I love racing at the local drag strip. It's a wonderful way to see what your car can do or how a new modification works out. It's also much safer to race on a track than to test performance on the street, and it's a great place to hang out and shoot the breeze with fellow racing enthusiasts. But if you'd expect just a bunch of old muscle cars and modified imports at the track you'd be surprised. I've seen Porsches, BMWs, AMG Mercedes and lots of Audis and Volkswagens. Go to the track and you're as likely to see a guy in a suit perusing the boost display on his twin-turbo 12-cylinder Benz as you'll see a guy tweaking the carbs on his 68 Camaro.It's interesting to see so many upper level cars at racing events these days, but that's all part of a luxury car tuning revolution. Be it entry-level luxury vehicles from Volkswagen and Audi or more expensive models from Mercedes Benz, Audi, Porsche or others, it's become fashionable to tweak those vehicles to get even more performance from their already powerful, high-revving engines. Simple software updates can add 10-35% extra power just by optimizing engine tuning. See, most cars are tuned very conservatively so that they run well under any conditions and with any type of gas. Software tuning can unleash extra power simply and easily and without the help of more traditional performance car parts. If your car has a turbo, performance increases achievable with ECU modification are even larger. This is why catalogs for Audi parts, Volkswagen parts, Mercedes parts, BMW parts, and other luxury car parts include Electronic Control Unit, or ECU, programming, performance chips and other ways to optimize the vehicles' computers.
But performance is not everything that is available via programming of the car's Electronic Control Unit, or ECU. Since the ECU monitors several dozen sensors, it can provide much more information than is normally displayed. And unlike in the past where analog gauges could only show one piece of information (like oil pressure or battery voltage), most of today's cars have screens and consoles that can be used to show all sorts of information. One example is the actual speed of the vehicle. Why would you need that when the car already has a speedometer? Because many speedometers are wildly inaccurate, making you feel like you're going much faster than your real speed.
Information available via software add-on modules varies from brand to brand and model to model. It may include 0-60 mph and 1/4-mile acceleration times, more elaborate boost pressure display, air-fuel ratio, power and torque, or more technical information such as ignition advance, knock sensor data, cam angle, short and long term fuel trim, injector duty cycle and more.
More interestingly yet, these easily installed software control modules can be used to override annoying, limiting or non-intuitive stock programming of how the sunroof, windows, seats, mirrors and other parts of the car operate. It may even be possible to change the way the key remote works. Or you can do things like adding a special horn sequence while you're in reverse. The possibilities are endless, ranging from performance to convenience, from customized boost display to comprehensive sensor readings, and from simple plug-in modules to extensive ECU modification. So next time you search for luxury performance car parts, keep in mind that tuning starts and ends with the car's computer these days.
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