Long posts

[poet_x]

What is this "Nais" thing on your webpage? I assume you work for an automotive magazine????

North American International Auto Show.

I kinda do my own thing w/ the site. My day job is in an optical lab doing all the IT stuff...

 

[thrillseek]

My favorite part about John's response to the original post was that it was indeed six paragraphs! Maybe John's posts are a bit long-winded, but I will always stop and read his responses. 99 percent of the time I will find something within all his writing either interesting or thought provoking!

 

[jalnjr]

Re: Long posts?

no

 

[Ryanmcd2]

Microsoft is lucky to have John, smart guy and excellent at getting his point across. In fact I do not think anyone can post a more well written post then him. :biggrin:

 

[TurboLexus]

you should not be like my blonde ex girlfriend and ramble on forever?

Dated a girl like that also, just made sure she always had something in her mouth. Problem solved :wink:

 

[NeoNSX]

Nothing wrong with long posts. Let me give some examples:

On the <A HREF="http://www.nsxprime.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79318">following thread from 2006 about tuning costs</A>, John@microsoft posted two reasonably long replies:

Rob,

Bruce Nomura told me the same thing four years ago. Not even being an engine guru by any stretch myself... being a piggy back setup, common sense on a customer level told me the HKS definitely has several advantages by design over the more hyped stand-alone AEM that later became so popular around these parts. If your a late model with DBW it's really not that much more to step up to the HKS, or if you truely need to move to stand-alone and DIY- the M800 has the resolution and solid foot work so just pay the tuning costs at a real race shop. I think HKS's strict approach to authorizing tuners is a fantastic idea, and stands to make customer experiences better for the ever growing home tuner market.

I pick no sides in this discussion, but for starters- from all the community members I've talked to over the years, I am of the opinion that it seems that for many of the NSX members that make the initial move to an aftermarket engine management system, it is the first time they have ever done so in any vehicle. They seem to take advice readily from others that are essentially making the exact same mistakes concurrently, and try to make comparative arguments on things that aren't comparative.

As a result, It can thus can be an all around expensive learning experience, since failure doesn't mean picking up another B18C or SR20DET for $500 off ebay when your NSX engine gernades. Instead it often means that their ride ends up on jack stands for a very long time while they call their bank, tuner, and "do more research".

Perhaps I am just ignorant to the point. I think that most import car enthusiasts whom take the big step to move to an aftermarket stand alone engine management system with their pet project street cars often do so for all the wrong reasons. Many apparently are [over the phone] willing to except the routine 'driveability issues' such as fuel economy, cold starts, altitude/fuel differences, occasional shut-off, even emissions inspection issues, etc... but once the car flat out just doesn't start in their driveway or starts leaving them stranded half way down US101, all that changes... and even a casual hint of increased risk to eventual internal engine damage [off-line] typically provokes an all together different and more serious reaction. Once the damage is done, the blame game starts.

Rob, your 100X$100 = Buy your own dyno concept is a great formula. It's easy for vendors to say "plug and play" in their marketing then chalk it up to the "guy behind the keyboard" whenever a problem occurs....but the fact is that stand alone tuning isn't easy, and I could dispute that comment readily in oh so many ways.

As you said once before, making maximum power is the easy part, but driveability comes at a huge price. It doesn't matter what stand-alone solution you have.. their is so much the factory can do that enthusiasts cannot afford to tune for, and making the move to a stand alone aftermarket engine management system and playing the "my tuner knows best game" is the most significant driveability/reliability compromise one can make, no matter what forum or board of logic you come from. Arrogance always comes at a price.

Even thou a customer says/thinks that is what they need, often it doesn't mean they do. Most often, they should be stepping back to look at their vehicle as a whole and trying to figure out fundamentally, what it is they are trying to accomplish. Even with huge investments in engine mods... often times they are trading up inconsequential power gains for huge risks, seat time for headaches, or but a few seconds off a laptime that could be gotten so much cheaper elsewhere in car setup.

No disrespect to others on the board whom I realize are far more knowledgable in this arena (Mike, Devin, etc..) than I but...

Personally if in the future, if neccessity moved me in that direction, even for the sparse research I've done from various boards.... I'd be willing to spend a lot more on proper fuel delivery and a stand-alone aftermarket engine management system than many of these AEM tunes on my $9000 engine, let alone a 20k+ fully built one.

What is your definition of 'tuning'. If by 'more difficult to tune' you mean adjusting the AFR, obtaining maximum output, or tuning for better driveability than the the fundamentals and theories behind engine management are applicable cross platform- and all that is at issue is the experience of your engine builder/tuner, the quality of tools at there disposal, and how much you trust their judgment. If you have reasonable expectations, achievable goals, and enough money.. good results can and certainly are achieved everyday.

