Well for starters, hes not mapping his car. He already has it mapped, and wants to make a copy of that map for whatever reason.
If his car is mapped he shouldn't need a copy of the map; exactly my point. If my car is overmapped by Audi I just go back to my tuner and they re-load it, it's that simple. If you want a reloadable map, buy Superchips.[/QUOTE]
While i'm not suggesting its "easy" to map a car, when working with ME7 its not particularly difficult either. Especially once you have the knowledge and experience of doing it a lot.
Which lets face it from the OP's post he doesn't have the knowledge, but I don't think that's the big issue here.
A custom map built from scratch wont cost you much more than £500-600, which is representative of the tuners time doing the work. An off the shelf map from one of the large tuners such as revo, which also costs many hundreds of pounds, represents very little tuners time in the grand scheme, as its more or less a standard flash sold over and over that gets blatted on and mildly tweaked if your lucky. In my view a standard off the shelf stage 1 map shouldnt cost any more than £100, and the majority of that cost is in the tuners time for actually getting the car into their premises and flashing it onto the car. The software effectively costs nothing after you've developed it (and we've already ascertained that can be done for £500), and the end users are being thoroughly ripped off.
I dont mind paying a tuner to TUNE my car, but this ridiculous situation that seems to exist in the euro scene where everythings done to standard "Stages" with the tuners simply selling a one-size-fits-all file for the car at a price which would easily pay for a proper custom job is quite frankly a joke.
It's a difficult one to position, but on the two occasions my car has been used to develop a stage of a generic remap it's been with the tuner for over a week. That's just one model, for two different stages of the code, and I know for a fact my car was one of a group that were used, so literally hundreds if not thousands of hours go into producing a generic remap from a reputable reseller. When you're paying salaries, pensions, premises, testing time, dynos, petrol, equipment, associated overheads it's not a cheap process at all. Then take all the various cars / models / updates.....
I will galdly concede remaps are expensive, MTM were charging £1000 when I had my S3 mapped there in 2007 (generic code), and they've recently dropped this to £600 showing sign of the times. But I've always conceded that a road car is not a race car, and does not have the specific tolerance as such, so unless you go a very specific modification route then I can buy an off shelf map and follow the manufacturers recommended mod path.
I agree about the prices, but am going to have to beg to differ on the effort investment. I've seen it with my own eyes, and I have no vested interests to lie. Maybe some companies do a very generic job, but not all. Hence why Revo for example are sometimes considered late to market, it's not laziness its a case of trying to meet customer feedback requirements.
Furthermore you suggested the tuner would happily provide the bloke with the binary dump from the ECU
I think there's been a misinterpretation of the 'give you another copy' in my first post. My tuner has always provided me with a replacement upload file if Audi have inadvertantly overloaded it with an update - I think we're insinuiating the same thing but using different terminology. I wasn't suggesting you (a) get a free copy / (b) get handed a copy to do what you like with; I have to drive somewhere and have it uploaded, but if your tuner is reputable he'll do this anyway.
which would NEVER happen from a mainstream tuner, because the tuner sees that file as something he can sell for £500 a pop, theres no way they'd hand out a file that could then be passed on to others, which is also specifically why they try to make it difficult to read it off the ECU.
Absolutely.
