Howdy all!
Does anyone have any personal experience with chip or fuel map tuning? I came across this video:
and from what I can gather they are reprogramming the ECU to change fuel / air mixtures in specific situations (i.e. speed and load). In this case, they significantly improved the fuel economy at highway speed, while leaving the low speed and high load performance the same.
This seems like a legit strategy. More google searching has found stuff by both performance enthusiasts (i.e. making the engine crank out more HP but worse FE) and conservationists (i.e. get better FE at cruising speed). In the latter case, chip tuning appears to be forcing cars into going into "lean burn" mode, even though the engines weren't originally designed or intended to do so. And lean burn has an established history of trading better fuel economy for worse emissions / wear on the cat.
Apparently this is much harder to do on hybrids because the chips are more sophisticated and harder to fool. But I've come across products to just replace the chip:
https://www.magnumtuning.com/en/deta...p/toyota/prius
Has anyone tried one of these? Once again, it seems like a legitimate way to improve fuel economy, but I would have a *lot* more confidence if someone on here has actually used such devices / done chip tuning / could relate their personal, firsthand experiences.
By the way, I've found other stuff that gets better mpg by feeding false information to / from the sensors... but I personally would avoid those even if they work. They do stuff like saying the engine is warmed up even though it isn't, etc. I'm leery of anything that falsifies sensor info, because I don't know what else is being calculated from the data. Tweaking the fuel map seems much safer in that it only changes the air/fuel mixture, and only in the regime(s) we want (say, cruising at highway speeds).
Thanks!
