Jan 22, 2021, 04:08 PM

Clearly I am pretty biased, but saying that there are mixed results I don't think is very accurate. People have different expectations and sometimes their impressions are not in line with what the gains feel like in the real world. That being said this comment is worth some exploration:

"actually take the car to a tuner"

What does this really mean? I'm going to dive into some background tuning industry stuff that will hopefully shed some light on it. When you 'take the car to a tuner' you're taking it to someone (presumably) with a dyno and who is a generalist - or possibly has some level of specialization in a brand or a few types of cars. Assuming that they are not a Jaguar specialist they are going to use something like Alientech, CMD, Autotuner, BFlash or Dimsport to read the OEM file off the car. It won't be HP Tuners.... or if it is run a mile, HP Tuners hasn't got close to enough maps defined to properly tune the car.

What actually comes off the car? A giant pile of hex.... just a giant file full of letters & numbers. So what is this tuner going to do to make sense of that? Compiling their own drivers would take years (it would take us years as well) so they are going to go to a 3rd party from whom they can purchase a 'tuning file' and possibly a Map Pack. If they are buying a Map Pack expect it to cost a couple thousand dollars for a decent one. A Map Pack is like a header file in normal software parlance. It has hex addressing & functions defined and should explain what scalars are being used and what values in a table correspond to. For example 16,400 might equal 55% of theoretical maximum torque driver demand.

Since we have been hex editing for the best part of a decade (Chris) I can tell you that almost any of the commercially available Map Packs are incomplete at best, and incorrect at worst. We've seen stuff where a table is labelled as ignition timing but actually corresponds to opening an EGR purge valve. Now, this is exactly the sort of thing we started out with in 2014 when we started tuning for this platform. What it takes to really figure it out is several years of familiarity with the ECU family, and enough testing and datalogging to correctly identify all the tables needed to properly tune the car. And believe me there are many - for example you cannot simply edit a torque driver demand table and expect to get power, you'll have to edit a whole domino effect of other tables to allow the air charge, command and allow additional boost pressure etc. So it takes a fair bit of money and a lot of time to effectively tune for a particular platform, if you're doing it yourself as a 'tuner.' And that's assuming you can actually log the PID's you need to see in order to confirm that what you're editing is correctly identified and is actually delivering the change you're commanding and not blocked by another table somewhere else. In VAP's case we actually had to spend several grand to develop our own proprietary datalogger for this platform so we could really see the data streams we needed to see.

The second option is that the tuner just buys a 'tuning file' from someone else. We've seen plenty of these. I won't name names but for example another well known tuning brand who's tune for an FType R simply had 2 torque tables bumped by 8% demand across the board and nothing else edited. And though it is a North American based brand the file was signed by a 'file service' in Germany.

So either you're going to pay thousands of dollars and spend at least a week to get a well researched, well developed file, or your 'tuner' will just be buying something off an exchange, in which case why not buy the software we have put all the work into developing, written thousands of times by a JLR Master Technician? I'm not saying that a good tuner with a dyno can't do a good job, but I would be very surprised if they can deliver what we can, without spending a lot more time & money.

Like I said, sometimes people are expecting it to feel different than it really does. The power gains are great, but it's also a 3800lb car.