When it comes to driving exotic cars, performance matters. It’s a big part of the reason why drivers spend thousands of dollars year after year to “tune” their vehicles.
With exotic car tuning, the vehicle is calibrated and adjusted to meet the desired performance standards, whether that be increased power output, better handling, or higher speed. While vehicle tuning often involves tasks like exchanging springs and shocks, or even getting rid of extra parts to lighten its weight, in recent years, exotic car tuning has increasingly focused on remapping the vehicle’s ECU.
Regardless of the exact method being used, the process has typically been very involved, and often required that drivers wait at a dealership or specialty shop for hours at a time while a tuning specialist to handles the work …
Now, however, the brand M-Engineering is poised to change all of that.
Faster Results With a Smarter Tuner
“When we developed the M Tuner, we had two primary goals,” explains Mitch McKee, founder and CEO of M-Engineering. “Naturally, we wanted to get better results from ECU calibration than other tuning services could achieve. But we also wanted to make the entire experience more user-friendly for the driver. By catering to their needs and lifestyle, we could make it so that tuning didn’t have to feel like such a chore.”
Together with childhood friend and M-Engineering president, Jonathan Hebbeln, and M-Engineering CTO, Jason Carberry, the team put in countless hours of reverse engineering to develop a flashing suite that would allow end users to quickly and effectively perform an OBD flash of their vehicle’s ECU.
“Your car’s ECU is essentially its brain,” McKee explains.
“A flash tuner connects to your vehicle’s OBD-II access port so that it can subsequently modify the factory parameters within the ECU. This works by re-flashing the computer’s RAM memory, allowing for instantaneous tweaks in features like torque limiters and fuel maps. It allows us to take away the conservative factory tune settings and unlock the full potential of the vehicle’s torque and horsepower.”
The ECU calibration work went well beyond these basics, however. The M Tuner includes a host of additional ECU features such as live map switching, which allows the ECU to store multiple calibrations and enables the driver to switch between “maps” while the car is in use.
Other premium features include rolling anti-lag, which inhibits the vehicle’s acceleration while building boost; the ability to disable auto start/stop in cars which include that feature and even left-foot braking and kick-down disable, commonly requested features for track racing enthusiasts.
Making this even more impressive, all of this is done through the writing of custom, in-house code and calibrations. Truly, this is what separates M-Engineering’s technology from other tuning companies in the exotic market.
Giving Drivers More Options
“With the extra ECU features, we looked at the type of performance enhancements that a lot of drivers were requesting, but that weren’t being made available through other flash tuners on the market,” McKee says.
“We knew that giving them the ability to truly customize their vehicle’s performance based on the features they wanted — and offering services others simply couldn’t provide — would give us a vital edge. We don’t want to take on a one-size-fits-all mindset — we want to match the specific performance upgrades each individual driver is looking for.”
A host of added features and services to choose from isn’t the only way M-Engineering has opted to differentiate itself. The brand also gives drivers three options for performing a tuning flash.
“Sure, we can have Southern California drivers come to our headquarters for a same-day calibration, but what about drivers living on the other side of the country? That’s why we decided to make our tuner suite readily available through partner dealerships, and even at home. Drivers can literally perform their flash at the track or in their garage, and get the same results as if they came to our headquarters.”
To accomplish this, M-Engineering provides an M Tuner that is to be kept by the driver, and licensed specifically to them by CTO Jason Carberry and his team. For at-home flashing, drivers mail their vehicle ECU to the M-Engineering team, which bench unlocks it to add the M Tuner feature set.
After this, the modified ECU is sent back to the driver via overnight shipping alongside the M Tuner and its flashing suite and an OBD cable. This allows drivers to collect data logs that they can email to M-Engineering to receive additional map revisions.
Dealer flashings are just as easy, with drivers taking their vehicle to a licensed dealer who will read out the file, send the data to M-Engineering and have a fully loaded calibration ready by the next day. Such flexibility in OBD flashing serves as a win-win for both the brand and its customers, resulting in a streamlined process that fits any schedule.
Making Tuning More Efficient Than Ever
With M-Engineering’s proprietary M Tuner, drivers of such brands as Porsche, McLaren and Ferrari will now have an easier time than ever getting optimal performance out of their vehicles.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the driver’s experience. Does the M Tuner help them get what they want out of their vehicle?” McKee says. “We want to keep improving our calibrating process and making it available for more makes and models so everyone can get the driving experience they deserve.”
(Syndicated press content is neither written, edited or endorsed by ED Times)
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