Ever since the first car came out, apart from satisfying our transportation needs, we’ve always aimed at making them faster. Most producers have tried making them more trustworthy and more durable. The automobiles from their production houses come with various parts equipped to do different things at different times with different designs and constructs.
So the main question that people wonder about in general is how to make a car perform better? We’ve got better nutrition, steroids, and other performance-enhancing things for humans, but what about cars? The answer to that is Tuning!
Tuning involves segregating various things to maximize performance and give the vehicle a peak level of operation. Tuning a car is similar to tuning a musical instrument. The screws on a guitar being tightened will ultimately make the instrument sound better, and this is essentially what the tuning for cars also does. Tuning is all about balance and needs to be done correctly to avoid any problems.
For example, if there’s too much fuel with less air in the burning chamber, the engine will run a bit coarse, and if the engine has less energy with more air, the vehicle is more likely to be running low like a weak person.
Visit seletron.com to know more about tuning petrol and diesel vehicles. This article will talk about what tuning is and the various car tuning mistakes you should avoid. With that being said, without further ado, let’s get into this!
How Tuning Has Changed Over The Years
Tuning has changed over the years. There was a change in how people manufactured cars, and their vision for their engines had changed drastically. It all happened in the ’70s and ’80s. Instead of horsepower and greater short output for cars, manufacturers now envisioned their machines to have better fuel mileage than just horsepower.
This leads to the reduction in horsepower as mileage and horsepower are directly and inversely proportional to each other. This led to tuning down the engines of the car by the producers. To prevent people from tuning cars themselves, they capped off their carburetors.
Thus, the air-fuel mixture was constant and set by the manufacturers. The first versions of ECUs measured the amount of oxygen going in and out of the engine. They used electric signals to determine the flow of oxygen into the burning chamber.
Moreover, they used an electromagnet to close or open the carburetor on will, which meant that now through this new tuning process, they had their development and control in the engine’s performance.
The ECUs In Car Chips
ECUs, for your information, are the same thing as an ECM or an engine control module. The first versions of the ECUs that came out were only involved in the mixture of fuel. As time went on, the injection of energy into the burning chamber started developing and naturally evolved.
Producers, after this, began to use transmission control modules. Apart from all this techie jargon, the only thing you need to know is that ECUs are the engine module controllers in the simple sense.
Remapping ECUs
Remapping a car’s ECU is an excellent way to get it to make more power. After all, the ECU’s that cause controls such as ignition, timing, the amount of fuel going into the engine, the rev limiter of the boost pressure from the turbocharger is fitted.
So it makes sense that that will work, and it does. And you can get some good gains now. Certain tuning companies that mount you and abs work with manufacturers so that they can fit these things into your car without affecting the warranty, which is superb.
They did this on a set and got an increase of 50 horsepower over the standard car, and it was noticeable, and it cost 500 quid, which seems an excellent value for money. Yet some people want to save money. They don’t want to pay 500 quid for some actual performance gains, so instead, they go on the internet and look for tuning chips.
Avoid Remapping ECUs With Cheap Chips
Now the way these are supposed to work is that they plug into the car’s ECU, and they alter the signal going from the engine intake temperature to tell the car’s ECU the temperature of the intake and make it think that it’s more fantastic than it is.
So the vehicle feels, wait a minute, we’ve got more dense air, we can shove more fuel into the engine, and as a result, the car should make more power. That’s a theory, but it doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is that these boxes are nothing more than a placebo effect.
Just a little box with a flashing LED. Would you wire in, and they don’t do anything. So the best bet is you’re going to get no performance gains, but at worst, if you’re hacking this thing into your car’s wiring bloom, then you could damage it. If you want to increase the performance, go for a proper ECU tune.
Replacing Spark Plugs For ‘Better’ Spark Plugs
Some people think you can improve the car’s performance by fitting specialist spark plugs. Now, if your car spark plug is failing, then the car won’t run properly. That’s a given. However, no performance spark plug will perform better than a standard spark plug if it’s working correctly.
All a spark plug does is provide a spark, and if the spark is sufficient, it’ll do the same job regardless of the kind of spark it produces. Simple. It just starts the process of burning the fuel. What matters for performance is the timing of the spark and the fuel-air mixture ratio, that’s all.
