So we finally have a full PnP Stand Alone DME for the N54 released by Syvecs http://www.syvecs.co.uk/products/engine-management-plug-in-kits/bmw-135335m1/
In the product release thread there were a lot of people basically stating that with MHD and JB4 you have all the functionality of Syvecs and they didn't understand why the product existed, much less why the product existed at a $5-6000 price point. And although I don't have direct experience with Syvecs, the people who do, have not stepped forward to explain the value proposition they bring to the market. Why does this product exist (in other words why not a JB4 and/or MHD)? Why the enormous price?
What I do have is experience as a consumer with these types of products in the current market and in the past. I remember the frustration I experienced with piggy back devices in the 1990's. In the DSM community we had many offerings from Apexi, HKS, and Greddy to address our tuning needs.....and they did so very poorly. This drove the development of flash tuning...or DSMTune (if you remember it). That didn't do everything needed either so AEM stepped up with their EMS product and released a PnP Stand Alone DME for the DSM cars. I probably owned every single iteration of tuning product available for the DSM at one point or another and had the first AEM 1301 EMS in 2003. From an N54 perspective I'm on my 4th N54 and have used the COBB, Proceed, JB4, MHD, and MHD+JB4.
So I'll be taking my experiences in DSM (and EVO) tuning and juxtaposing them over to the N54 community. I've never been a tuner, I'm only a consumer that has been through this before and knows the value each product (piggy back, flash tune, stand alone) *can* bring to the table.
Let's hit price first. From a pure inflationary standpoint Syvecs isn't *that* far off historic pricing on products like this. Remember guys, we aren't talking about a stand alone kit you have to put 2000hrs into wiring up yourself and developing a base map to even get the engine to turn over. You're talking about a Plug and Play (PnP) product here. AEM was one of the first to offer this to the Supra market (then the DSM market) in the early 2000's. This was on pre CAN bus cars. OBD2 compliance wasn't even there, the port was dead if you used an AEM EMS. And that PnP DME cost me $2500 in 2003 for my 1994 GSX that could be purchased used for roughly $5000 at the time. Simply adjust for inflation and you end up with $3325 for that product today. Add in additional control layers and infrastructure to deal with CAN BUS, BMS BUS, DI Injection, etc and $5000 isn't off the historic norm for a product like this. People have regularly paid this type of price for a product in this market space.
So what the hell does Syvecs bring to the table at this price? Well, lets go through their bulleted marketing listing of their features and talk about each of them:
• Live Tuning of every aspect of the engine’s calibration, including signals sent to the DSG ecu
Live tuning doesn't offer 99.99% of us any value on a daily basis. This is really for track cars. The highest value this would bring to the table is the capability of a tuner to sit in a pit area tuning a car in real time as it circles the track using Syvecs add on WIFI module.
The average Joe won't ever use this beyond the initial tune however. This would also make road tuning or dyno tuning your car faster. You could have a tuner in the passenger seat making real time adjustments to your tune and committing them to the DME without the need for a reflash, or to stop and start your car. And while that's cool for a tuner, most of us are just consumers and aren't tuning every day.
• Ability to select desired engine map, boost level, traction and launch control levels through 8 Position switch or via OEM Cruise control levers
Oooooo....this is the one that causes everyone to say, "Well I can do that already with a JB4". And when I hear that vapid comment I know that BMS's marketing wank has claimed another victim. No, the JB4 can't do this. It can do a cheap parlor trick that looks like this, but it's not even in the same ballpark. First off the JB4 is a piggy back that only really lies to the DME to get it to do things differently. It does allow you to change boost levels ABOVE what is in the flash tune itself, and to get the associated fueling and ignition changes to take advantage of that additional boost, but in essence, that's all it provides.
THIS however is a whole 'nother beast entirely. How about a *true* valet map on the fly? 0psi boost, 3000rpm rev limiter, etc. Or in normal operation how about different maps for different boost levels like a JB4 but with the capability of changing ALL parameters. So on my 12psi drive around town map I can also alter my throttle position mapping to make the midrange throttle response less jumpy? Or how about a fuel saver map for your long road trips? The JB4 itself can't do this stuff. And even with the JB4 w/MHD BEF you are still not about to re-flash on the fly while driving down the street.
