Performance Chips, Do these really work? Options

[jsm]

Is this as magic as they claim?

http://www.ioffer.com/i/Chevy-Astro-Aveo-B...e-Chip-48155506

anyone have some experience with this?

I have a stock aveo 2006

[twistedsymphony]

These chips are such a scam it's not even funny.

literally this is nothing more than a resistor that plus into the mass airflow sensor and causes the car to run lean. This will give you slightly better mileage, and a couple extra horse power but you will also run the risk of engine detonation (the reason they don't "support" turbo vehicles is because pulling this trick on one of those can cause catastrophic failure rather easily).

That's not to say that there aren't actual chips and or programmers that you can use to improve the performance of your car, but the legit ones require weeks if not months of tweaking by someone who knows the specific engine very very well. and those typically require you open up the computer and swap out the chip, or plug into the OBDII port and re-program it, in extreme cases you can replace the engine computer completely.

I wouldn't buy a computer upgrade from anyone but a company that specializes in your SPECIFIC car.

Here's an example of a real computer upgrade:
http://cobbtuning.com/products/?id=3264

General rules for buying stuff like this:
1. don't buy anything from anyone unless they require you specify the exact engine model you're putting this one, tuning is completely different even for very very similar motors. The Aveo came with 2 engine options which one is this chip for? they don't care because it doesn't matter, because it doesn't do anything worth a damn.

2. Don't buy anything like this from anyone who isn't willing to PROVE their gains by showing you a dyno graph of the improvements. If they really did anything worth your money they would have had one of these cars on a dyno to build and test the "upgrade" to begin with, so if their legit, there's no reason they can't give that graph to you the customer... that is if they even have one, and if they do have one and their upgrade does what they say it does then they should be happy to give you the graph to show you the fruits of their labor.

3. of course it's pretty easy to fake a graph, or fudge the numbers in your favor, so don't buy anything like this from anyone unless you've read at least a dozen reviews from independent sources and seen at least 4 or 5 dyno graphs of the actual results from people who have tested it on their own other than the company selling it.

Any good performance shop has their own dyno, even if they don't own a dyno usually it's $50 for 3 runs. If you're selling a $100 product that's supposed to improve performance and can't be bothered provide a dyno chart, you're selling f*cking snake oil.


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I honestly don't know much about the aveo but a good place to start would be an actual Aveo club http://www.aveoclub.net/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=4

This post has been edited by twistedsymphony: May 18 2010, 03:37 AM