Because it seams everyone on here is negative yet on piston heads it's the other way round

Piston heads is probably more popular with under 25's who wear baseball caps while redlining their Corsa's in every gear.

This forum has a lot of very experienced and mechanically knowledgeable members, some of us have spent over 30 years in car and component design/development and production engineering (as well as many years of car ownership).

Other posters ask for advice based on such experience and knowledge, as they themselves are new drivers/not mechanically minded, so advice is given in cautious terms, which is why re-mapping is not often recommended on here.

Indeed - I wonder whether the same 'yoofs' realise that remapping their car's ECU (if not carried out by a Main Dealer as part of a general software update) will invalidate their warranty, maybe break the law if the CO2 figure/band goes up as a result, and likely their insurance if they don't tell their insurer - even if they DID tell them, a hefty premium increase (especially as the vast majority of remaps are done to increase power/torque output) would likely result as the car is now classed as 'modified'.

Come insurance renewal time, many insurers will either not be willing to insure such cars, or will deliberately give quotes vastly more than before to ward off people who are much more likely to have speed-rated accidents because they wanted more performance for their car.

...and I bet your car's bhp didn't go up from 80-odd to 200 to account for the '£12.80' increase, unless you seriously loaded up the excess. An average small family diesel car has about 110bhp, so increasing it, say, to 150 would bump the car 6-8 groups up the insurance group table, so a tenner or so increase sounds rather low without adding further excesses.

A personally think the whole issue is rather moot as most turbo-diesel engines (aside the low powered 1.6s) have decent performance compared to normally-asiprated petrol engined cars and in my (and it seems, most people's) view don't need chipping - its petrol-engined cars that, up until the advent of the modern turbo-petrol engines (like VAG's 1.2 and 1.4 TSIs and equivalents at Ford and others), needed a bit more 'oomph' that was constantly being lost due to manufacturers downrating petrol engines to meet more stringent emissions regs and VED CO2 bands.

'Dieselgate' has shown us that you can't have your engine map cake (high performance) and eat it (low CO2/NOx) without some serious (expensive) engine alterations or additives (AdBlue) and accept lower performance. I think the days of diesel being king (except for carrying heavy loads or for vehicles doing big mileages [over 25k miles]) are over - as can be evidenced by the number of munfacturers (especially VW) trying to (relatively) cheaply offload diesels at present.

My hp was 224 mapped 295 so a good jump . Remapped it the day I got it with 23 k miles now it's got 118k full service only thing that I have needed to change engine wise was Glow plug module and 02 Sen and turbo pipe that's it in 5 years so I don't understand what you are talking about with diesel gate also my mpg has gone up and as with everything I tested and still do as when I fill up its to the brim to light on and I have only used vpower never supermarket fuel

As I posted upthread - no-one has published before-after figures on fuel consumption that stand up to statistical scrutiny

My hp was 224 mapped 295 so a good jump . Remapped it the day I got it with 23 k miles now it's got 118k full service only thing that I have needed to change engine wise was Glow plug module and 02 Sen and turbo pipe that's it in 5 years so I don't understand what you are talking about with diesel gate also my mpg has gone up and as with everything I tested and still do as when I fill up its to the brim to light on and I have only used vpower never supermarket fuel

If you mapped it the day you got it how do you know it increased your MPG?

I am by nature a positive person. The majority of posts on the forum are, in my view, positive.

Hopefully, bradmax was intending to share something he felt very strongly about ; rightly or wrongly. Our language is not always as effective as we wish and a poor choice words can get in the way of communication.

I have complete respect, and appreciation for, the knowledgeable posters on here. Bradmax, I know absolutely nothing about you : indeed don't know anything about remapping.

I think this thread is probably going nowhere of any value.

That first post has to be one of the most persuasive i've ever seen, anyone here considering remap is now firmly convinced not to on the strength of that alone.

It could have been even more persuasive, in the negative, if Top Gear were as enthusiatic as the other forum mentioned.

:-)

Edited by gordonbennet on 07/04/2016 at 17:46

Indeed - an engine that is working harder all the time surely won't last as long as another that is loaded less heavily. I presume that's why manufacturers will invalidate the warranties of cars that get chipped.

I think that engine longevity is probably inversely proportional to bhp per litre. I wonder how many of these engines 'remapped' at, say, 40,000m, will last another 100,000m without powertrain issues?

As someone who buys cheap old cars and cares for them for at least 10yrs I would not touch a 'remapped' engine with a bargepole although I understand it might appeal to a growing cohort prepared to pay well over £200 a month for a mundane car and change it every 3yrs. £2500pa depreciation is completely unacceptable to me.

There are a few myths with these devices.

1) The MPG improves. no true they simply cause the trip computer to miss read as they put more fuel into engine the the ECU thinks it did.

2) The devices increase the fuel presure and some turbo boost so extra fuel gets into the engine which the ECU does not know about. Stress is therefore on the fuel pump and turbo.

3) Any car failure is always caused by the remap.

Ive used one in the past 150k and no issues.

Oh dear, is it half term.