• Fully adjustable Launch control with Anti-lag strategies and Ramp in Maps
This is one we need direct experience to interpret. Is this only for 6sp cars? Is this for DCT cars too? There is a ton of potential here, and without some direct experience from someone who has used this as a tester we won't really know what this feature brings to the table. We can guess all we want.
• Ability to control aftermarket High pressure and Low Pressure pumps
This one is easy. Instead of using a stand alone Hobbs switch to control your secondary LPFP you can now control them directly via the DME in the tune. Also, instead of having to run an AIC to control a secondary HPFP in a VTT Double Barrel Shotgun kit you can control it directly here.
AND you can use aftermarket HPFP's directly. AND!!! You can also use custom PWM 750LPH LPFP's and just use one LPFP instead of multiples that we have to now. We can't use custom 750LPH LPFP's right now because they need to be controlled via the tune itself with PWM to prevent from overheating the fuel in low load situations.
• Full Variable Valve Timing control
I'm not sure if this is any better than what MHD already has...might be the same. Would need to hear from someone with direct experience with this piece.
• Closed loop Dual Lambda Control using OEM lambdas
I'm not sure if this is any better than what MHD already has...might be the same. Would need to hear from someone with direct experience with this piece.
• Flex Fuel control
Oooo...another one where the marketing wank from existing products is confusing people. So first off no, JB4 doesn't do this at all in their e85 implementation. Not even close. If you want to read about it see prior discussions about their E85 solution vs the impending MHD Flex Fuel Offering.
But what about the upcoming MHD offering? Well, honestly we don't know cause nobody has had the chance to use it yet. BUT, MHD did reveal a few things already. The biggest problem they are overcoming however is a lack of free memory space in the factory DME to accomplish this task. So they are having to compromise by deleting things from the factory functionality. One thing they said they were going to have to remove is Bank to Bank trims and fueling. Ouch. Any how you can see what Syvecs does in existing platforms here and it is full featured no compromises Flex Fueling. There might not be much benefit over MHD, or there may be a lot. We won't know until MHD releases.
(I am overwhelming this text editor for the spoolstreet forum and it's glitching out with this much text so I'm going to have to break my post apart)
In the product release thread there were a lot of people basically stating that with MHD and JB4 you have all the functionality of Syvecs and they didn't understand why the product existed, much less why the product existed at a $5-6000 price point. And although I don't have direct experience with Syvecs, the people who do, have not stepped forward to explain the value proposition they bring to the market. Why does this product exist (in other words why not a JB4 and/or MHD)? Why the enormous price?
What I do have is experience as a consumer with these types of products in the current market and in the past. I remember the frustration I experienced with piggy back devices in the 1990's. In the DSM community we had many offerings from Apexi, HKS, and Greddy to address our tuning needs.....and they did so very poorly. This drove the development of flash tuning...or DSMTune (if you remember it). That didn't do everything needed either so AEM stepped up with their EMS product and released a PnP Stand Alone DME for the DSM cars. I probably owned every single iteration of tuning product available for the DSM at one point or another and had the first AEM 1301 EMS in 2003. From an N54 perspective I'm on my 4th N54 and have used the COBB, Proceed, JB4, MHD, and MHD+JB4.
So I'll be taking my experiences in DSM (and EVO) tuning and juxtaposing them over to the N54 community. I've never been a tuner, I'm only a consumer that has been through this before and knows the value each product (piggy back, flash tune, stand alone) *can* bring to the table.
Let's hit price first. From a pure inflationary standpoint Syvecs isn't *that* far off historic pricing on products like this. Remember guys, we aren't talking about a stand alone kit you have to put 2000hrs into wiring up yourself and developing a base map to even get the engine to turn over. You're talking about a Plug and Play (PnP) product here. AEM was one of the first to offer this to the Supra market (then the DSM market) in the early 2000's. This was on pre CAN bus cars. OBD2 compliance wasn't even there, the port was dead if you used an AEM EMS. And that PnP DME cost me $2500 in 2003 for my 1994 GSX that could be purchased used for roughly $5000 at the time. Simply adjust for inflation and you end up with $3325 for that product today. Add in additional control layers and infrastructure to deal with CAN BUS, BMS BUS, DI Injection, etc and $5000 isn't off the historic norm for a product like this. People have regularly paid this type of price for a product in this market space.