Now on the other hand, if by 'difficult to tune' you mean achieving equivalent high output as you can with the 2JZGTE... so you can run around and kill things on the highway or shurg off competitors quarters... well then, the NSX Platform while in actuality being more than adequate for the realities of modern public road driving... will to the majority always prove to be not good enough since there is always something seconds faster.. and I'd recommend one of the other platforms because you can do the exact same thing for a whole lot less money.

Unlike some other tuner platforms like the 2JZGTE you mentioned or the popular SR20DET or even a Mustang which are relatively easy and cheap to extract numbers from, The NSX will never be that platform due to cost, physics, technical issues, low production numbers, the even smaller aftermarket enthusiast market, and the realities of vendor development costs pushing most products one step away from one-off custom fab.

The design goals, well stated officially by Honda, was for a balanced platform. Balance doesn't win you anything on the street, strip, or with the editor of Import Tuner but balance is what separates fast cars from winning cars on the circuit. What makes for a fast street car by todays standards very often does not always make for a fast well balanced road car.. and it should come as little surprise that the engineering difficulty required to achieve this feat is over looked by the average car enthusiast because they have no genuine knowledge of race car design.

Someone recently posted lap times at the ring.. and if you compare the lap times at the Ring to the spec sheets for the cars fielded it shows how good the NSX-R really is when it's posting times competitive with a Challenge car. Within a certain design rule set and everything else being equal, that would be practically impossible to perform for some tuner in his garage.

Achieving maximum hp or comparatively amazing super car specs was never on the engineers minds when designing their ultimate road car in the first place. In the end, the engine elected for the chassis and hp/tonne targets by the engineers was the C30A/C32B...an aluminum block high compression naturally aspirated V6. While not having the best specs or value present day... it is in fact relative to the vast majority of OE powerplants a very special, amazing, more than capable motor that often goes unappreciated even in stock trim.

How difficult it is to 'tune' in the aftermarket is a function of what the enthusiast is trying to accomplish and how deep their wallets are versus what they think they are. If you want to effectively double the power output of the engine by building the motor out with low compression and essentially re-designing everything from the block up because the NSX GT1 wasn't for sale when you bought yours, then several members here can testify that it can get quite expensive with variable results over the long term. Within a certain rule set it might make sense racing competitively with factory backed support, but for club motorsports it's entirely cost ineffective IMO unless your trying to do something pretty specific. On the other hand if can accept mild numbers, a good well setup NA tune with a free flowing head and some cams to extend on the vehicles original design is an excellent alternative. Most popular, if you want to leave your block as-is and chance a low boost air pump with the stock compression some have done arguably well over the years there.

My conclusion is that tuning the NSX is only as difficult as your making it.

What is reliability? How do you define it? Is it 100K on the odo with little more than the occasional oil change or is it a successful podium finish at a race? Is it two summers on a motorcycle engine or a few track days on your new Radical after which the engines need to be tore down every 50 hours for NA or 35 for the turbo at $5000... and that's just street and club track stuff. Move to pro, and Formula Atlantic engines can last one weekend because the tolerances are so tight, and on the better sponsored ones can cost $15,000 to rebuild. How much routine maintenance, recurring parts, self-service, and downtime will you be willing to accept? If their is a problem with your one-off modified NSX engine and/or drive train can you afford to properly tune a fix and maintain it without shipping it half way across the country? What level of physical stresses will the components sustain- you driving "really, really hard" on the street, 5 track days a year, SCCA finals, or a 24 hour enduro?

What is drive-ability? Is it 92 pump gas at $30 a tank or 100 VP Racing for $120? Is down-time for a month acceptable to you or is an hour on the side of the road trying to get your car to start too much? Are you doing the work or are you paying to have it done? Are you willing to put seat time second to your engine working? Even if you are willing to accept some issues, wait until they leave you stranded. Ask any mechanic, drive-ability problems are the most expensive to diagnose, and can turn a $40 part into a $4000 bill.

Also, what is performance tuning really all about to you? Is it just a nicer dyno chart or is a lower lap or auto-x time? Do you really have a need to develop more power? On some tracks you can double your HP and if you are lucky shave 3 seconds off. Are you always looking for more and if so when will it be enough- is it +50rwhp or +500rwhp? Is it truly a faster 1/4 mile at the weekend strip or is really about racing that C6? Are you willing to work through and address the other issues caused by creating power in car setup to again re-balance the vehicle?

Yes, it is complicated.






Yes. The short answer is that It's well beyond what even the best tuners in the import tuning world could ever aspire to achieve with their limited resources when tuning a customers engine for a compromise between driveability, reliability, emissions, and performance. The extended answer is that Honda is well known for building amazing engines, but everything in engine design and tuning is about compromise, and inevitably the internal engine design and ECU programming on most production cars- even on the higher ends, are really in place to meet the needs of society at large with emissions, drive-ability, etc... being just as high of a priority as performance. VTEC is actually a great example of a selling feature that does just that.

