Quote:
Originally Posted by Sledgehammer70
Last time I posted numbers a certain company sent me a cease and desist DM trying to tell me I couldn't share my opinions and facts from my own testing. At the end of the day and some back and forth DM's they took back their statement, but it was frustrating.
At the time I thought I ran into issues with the dyno I was on and the car being put into an odd mode causing the AFR to tank and dump fuel to cool the cats. What the real issue was is no one really dyno'ed these products on automatics in their initial testing. When I asked each company if they did, most came back with 'we're doing testing now' or never responded. The only company who worked with me directly and saw the same issues was Roto-Fab.
At the end of the day on real road testing, you can see a gain of around 6-7RWHP and the same with TRQ (this is not scientific testing) on the CAI product. On a dyno, the A8 ECU will take a crap and will most likely not provide real results. I was getting 1-2RWHP and TRQ gains (within fault tolerances on three different dynos).
I worked with EFI Tuning early on to read logs to see what was happening and in road driving the conditions we saw on the dyno were non-existent (Thank God I avoided tickets doing full limiter runs in 5th gear). The only way I was able to get a real reading on a dyno was to lift some of the ECU parameters to allow the car to not shift into some weird protection mode. So technically I had to tune my car to get real dyno results, but the only change was lifting the limits that were predefined by GM to not set off the fail safe.
At the end of the day, I settled in on CAI and Roto-Fab being the only two systems I tested that felt worth the cost of admission. I tested products from AFE, Mishimoto, CAI, Roto-Fab, and K&N. I should also note, the simple swap of the base filter in the stock system showed promising results for the lowest price.
I spent a lot of money on products and dyno time and a lot of hours of frustration around this. I haven't seen many others outside of Jannetty Racing put time and effort to reveal true numbers. I'll be honest in saying some of the harsh letters and DM's I got from companies put me off from chasing this any further. Again Roto-Fab was the only company who showed professionalism and gave me their time to figure some of this stuff out. Also, a shout out to EFI Tuning for his early help on some of my logs.
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Wow, that is some BS that a company making products for a hobbyist would do that.
We all appreciate all of the work you put into the videos and how much knowledge you have provided the community. It's made the overall ownership experience of this car that much better having someone like yourself out there testing products and providing feedback.
If a company were smart, they'd leverage that, not try to stop it...but as we all know, there are some dumb companies that exist in the short term with these kind of tactics.
Thank you for the response, I'm about to head to the garage now with my GM CAI and your video on my phone to install it.
