Improving Gas Mileage By Changing Computer Chips

Have you heard of any chips that can claim to accomplish this?

I'd be hesitant to attempt this, as most aftermarket chips come from China.

Of course, it also took me years to understand the concept of, " If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".

"Have you heard of any chips that can claim to accomplish this?"

Yes They are all over. Do a search on e-bay and you should be deluged with hits

LJ

A quick google search is telling me that they are a waste of money.

Somebody may know different though.

I know of a few people who have used chips and reprogrammers with good results.

I have a reprogrammer on my 99 Ford F250 pickup that seemed to improve the mileage a little bit. Now that I am running propane as a primary fuel I am not sure how much good it does since it cant interact withe vapor fuel systems. It still lets me change my shift points and curves which I like.

Regarding the re chipping or reprogramming the biggest changes you can get will be with the off road rated non emissions compliant ones. They will give you the best fuel mileage and power improvements by changing your engines fuel burn and ignition timing curves from the theoretically cleanest ratio of around 14.7:1 stoichiometric to the more power full and fuel efficient ratio which is around 12.9:1.

Read up on quench effect if you wondering how a richer A/F ratio and an ignition curve change uses less fuel and produces more power.

To all of you who have responded. . . . . Thank you!

I am inclined to agree that any attempt to alter the spark curve or fuel mixture will not likely yield any appreciable improvement and that driving behavior is indeed the most influential factor.

Long ago I purchased one of the more sophisticated diagnostic systems, the kind that plugs into the diagnostic port under the dash and which is used by state inspection operators to test EPA compliance.

The read out panel Is used mostly on my 2000 Chevrolet 1500 Express Van equipped with a small V6 and an automatic transmission.

The manual says that the van weighs 6000 pounds

I don't like automatics and much prefer the simple reliability of a clutch based manual transmission. In all my many years of driving, I've never had a manual gearbox fail nor have I ever needed to replace a clutch. I can not say the same about automatics.

The better gas mileage I get on my equally old Mitsubishi sedan with twice the mileage (Median 36mpg) is due in part to the manual transmission in spite of a brisk driving style. Even with the most conservative of efforts, the van rarely breaks 14 mpg, which under current inflated gas prices is a wallet buster.

TCM Tech's response has alerted me to a possible option I'd not considered: to alter the threshold at which downshifts occur. The van often downshifts when I do not want it to, even under a light throttle and relatively light loads.

I know how to force an early up-shift when driving an automatic but not how to delay the downshift. The ability to alter the programmed threshold for a downshift may be the solution I am looking for.

I learned a long time ago that losses in efficiency are rarely caused by one major source but the accumulated effects of many small ones. Delayed downshifting may not boost fuel economy dramatically but it will help. I'll start there.

Thanks, everyone

LJ

Can you change the aggressiveness of the cruise control? I had a Chevy van and if I approached a grade the cruise control would immediately compensate for any loss of speed. It was the most aggressive cruise control of any of the cars that I have ever owned and I am sure that it cost me in terms of gas mileage.

Normal city driving (all I do) I get 14.5 MPG with an unmodified super crew F 150. When I really try to drive economically, I can get 16.5 MPG. It doesn't cost me money for a chip, it just takes discipline.

Now, I think you should get one and give us a report.

Assuming a 10% reduction in fuel cost, it might just be worth it.

I run a Moates emulator which replaces the eeprom. I can make changes on the fly and see/feel these changes instantly. I have it installed in a 88 Plymouth Sundance T2 turbo. I was getting 23mpg, I am now getting 34. I worked on fuel curve, and spark advance tables as wells as spark curve. I also have a 87 Shelby Charger which I can use same hardware and it was getting almost 40mpg. Be warned you can damage you engine to the point of no return. SOme engines will not tolerate predetonation and will crack the pistons easily. Its best to have a wideband installed and a vacuum guage and maybe even a datalogger, a egt guage is also advisable. DO some research, Im sure someone has tried it on the vehicle you own. Driving technique has a lot to do with it. It may be a good idea to install just the vacuum guage and keep an eye it, and train that gas-pedal-foot to stay mainly in vacuum. Vehicles with OD can do good with a additional electrical lockup so that the transmissions overdrive unit stays locked in when in slower traffic and even when the brake pedal is bumped (this always kicks out the overdrive which I have never understood why).

Wow! that Moates emulator is an impressive device. I fear the learning curve is considerable however.

I had an engine monitoring system on my plane that measured EGT and a knock sensor in the ignition that "listened" for pre ignition due to too lean mixtures or too much advance. Pre Ignition is an absolute No-No on air-cooled engines. I've seen holes in pistons big enough to swallow an egg!

I'll check it out.

