Chip tuning company?

[Bibby]

The most I can offer you as opposed to other people is to bring your car in, put the emulator on, map it real time and try to get as much as it wants to give us extra and if you're not happy, just put it back to stock and you pay nothing. I do think it's an honest offer...

I had to read that twice. A generous offer.

[Coxy]

Dan, I don't think 20 is that realistic, it could be more like 13-17 but I wouldn't claim 20 unless I had done at least 20 cars with the same chip and dyno tested them with solid 18-22HP gains on ALL cars.

IMHO 20 isn't feasible. The most I can offer you as opposed to other people is to bring your car in, put the emulator on, map it real time and try to get as much as it wants to give us extra and if you're not happy, just put it back to stock and you pay nothing. I do think it's an honest offer...


Mihnea

damn, you can't get better than that really!!!


p.s. I need to give you guys a call tomorrow!!

[dan_b]

@Mihnea - this is a fine offer - I need to give this some serious thought. Having lurked here long enough I know to trust your expertise and honesty. I need to check my bank balance as well

[Mihnea]

Guys, some of you have known me long enough so you know I'm not about showing off and being more generous than I actually am but just about being honest to people. If tuning a given car doesn't provide noticeable power/torque gains, then there's no point in doing it and therefore charging for it. I'm not going to sell Dan or whomever else a chip claiming it's 20HP extra, have him notice no difference whatsoever (apart from his wallet) and tell him BS and that it's normal.

I don't tend to push NA tuning a lot (unless lots of work is done, i.e. I have remapped a Clio V6 with stock 255 BHP, that had cams, intake manifold, tubular exhaust manifolds and full exhaust done to it, that ended up going like stink and dynoed 300 BHP on a relatively warm day. in stock form it had dynoed 245 on the same dyno in relatively identical ambient conditions), so the only thing I can offer people is to at least try and if they don't see a noticeable gain (which can happen), not charge them anything. At least it's better than buying an Ebay chip for £20 and blowing the engine up with massive power gains but also massive pinging/detonation.

No time spent tuning is wasted IMO/IME, it can be a good experience even if no big gains are made, this is the way I've always thought and always try not to forget.

HTH,

Mihnea

[quattroTurbo]

Well said and correct. Chiptuning is an art form that requires time and knowledge.

[~Delta]

Anything available for 7A engines yet, Mihnea? Chip / mapping wise that is.

[Markarina]

In case anybody is interested this is the result of some research that I did into the chipping market, it's all public domain information, the research was biased towards chipping done via the OBD port.

"I've spent some time trying to scope the size of the chipping industry, I have tried to constrain it to chipping done via the OBD port which is the main area we are trying to protect against.

I found 3 companies that supply plug in units and that have a number of dealers/distributors as follows:

Superchips - have 150 dealers worldwide, 82 UK based, 33 in Europe, 35 ROW, they chip in the region of 20000 vehicles a year at an average of £500 per vehicle making it around £10,000,000 per year - I'm not entirely sure if this includes the bluefin application, I suspect not as they seem to do a dealer based service and a mail order service which is bluefin.

REVO - have 138 dealers worldwide, 46 - UK, 22 - Europe, 70 ROW and I would expect a similar size of business, worth noting that they mainly seem to cover the major German brands VW,AUDI, Porsche and don't seem to cover Ford

Tunit- 35 total, 15 - UK, 10 - Europe, 10 - ROW, we would expect that they have a smaller reach in the region of £5,000,000

Doing a UK based Google search for OBD tuning, came back with a 1000 hits assuming that 30% of these hits are unique tuning companies rather than mentions on forums or related to people like superchips, then based on 300 companies doing a total of 50000 vehicles this would give a market size of roughly £25,000,000 (UK only). Searching yellow pages under "Engine Tuning" returned a 100 unique hits, which probably supports the figures derived from the Google search.

So the roughly the total value of the chipping market in the UK would be around £50,000,000 how much you scale up for the whole of Europe I'm not sure but I would a factor of 3 or 4 would be relatively conservative.

I have also recently seen a growing trend in DIY kits allowing people to do their own tuning (I actually find this quite scary) Dreamscience (www.dreamscience.co.uk) seem to be selling kits to allow people to set up their own tuning business and targeted towards Ford vehicles.

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, going to the DfT website you can access a lot of data relating to vehicles, for 2004 their were 32 million licensed vehicles in the UK, the number of vehicles we believe are chipped is probably in the region of 5% ( equates to 1.5 million ).

It's difficult to say how accurate these figures are, however the information relating to superchips we are reasonably confident of, I think if you wanted to be more conservative you could say it is worth £25,000,000 which would assume that superchips have 40% of the market"

[~Delta]

Blimey, Makarina, you HAVE been busy!

[Markarina]

Blimey, Makarina, you HAVE been busy!

lol not that busy it was about half a days work , the interesting bits not listed were that 32 million is boken down like this 26% of households have no car, 44% have 1 car, 25% have two cars and 5% have 2 or more cars !!, were that puts me with 3 cars, 2 motor bikes I'm not quite sure