Pervs

They're in Leeds, heard good reviews. No doubt there is other options available though.

Tad pricey although it is done properly on a rolling road. I demand Jack Hachet appears and tells me what's what. Lots of people appear to be selling boggo "tuning boxes" at £300 a time, a few more mentioned on the forums who come around and remap your car on the driveway etc, which seems a bit like setting up your carbs without having the engine running to me... OTOH it's hardly rocket science with a diesel is it - more fuel + more boost = more power...

Avoid, even the good ones don't have enough bins.

It's normally a generic map for your engine so it will be come round, plug in laptop call company in India and download map, take car for quick drive and do a little data logging with laptop if everything is OK take cash and go.

Torque is where it's at... ;-)

Being a 406, so long as you keep it in fresh fuel filters, it should be fine... well, bar the bits of trim that keep falling off, but that aside, good cars. ;-)

The info given on that site is a bit sketchy in terms of what they'd actually use to map your car, as in whether they'd fit a piggyback unit or actually remap the standard ECU.

Who is this 'Jack Hachet' you speaketh of???

Oh, me... the invoice for the =A350 callout fee is in the post. ;-)

Okey dokey.

The methods used down at the place I help out at are as follows, depending on the car in question:

1. Map bought in from a known third party supplier - this was how we originally remapped my Passat. In this scenario, the map has been developed on a similar car to yours, but they might not necessarily be the same in the real world and can't be tweaked by us (or rather they couldn't until we got hold of the kit that allows us to offer option 2 below).

For instance... my Passat - the map came from a respected company in the US. The map is tied to the ECU of the car concerned and cannot be used on other cars of the same type, although it can be removed and consequently uploaded back onto the ECU of the specific car as many times as you like after the first mapping.

=46rom a suitability for my specific vehicle point of view, I'm not exactly sure what the differences are in terms of diesel quality between here and the States, other than the fuel over there has a much higher sulphur content. I might be wrong but it may be this that causes for the EGR on VAG TDI stuff to clog up constantly.

Anyway, the point is, that map, whilst it vastly improved the performance on my car, it didn't do as good a job as what we've done since, which I'll cover in point 2.

Maps of this type invariably work out expensive as the supplier charges a fair amount to the company and the profit margins on these are therefore very tight.

1. Remap specific to your car. This is something we've only recently been able to do, and the kit to do this wasn't exactly cheap (neither was the jolly that took place as part of the trip to get trained up on how to use it) ;-)

With this, we download a checksum for your car / ECU which allows us to unlock the ECU and read the standard map.. or if you already have a remap uploaded to your car, as was the case on my Passat, we read that and use it as the 'base map' from which we'll tweak the relevant settings such as fuelling and boost.

The beauty of this way of mapping is that we can adjust the map to reflect what it is you exactly want from the car and how it drives because we're presented with a matrix full of figures which determine how much of whatever is required at X amount of revs vs, for example, amount of throttle, and we can then adjust these to suit.

Once the modified map is uploaded to the ECU, the car is tested on the rolling road to determine the power gains etc, and the power graph is also examined to determine any spikes in bhp / torque, which are then smoothed out if needs be by way of further tweaking of the map.

Once everything looks as it should do on the dyno, the owner is invited to road test the vehicle and, as far as I'm aware, no-one has been disappointed with the improvements they've seen so far.

Oh, and we keep the standard map your car started off with on our systems, so should you ever want to put it back to standard (can't think why you would, but anyway), it can be done in minutes if plugged into the kit we used to upload the maps etc.

1. Piggyback ECU unit. This method is, depending on the exact kit you buy, more flexible in terms of set up time as you can adjust the map in 'real time', i.e: someone can drive the car on the rolling road (or road), whilst the technician adjusts the map on a laptop from the passenger seat.

However... this method is more expensive and the piggyback unit is obvious under the bonnet, so not ideal for anyone whose car still has a warranty etc.

We've recently tweaked my Passat using the method described in point

I've not bothered to shove it on the rollers as of yet, but it's definitely got even more shove now than it had before, and has been known to kick in the traction control if booted hard in second, something it never did before. :-)

As above, these will probably do the job but they won't be getting the best out of your specific car or setting it up specifically how you want it. For another =A350+VAT it could have a proper remap...

That's the basics. Getting the balance between outright power / driveability / smoke right, is a different matter, and something probably best if done on a dyno.

HTH

-- JackH

Very informative. It sounds like option 2 is what I want. Apparently a lot of the tuning boxes just increase fuel pressure, which decreases fuel pump life. What would I expect it to set me back - £350 + dreaded? ISTR you're somewhere way down south aren't you?

For a custom map you will be looking at quite a bit more than a generic map, you will be paying for a trained technician's time on a one to one basis. Custom Code who are very highly rated in the VAG community are currently charging £300 for a phase 1 (generic) and £400 for a phase 2 plus vat but that's with a 30% discount (for none PD VAG 1.9 TDis). The difference in power output isn't that much normally.

So theoretically speaking a custom map is best, but a decent off the peg map is going to be fine, just not wringing the absolute max out of your engine?

Bingo :-)

Aye - the email addy is unmunged if you want to know more.

-- JackH

Depends where you go really...

As I said elsewhere in the thread, the place I help out at has recently invested a fair sum of money in the kit to allow them to do their own mapping, so whilst the initial investment is high, the overheads in terms of getting a map for the car now are much lower.

So long as the company who supply the checksums to unlock the ECUs have one for the model of car you have, we (I say we, but I only help out at weekends really on the dyno days), we can supply a custom map all in for =A3350+vat.

I'm not sure how well HDis will respond, but we've had reasonable, (safe), gains out of the Passat by mapping it again ourselves. :-)

The best bit of all is, we've got the standard map, the original remap and two maps we've done since all stored, and can swap them over to illustrate the difference in power delivery etc.

-- JackH

As I said before, it's not all about outright power gains produced purely from changes to the fuel and boost parts of the map.

-- JackH