Thanks

LJ

The Sundance has knock sensor, but I dont care, the cure for that was custom forged piston and ever since I have not had a piston fail to detonation but with the factory cast pistons I have a few ashtrays. Also forged pistons will handle higher egt's. My case I think Chrysler engineers ran the timing pretty modest on these older turbo charged engines as well as heavy fueling so that engine failures were minimal. Actually I learned to do the programming becasue I have a heavily modified Shelby Charger and I needed to be able to make my own calibrations and of course its fuel injected. ANyhow I know I can get another 4-5 mpg once I have the wideband installed, right now fuel is being done from the cuff and I fear to go any further until I can 'see' my a/f mix.

A few years back I had a 1989 Astro van that got about 26 miles per gallon. I took the time to add a 2 1/2" exhaust. That helped about 1 mpg later added an "A chip" at the time they offer A&B chips B chip was for off road performance, the A chip was for on road mpg and additional performance. And that is exactly what it did it jumped the mileage to 29 mpg. Then we increased the fuel pressure and added capacitors across the injector drivers and got an additional 3 mpg. Also I forgot that in the beginning we also changed the camshaft to an RV grind. At first the cam change didn't seem to make any difference. but it made a real difference with the other changes. When we didn't do the cam change on another identical truck we DIDN'T get near the mpg gain as with the first truck. All that said my personal experience with the after market chip was and is extremely good. And most chip's by my experience are made right here in the good old USA it is some of the programer's that are on E-BAY may be bogus copy's of US made equipment. That has become a problem in other area's of business with programing equipment such as locksmithing, programer's for computer cars to make keys. So it is possible that some chip's are bad copy's. My best suggestion to you would be to buy a chip or programer from a reputable dealer in your local area so you have recourse if it didn't work as stated. Being a cheep skate and buying off E-BAY can cost you hard earned money a lesson that I learned early on with E-BAY. Something like this it is just a lot safer to buy from local dealer that has experience with your vehicle. Just my two cent's

http://www.moates.net/ostrich-20-the-new-breed-p-169.html

Tuning solutions for the modern gearhead! I would think with some tuning almost any vehicle could pickup 5mpg...IMO

All of the above suggestions seem to be really good but I think that I have an easier and less time consuming tho more expensive option.

Buy a diesel! I have just got my first diesel which is a 2001 Ford Galaxy with a 1.9 Turbo diesel engine.

I have just used it for a holiday with my family and we drove just under 3000 miles and it returned an average of 39mpg. This doesn't seem too good until you consider that its about 1.75 tons in weight and was travelling heavily loaded and could still do 100 mph on sections of the autobahn in Germany. I don't have an economical driving style!

If you want to improve fuel consumption (and in the fuel prices we pay today ~£1.40 per litre) then I would have to say that diesel has to be the way to go.

Agreed, my 1996 DOdge 2500 Cummins diesel gets 18-20mpg with an easy foot and it weighs nearly 8000lbs!

Find a good performance tuning place. I am sure a good one would be worth the money in the long run.

Speedtek is one we have around here. I wouldn't use anyone who can't run the car on a dyno, though.

A common misconception is that more performance means more fuel consumption. It a lot of cases it is true, but I have seen simple changes in spark advance increase a small block Chevy's mileage as much as 4 mpg with improved throttle response.(Before the use of computers)

Now with the computerization, cars can get 30-50% more mileage and more available power.

I have a 436 hp 2010 Corvette (6.2 liter (376 cubic inches))which I get as much as 27.5 mpg on the road.(Mildly aggressive style) I average 17.9 to 24 mpg in the city. Now if I get heavy on the pedal it will drop, but my normal aggressive driving style gets me the 17.9 to 24 mpg. My worst (after first getting the car) was 15.3 and I drove the dog out of it. (Driving style obviously is very significant.) Before computers and fuel injection, a car with this kind of horse power would get 10-12 mpg, 14 if driven really easy.

One 100 mile trip I drove between 75 an 105 (85-95 most of it) and got 24.2 mpg.

The car has an exhaust system that changes dynamically which has some effect I'm sure as well as a 6 speed AUTOMATIC!

Many variables come into play on mileage and paying attention to your style is important, but most production cars can benefit from fine tuning.

(Vans, due to the frontal cross-section have a built-in disadvantage. Air resistance for DOUBLE a specific speed will (roughly) TRIPLE drag. )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient

Keeping the vehicle a few more years? Do the tune. Otherwise, don't.

Doing it yourself?, try to document the changes and do one at a time. Chart the mileage and 0-60 mph times. It helps to graphically see the results.

Find a good performance tuning place. I am sure a good one would be worth the money in the long run.

Your first sentence caught my eye.

The vast majority of performance tuning places use inertia dynos without really good fuel flow measuring equipment. Only when you get to the level of $25,000 per day EPA-certified facilities do you get the kind of repeatable accuracy that can reliably measure the actual effect, in all respects, of making a timing or fuel injection rate changes.

