Switchable Remaps

Things have moved on and it is now possible to have a few maps stored which you can select from. It is typical to have a valet mode to stop the boy racers at the garage thrashing your pride and joy on the "test run" to bed in the new wiper blades they have fitted. Then there is often an economy option to give very frugal fuel consumption, particularly useful when cruising on long journeys.

Then you have the 'sport' or 'power' modes which give lots of power and often require high octane fuel. TorqueCars strongly recommend that you get a switchable remap - it may cost a little more at the outset but you will avoid many of the pitfalls of running a high power remap all of the time by doing this and get the best of both worlds.

Some maps use the cruise control to choose a map, other companies offer handheld flash devices which allow you to choose a range of maps and upload these. It typically takes about 3 minutes to flash a car through the OBD port so is not an on the fly option.

Most people will run an economy map through the weekly commute and then go for a performance map at the weekend or a race map for track days.

Please do not confuse a remap with the little "tuning boxes" you can buy for $60 which generally contain little more than a $5 resistor and often do little more than fool the car into thinking the air is cooler than it is. If it was really this easy to get more power from a car then the manufacturers would have already done that themselves.

Some cars are not easy to remap, I remember that the Rover MEMS & Toyota ECU's are a case in point. The Manufacturer holds the key to the ECU and locks their Map into their firmware. Some ECU's are simply not reprogrammable. So what can you do? Is there an option? Well thankfully there is and they are called piggy back ECU's or aftermarket ECU's.