Keeping 'car chippers' plugged in
Reprogrammers do big business globally in retuning automobiles
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 4/5/2004
Franz Diebold had just performed a brain transplant on a 2002 Corvette, but he wasn't thrilled with the results.
Diebold's computer screen told the tale. The car's reprogrammed engine management computer would deliver a big increase in fuel economy, but people don't buy Corvettes for high mileage. They want brute horsepower, and the car's new brain delivered just seven extra horses, not the 10 that Diebold had been hoping for.
Diebold's firm, KTR Performance of Ayer, usually does much better. He gets the best results by plugging new memory chips into turbocharged Audis and Mitsubishis.
"This, because it's for a turbo car, will give you about 50 horsepower," Diebold said, as he pointed to a small square of circuitry. Fifty more horses, just by changing a silicon chip.
Today's cars are computers on wheels, with microprocessors controlling nearly every major subsystem, from tire pressure to braking to airbag deployment to, of course, engine performance. The auto industry started adding chips to cars in the 1970s, in order to slash fuel consumption and control pollution. In the process, they opened a new frontier for high-performance buffs looking for a few more miles per hour.
There's a global subculture of "car chippers" that consists of drivers who reprogram their vehicles and the companies that keep them supplied with high-performance software and silicon chips.
"We sell in the UK, we sell in China, we sell in Japan, " said Chris George, cofounder of APR LLC in Auburn, Ala., which specializes in chip upgrades for Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches.
Software upgrades are no substitute for the traditional tools of the hot rodder. People still rebuild their engines with competition-grade camshafts and cylinder heads. But these days, no performance overhaul is complete without new software.
"We probably do about 10 cars a week," Diebold said. And the coming of warmer weather is bringing in a new wave of customers to KTR, which was originally owned by Boston rocker J. Geils.
"Because it's springtime, the numbers are increasing every day," Diebold said.
The reprogramming industry owes its existence to the Arab oil boycott of the 1970s, and to the environmental movement. The federal government responded to both, by demanding cars that burned less fuel and generated less air pollution. But the engine controls of the time were far too crude to allow much improvement. Remember carburetors? Even the best of them couldn't deliver precise amounts of gas to each cylinder.
Meanwhile, crude microprocessor chips were just coming to market. Car makers began using them to mete out fuel more efficiently, and to measure and control exhaust emissions. Over the past 30 years, the chips have become more powerful and have extended their control to more and more vehicle systems.
These computers have transformed the auto maintenance business. Take your car in for repairs, and the mechanic will often begin by plugging in a device that reads coded data from the various computer systems. Often the computer will identify the defective part and tell the mechanic exactly what needs fixing.
But for performance buffs, the engine control unit or ECU is the star of the show. These microprocessors are low-powered by the standards of desktop PCs, but ample for this purpose. They absorb a constant flow of data from various sensors that measure vehicle speed, coolant temperature, and other inputs. In response, the processor constantly adjusts certain key engine parameters, such as the amount of fuel being fed to the engine and the precise moment to fire each cylinder's spark plug. Even subtle changes in these settings can lead to big changes in the car's performance.
At the automotive factory, engineers program the car's original chipset by mounting an engine on a dynamometer, a machine that lets a stationary engine run as if it were being driven down the road. The engineers then figure out the optimum engine settings for various driving conditions. This data is stored onto a memory chip that's mounted in the car. Thousands of times every second, the car's computer looks up the correct settings, "tuning" the car for proper performance.
Most cars are programmed quite conservatively. The goal is the best combination of good mileage, low pollution, and decent performance, all while burning regular gasoline. For the great majority of drivers, there's no reason to fiddle with the software.
But car buffs want more horsepower and better mileage. And they're happy to run more expensive premium fuels that can boost performance in cars that are tuned for premium gas. That's where the reprogrammers come in.
"The reprogramming basically takes . . . the file that's in there, extracts it, and applies tuning changes," said Johann Mangs, research and development technician at DiabloSport LLC of Boca Raton, Fla. Sometimes this requires removing a memory chip from a sealed computer module; other times, the change can be made by plugging an add-on module into a data port.
DiabloSport offers yet another option, the one used by Diebold to retune the yellow Corvette. DiabloSport's handheld Predator device plugs into the same under-dash data port used by auto repair technicians. The $420 Predator electronically rewrites the existing program, replacing it with a high-performance data profile. DiabloSport makes similar devices for every V8-powered car or truck made by <ORG idsrc="NYSE" value="GBM;GM;GMH;GMW;GXM;HGM; RGM;XGM">General Motors</ORG> since 1999, and is about to offer a similar line of products for Ford vehicles.
"Normally-aspirated" cars like the Corvette can get decent horsepower increases from reprogramming, but turbocharged cars benefit dramatically. Turbocharging uses exhaust gas to pump extra air into the car's cylinders. By reprogramming the turbo to feed in still more air, tuners can get 50 more horsepower from software alone.
Turbocharged cars from German auto maker Audi are especially popular. APR LLC sells chips that reprogram these engines. Diebold keeps a bunch of them at his electronics workbench, along with a laptop. He plugs the bare chip into a "flash ROM" device that downloads high-performance software from the APR website and writes it onto the chip. Then he pops the chip into a customer's car for an instant surge in performance, at a price of $599.
Some owners like to race their chipped-up vehicles. But what if they want to use the same cars on the street? Some APR products let the owner reprogram them to standard factory specs, merely by pressing the cruise control buttons. That way the same car can be instantly retuned for the highway or the race track.
Automakers are predictably unenthusiastic about all this.
"We do not support or encourage that they alter the vehicle with this kind of thing," said General Motors Corp. spokesman Randy Fox. For one thing, all cars sold in the United States must be certified under federal fuel economy and pollution control laws. The standard software is designed to meet those criteria; changing the software could throw everything off.
Then there's the warranty issue. Reprogramming a car doesn't void the warranty -- unless it can be shown that a later breakdown was caused by the new software. <ORG idsrc="NYSE" value="F;F-B">Ford Motor Co.</ORG> spokesman Glenn Ray says one buyer of a new 2003 Ford Cobra learned this the hard way. The Cobra is about as powerful a car as Ford makes, but not powerful enough for this customer. "He put a chip in it," said Ray, "and blew up the motor." The owner had over-revved the engine--something the original software would have prevented.
"He couldn't understand why we wouldn't replace the engine for him," said Ray. Instead, the hapless car owner was saddled with a $17,000 repair bill.
Still, Detroit is taking a tentative nibble at the software tweaking market. GM offers a chip upgrade as part of a supercharger kit it sells for the Pontiac Vibe, a small car that's popular with street racers. Films like "2 Fast 2 Furious" have inspired young auto enthusiasts to buy cheap "tuner cars" like the Vibe, and muscle them up.
Will Handzel, group manager of GM's performance parts operation, said the company is looking to offer a wider range of accessories for this market, including software upgrades.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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