REMAP

When a manufacturer develops a new car they have to take into consideration all of the conditions it may be subjected to in all of the regions in which they intend to sell this model. This means instead of just optimising the ECU’s program or ‘map’ to deliver the best performance or the most fuel efficiency they have to make compromises to the map to take into account these potential differing operating conditions. These could include sub-standard fuels, extremes in temperature and altitude, differing emission laws and even the possibility that vehicle may not be serviced on a regular basis and in accordance with the manufacturers recommended instructions.

ECU remapping is taking a read from the ECU’s processing chip of the vehicles standard compromised map and adjusting various parameters within the map such as fuel pressure, boost pressure (on turbocharged applications) ignition advance and throttle pedal control amongst others to release the true performance from the engine. It is a completely safe process as it is just giving the engine the performance it should have had in the first place before all the compromises were applied to the original programming. Every engine will have its own unique map and by adjusting this we can fine tune the characteristics of the engine; unleashing more power and in many cases reduce fuel consumption too.

Is this easy like a turn of a button? No it is not. The software development is a long and time consuming operation, and there are hundreds of tuners that claims that they are the best.

Many are good, but the only issue is that there are also many that are not good at all. Even if the car feels alright to drive, it does not mean that the engine feels the same way.

A car properly tuned by a company who knows what they are doing, will have the same life time, same services intervals, better fuel economy and will be better to drive. This engine has like we said in the top of the article, been “optimized” to perform its best within its given limitations.