Chip Tuning Your Car
Most of us like the idea of making our car more powerful. You can easily increase the performance of your car simply by adding custom accessories to it. However, making your car more powerful means that is burns more fuel. That is fine for your muscle car, which you use at the weekends, but not what you really want for your family car. For that car better fuel economy is what you really want.
Chip tuning to save fuel
Chip tuning – see http://www.racechip.com/chiptuning/ – is a simple yet extremely effective way of improving the performance of your car. However, chipping your car can also change the way in which your car’s computer uses fuel. Instead of boosting your car’s performance, i.e. making it go faster you can use chip tuning to improve your car’s fuel economy instead.
Basically, there are two types of chip tuning used to achieve this. Which kind of chip tuning you need depends largely on how old your car is. Older cars use a different kind of computer than the one installed in most new cars.
Chip tuning older cars
Cars made in the 1980s can benefit from ODB I chip tuning. To chip tune a car using the ODB I system you simply remove its ECU chip and replacing it with a performance chip. ODB I chip tuning is simple and only takes a few minutes, but should still be carried out by an experienced garage.
Chip tuning newer cars
Newer cars have more sophisticated car computers and require an ODB II chip tune. An ODB II chip tune involves updating the ECU software and uploading new fuel maps.
Fuel maps for most car’s are available online. ODB II chip tuning is more complicated than ODB I chip tuning, so you need a specialist and experienced mechanic to get it done. It is not something your local garage is likely to be able to do, so you may have to travel to a big town or city to get it done.
By chip tuning your car you are changing the way the car’s computer works, Keep in mind that you are messing around with a component that plays a role in controlling virtually every system used on your car including your brakes and suspension. Therefore, poorly carried out chip tuning can lead to your car’s computer no longer working correctly. This is why chip tuning is not something an amateur mechanic should attempt.
Other ways to improve fuel economy
Using body kits to improve the aerodynamics of your car can really help fuel economy and performance. Generally, with chip tuning you have to choose between a tune that improves your car’s performance or one that improves fuel economy usually you cannot achieve both goals simultaneously with a chip tune.
For most cars, chip tuning is relatively inexpensive. However, the larger the engine capacity is the more chip tuning costs. In addition, generally speaking, the more expensive the list price of the car the more expensive chip tuning is.
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