It's easy to move to a stand alone EMS and instantly see some minor gains, or think your safer because you are assume more control- but this move can often come at a high price.. and the bill often doesn't arrive until much later. I'll see if I can dig up some facts, but in general the larger manufacturers that build production cars spend many millions of dollars to get results in this space, and sometimes even they don't get it right. So, what makes someone think the AEM certified dyno shop down the street can do better, or because someone had one result on their personal car yours will be the same?

When discussing stand alone EMS tuning, it really has little to do with AEM is better or worse than brand X.

If that's all anyone got out of this thread they missed the point. Such would be drastic simplifications and make someone sound very unknowledgable. As you'll find if you dare read all those responses on the supra forums- most aren't specific in their arguments but often times what is better for someone could come down to something as trivial as which vendor has a default map for them or supports their firing configuration. For others they might need the telemetry and MIL spec connectors and better resolution on the motec for their requirements. For others, it could be system familiarity.

EMS tuning is what it is, I think all the forum kill threads and NSX vs. M5 threads out there would back me up if I stated my belief is that for 90% of car enthusiasts pursuing engine mods- street performance in daily driven street cars is really what most of this discussion comes down to. This means that Hp/$, reasonable maintenance, preserving ammenities, and reliability (however individual owners care to quantify that matrix) do in fact matter greatly.

That being the case, if someone wants to play import tuner and throw an AEM EMS on with a
few hundred dollars in 'safe' tuning, call it 'good enough' and perhaps risk blowing up their engine screwing around with a laptop I know I don't care, and I don't think too many on the various forums will really care either if you have a D16Y7 or a C30A with toasty internals since it's your checkbook.

However, once you move beyond the 'street tunes' to real racing where you put everything you have on the line, or if you are a vendor and start working on higher end customer cars- 911's, Gallaro's, expensive imports, etc... you'll quickly find yourself working with $40,000 engines where mistakes carry bigger consequences. In these instances, spending $1500 for an AEM and $500 in tuning vs. $6000 for a Motec system and $2000 in tuning is going to quickly become a really big no brainer.




No problem Rob, I didn't intend to have such a lengthy post!! But, in closing, I stand by my earlier comment, and know enough to realize that a quick tune with a stand alone EMS is no way to save anything. Even designing a fuel delivery system that functions well under high G loads is difficult. Just because some guys pistons go up and down for a few track day's, or he thinks his tuner is great, or his FI solution is best, etc... doesn't doesn't prove anything to me personally about their setups reliability. Especially, since writing Q/A tests for software that runs millions of times a day in 33 languages on 10,000 different devices is what I do for a living, and I can count the years some of the NSX vendors have been around on one hand. Why would I see it differently? Real reliability, as would be achieved in OE setups or in aviation takes decades to accomplish, which any Auto Historian will tell you is a leading reason why Honda has done as well as they have with their quality relative to their competitors.

There is enough information out there on EMS and tuners, and everyone needs to decide what works best for themselves. Obviously vendors, whom have sold expensive tunes aren't going to be the ones to break the bad news particularly since some of their batting averages already suck to begin with.

This thread, purpose long lost, was originally about the fact that Rob's AEM unit had some very real and specific functional issues, which when compounded with shabby support cost him greatly while racing. That sucks. If the problems can be repro'd and verified... hopefully AEM will professionally acknowledge and deal with these issues directly, which is far more confidence inspiring to the rest of us then hearing their employees rant freely on message boards about AEM's that run 1000hp race cars on salt flats as if that has some bearing on his CRM issue which simply needed resolved.

Regards,

John

If you read these posts you will see that John answers the questions purposefully and exactly, whereas a two-line post would have been insufficient.

On the other hand, some other threads such as <A HREF="http://www.nsxprime.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74748">Supreme Court says Bush acted illegally</A> with 150+ posts and most replies being 3-6 paragraphs long, a lot more one-line comments may have been more approperiate.

I hope this has been educational, and if anything, helped exercise your scrolly-wheel finger.

 

[Ponyboy]

Sometimes a response demands a thorough and lengthly answer. And sometimes, the opposite is sufficient.

However, every reply does not need to be lengthly.

 

[Patdeisa]

I totally agr...

...look! something shiney!

This had me laughing...

Whenever something comes up between my wife and I about a short attention span, I insert, "Oh look, a castle!" The reference is that a goldfish supposedly has only a 3 second memory, thus finding a castle in the tank after turning around is a new and unknown experience.

 

[ChopsJazz]

Every time I see one coming I just scroll through it. It's like a knee-jerk reaction.

And then I think of this thread...