Ok I’m thinking about getting into tuning a little and I’m leaning towards HP Tuners.
I would LOVE to get a tuner for free to play with before I go out and spend $600 on one.
My goal would be to be able to street tune my own car, and also some of my friends cars. I know HP has some credit system that seems a little greedy to me, but so be it.
Any suggestions? Anyone know if there is any free stuff out there?
I wouldn’t even mind buying HP if I knew I could change up the code a little to allow me to tune as many vehicles as I wanted to, but since I don’t have a copy I can’t play with it.
Any one use something else? EFI Live etc?
This will be used mostly for Domestic Cars aka LS1 etc.
HP tuners is the best way to tune your LSX vehicle. IIRC the cable comes with a few credits to get you started. The user interface is relatively nice to work with. There is also a forum full of helpful info to learn.
Find a friend that has a cable and buy some credits to see how you like it.
I’ve been tuning with HPTuners for years now and love it. Compared to many other platforms i’ve used both import and domestic HPTuners is one of my favs and I use it on both my Turboed Cavalier and Cobalt SS.
To answer a few questions the credit system is a great way to control things in my opinion. Most tuning software is not as plug and play as HPT is and is also not compatible with nearly as many vehicles. HPT does have a tuner version of their software that is available but it will run you around 3k that unlocks all supported vehicles. For the 600ish bucks the program and cable costs I think it’s a steal… you also get 6 credits with the cable initially which is good for 2-3 cars depending on what you are trying to tune.
There is no way to hack the HPT system… it’s been tried before and doesn’t work. HPT requires the purchase of credits and they send you a new VIN# to plug into the software which unlocks your purchased credits and allows you to tune via the MPVI cable/box.
What I will say is definately get very familiar with the program and how to tune with HPT before you ever start touching others cars though… I can speak from personal experience and tell you the software varies greatly car to car… My Cavlier is entirely different than my Cobalt (not even remotely the same tuning) as one of MAP based and one is MAP based. You can also speed density tune etc.
I’ve personally used the software on many j-bodies, cobalts, f-bodies, GTO’s, vettes, and a few Chevy trucks SUV’s over the years.
I tuned Cougarspeed’s old car on it, very user friendly…if you have ANY EMS tuning experience it’s cake, but if you want to just mess around and learn, that’s fine too.
I love their 3-D maps, a lot of progs only have tabular and 2-D line graph layouts…the 3D makes it real easy.
J-bodies require 2 credits to license/unlock the pcm and that’s about 100 bucks. Beyond that just shoot me a PM with everything the car would have done to it when being tuned and I can work something up for ya man
