Car tuning

The idea

Ever had the thought that manufacturers are too careful? Well I had one when I bought my first car - a 2002 Volkswagen.

The thing is, cars from this era have a lot of reserve built in. After all, it’s no wonder that durability is one of the reasons people still drive them.

One of the easiest ways to get more out of your car, or should I say easier, is to reprogram the Electronic Control Unit (ECU). This allows to safely free up some of the power locked away, without causing much harm - often around 30%!

The execution

To do this for my vehicle, I needed some way to get at the fuel injection maps stored in my car’s engine computer. These “maps” are why doing this sort of thing is known as “remapping” colloquially.

The maps are basically a 3D graph and store a few parameters - engine speed (RPM) and engine load (throttlei %) corresponding to an amount of fuel that should be injected into the cylinders. This is why if you press the gas pedal more, more fuel gets burned and consequently the engine increases speed quicker. You can see a sample map below.

For this reason I purchased an MPPS programming cable (in the cover photo), which, combined with some special software - VAGEDCSuite - allows to download the ECU firmware, modify it, and flash the modified firmware back to the vehicle.

To learn exactly what parameters to change, I scoured TDI tuning forums, watched countless YouTube videos, and learned from the best - which avoided turning the car into a brick and tuned successfully on the first try.

By doing this I extracted more power out of the engine, increase fuel efficiency, with the cost of somewhat increased wear on the clutch and other engine components (which I still haven’t noticed!).