So what the hell does Syvecs bring to the table at this price? Well, lets go through their bulleted marketing listing of their features and talk about each of them:
• Live Tuning of every aspect of the engine’s calibration, including signals sent to the DSG ecu
Live tuning doesn't offer 99.99% of us any value on a daily basis. This is really for track cars. The highest value this would bring to the table is the capability of a tuner to sit in a pit area tuning a car in real time as it circles the track using Syvecs add on WIFI module.
The average Joe won't ever use this beyond the initial tune however. This would also make road tuning or dyno tuning your car faster. You could have a tuner in the passenger seat making real time adjustments to your tune and committing them to the DME without the need for a reflash, or to stop and start your car. And while that's cool for a tuner, most of us are just consumers and aren't tuning every day.
• Ability to select desired engine map, boost level, traction and launch control levels through 8 Position switch or via OEM Cruise control levers
Oooooo....this is the one that causes everyone to say, "Well I can do that already with a JB4". And when I hear that vapid comment I know that BMS's marketing wank has claimed another victim. No, the JB4 can't do this. It can do a cheap parlor trick that looks like this, but it's not even in the same ballpark. First off the JB4 is a piggy back that only really lies to the DME to get it to do things differently. It does allow you to change boost levels ABOVE what is in the flash tune itself, and to get the associated fueling and ignition changes to take advantage of that additional boost, but in essence, that's all it provides.
THIS however is a whole 'nother beast entirely. How about a *true* valet map on the fly? 0psi boost, 3000rpm rev limiter, etc. Or in normal operation how about different maps for different boost levels like a JB4 but with the capability of changing ALL parameters. So on my 12psi drive around town map I can also alter my throttle position mapping to make the midrange throttle response less jumpy? Or how about a fuel saver map for your long road trips? The JB4 itself can't do this stuff. And even with the JB4 w/MHD BEF you are still not about to re-flash on the fly while driving down the street.
• Fully adjustable Launch control with Anti-lag strategies and Ramp in Maps
This is one we need direct experience to interpret. Is this only for 6sp cars? Is this for DCT cars too? There is a ton of potential here, and without some direct experience from someone who has used this as a tester we won't really know what this feature brings to the table. We can guess all we want.
• Ability to control aftermarket High pressure and Low Pressure pumps
This one is easy. Instead of using a stand alone Hobbs switch to control your secondary LPFP you can now control them directly via the DME in the tune. Also, instead of having to run an AIC to control a secondary HPFP in a VTT Double Barrel Shotgun kit you can control it directly here.
AND you can use aftermarket HPFP's directly. AND!!! You can also use custom PWM 750LPH LPFP's and just use one LPFP instead of multiples that we have to now. We can't use custom 750LPH LPFP's right now because they need to be controlled via the tune itself with PWM to prevent from overheating the fuel in low load situations.
• Full Variable Valve Timing control
I'm not sure if this is any better than what MHD already has...might be the same. Would need to hear from someone with direct experience with this piece.
• Closed loop Dual Lambda Control using OEM lambdas
I'm not sure if this is any better than what MHD already has...might be the same. Would need to hear from someone with direct experience with this piece.
• Flex Fuel control
Oooo...another one where the marketing wank from existing products is confusing people. So first off no, JB4 doesn't do this at all in their e85 implementation. Not even close. If you want to read about it see prior discussions about their E85 solution vs the impending MHD Flex Fuel Offering.
But what about the upcoming MHD offering? Well, honestly we don't know cause nobody has had the chance to use it yet. BUT, MHD did reveal a few things already. The biggest problem they are overcoming however is a lack of free memory space in the factory DME to accomplish this task. So they are having to compromise by deleting things from the factory functionality. One thing they said they were going to have to remove is Bank to Bank trims and fueling. Ouch. Any how you can see what Syvecs does in existing platforms here and it is full featured no compromises Flex Fueling. There might not be much benefit over MHD, or there may be a lot. We won't know until MHD releases.
(I am overwhelming this text editor for the spoolstreet forum and it's glitching out with this much text so I'm going to have to break my post apart)