ECU Reflash FAQ

[JanSolo]

So are u saying you're going to change your exhuast? :lol: Bring it on!! Although I hadn't planned on adding anything onto my car at this point. Anyway it should be interesting.

I have a Buschur exhaust. What we could do is either put my stock exhaust back on OR put my Buschur exhaust on your car for the dyno pull. Putting the stock exhaust on my car is probably easier, but just thought I would throw out either option to you.

[vtluu]

Any volunteers? I am willing to volunteer my P2 flashed Evo. Anyone with an Xflash that wants to help end the debate (hint, hint Leroy).

I still think that there would be car-to-car variability that would throw your results into question. You could take two cars w/same exhaust (and everything else) and no ECU flash, dyno both on the same dyno, get each of them flashed (one with Xflash, one with Works), and dyno them both again on the same dyno. The delta (before/after) on each car should be telling... but then one might argue that different cars respond differently to flashing.

If I had a ton of spare cash, what I would do is take a single car with no reflash, dyno it, get the Works flash, dyno it again, get it Xflashed (presumably this overwrites the Works flash), and dyno it again (all three times on the same dyno). Of course all this flashing back and forth burns money--hence the need for aforementioned ton of spare cash. This need not cost anything if Vishnu and Works agreed to such a comparison--whether or not they would, is another question. Anyway even if the results showed one "better" than the other, the results for a different car (or certainly, different mods) could still be very different.

After all is said and done, one could finally argue that a dyno run peak also should not be the sole basis for comparison. One could apply other metrics such as overall drivability, long-term reliability, etc. Some of those could only be measured statistically--and only if we had a large number of samples. Short of that, any evidence one way or the other remains largely anecdotal.

[JanSolo]

It looks like the car to car variance is pretty big. Obviously, if we had tuner interaction with this, it easier, but there is little chance of that happening so we will have to make do. Actually, we technically do not need all the tuners involved - we could just get one car with a flash from one tuner and then get another tuner there to perform their flash.

All this depends on what we are arguing about, of course. I think most people here are probably looking for power, since if reliability was the highest priority, they would probably would not mod their cars, drive them hard or consider a reflash.

Obviously, people want an answer to this and since no tuners are doing it, we might as well do it ourselves. It might not answer all the questions or be perfect way to gauge everything, but it will give us some answers.

[xchoirboy]

Still wondering what's up with with this XFlash Challenge.