At the level of changing fuel efficiency by one mpg this stuff is pretty simple: just make the ratio ever so much leaner. But you cannot measure a one MPG difference with any typical chassis dyno, let alone the inertia types , which are useless for this. (I talked with an EPA-certified lab where they said that they can barely measure a five mpg difference reliably with just one test, even with really sophisticated equipment). In a vehicle that must be tested for actual emissions (rather than accepting the onboard computer's assessment) leaning the ratio is likely to drive up NOx enough to cause you to flunk the test.

The factory settings are extremely hard to beat for economy purposes, because for most cars, the settings are optimized (with multimillion-dollar budgets) for the EPA test cycles. (When the EPA changed its tests to included air conditioning on times faster driving, etc. the manufacturers re tuned and redesigned accordingly.)

Getting perceived improvements in "performance" is pretty easy: you burn a little more fuel, your get both a little better performance and little better throttle response... and you make the converter work harder... or fail emission tests). Getting real improvements in fuel efficiency is not easy, because, for most cars, that's what all the manufactures spend their R&D budgets doing, so that, for example, the Ford Fiesta can be advertised as getting over 40 mpg (a figure that can be matched by some drivers, if their driving happens to precisely match the EPA cycles). The Fiesta has a double clutch transmission (of stunning complexity) to eke out the last one mpg... and only if you buy the "high efficiency" version of the Fiesta do you get the 40 mpg.

A garage tuner making a Corolla perform (in efficiency) like a Prius (for which the 1 billion dollar development budget was all about the 100 small items that added up to high efficiency) will not happen -- certainly not with a chip, and its unlikely to happen without all the subtleties in the Prius (as well as the obvious stuff like the Atkinson cycle engine, the streamlining, and the hybridization).

It is a really rare car that is so badly engineered in this market-driven aspect of performance, that you can improve upon (or measure) gains in fuel efficiency. (One of the rare cars: You can get LT1 (fuel efficiency) performance out of a ZR1 Corvette by detuning. Then you'd have a $100,000 econocar, with the performance of a $45,000 Vette.

So no, a performance shop doesn't have the equipment to measure fuel efficiency improvements. You have to have at very least, a dyno that can run a whole EPA cycle, you have to collect all products of combustion in huge bags, etc etc. Chances are that (at a performance shop) you will end up with worse fuel efficiency than you came in with, with a negative ROI.

Ask a Corolla driver or a Prius driver what mpg they are getting and most can at east quote a figure (often an incorrect figure). Ask them what 0-60 time they are getting: they are clueless. Car marketers know that, so spend tons of money on optimizing fuel efficiency in all vehicles where that is likely to be a buyer concern.

Your comment on your Corvette is spot on -- you are getting figures very close to the EPA figures. You're right, before the days of computer control (which was driven by emissions requirements) mileage for comparable cars was far worse, as was performance: Your Vette gets to 60 in about half the time of the 409 Chevy they used to sing about... even though it is closing in on the same weight.

Even the tiny engine in my prototype three wheeler will require computer managed fuel injection and timing to meet (looser motorcycle) emission requirements, and to improve efficiency to the desired level.

K Fry,

You are apparently quite aware of what you are talking about, BUT the poster's question was:

Have any of you succeeded in improving your vehicle's fuel mileage by swapping out the OEM chips in the on-board computer for 3rd party aftermarket chips?

Emissions were not the point. Secondly, SOME kind of metrics are better than none was my point in recommending a shop which could test the changes.

Unfortunately car company's decisions aren't always made on what's possible. They must get new models out in a reasonable time frame, so the progress will be spread out over many years.

Despite all the improvements the internal combustion engine still is woefully inefficient. I feel very confident that new engineers will be up to the challenges, just look at what has happened in just a few decades! My Corvette is SO MUCH improved over my first and second ones that I was astounded!

P.S. I have a 1996 LT1 Z28 (performance built and tuned) and it SCREAMS!

It is a really rare car that is so badly engineered in this market-driven aspect of performance, that you can improve upon (or measure) gains in fuel efficiency. (One of the rare cars: You can get LT1 (fuel efficiency) performance out of a ZR1 Corvette by detuning. Then you'd have a $100,000 econocar, with the performance of a $45,000 Vette.

True and false, you can have both. New electronics are very capable of running dual-programs, flick of a switch and your back to economy, or nowadays just say it!

"It is a really rare car that is so badly engineered in this market-driven aspect of performance, that you can improve upon (or measure) gains in fuel efficiency."

Umm does American designed and built Vs built almost anywhere else in the world sound familiar?

Especially the aspect of where designed and built elsewhere has become very well known in the public as to typically being better designed, better built, and to have better fuel economy in more than just marginal levels of measurement to top it off.