Road trip and info on performance "chips" for our 100

[TLC Dan]

Hello Guys,
Took a road trip last week to deliver 20k pcs of a 2 gig Micro SD cards to one of the largest after Aftermarket Performance product manufactures in the states. I have known the owner of the company for over 10 years from my Dodge diesel days and got a chance to discuss with him the possibility of a performance "chip" or download only to get the bad news. Our ECM has a difficult Protocol that is very hard to work with. He says that i would take 4-6 months to get right and he won't take the time based on the finickiness of the ECU's protocol. He sells Can-bus products 50-1 over "protocol" and the ratio of customer service tech support calls for protocol is 10-1 over can-bus Oh well i tried.

It was a 1200 mile round trip run that netted me between 14-15.7 mpg at an average speed between 72-78 mph. Not bad considering the speed and a fair amount of gusty wind.

A few pics of my wingman and load.

 

[FJCowboy]

That is rather disappointing. I recently did a half cross country trip from Virginia to Oklahoma to Virginia. On the way to OK, with only light luggage, I was able to get between 16-17MPG, around 75-78MPH. On the way back to VA, loaded down with several hundreds pounds of household goods. It only affected me by a couple of MPGs, low 14s to high 15s. Shocks were shot prior to the trip, so it was fun to have that bouncy experience going down the Interstate with my large cargo load.

 

[TeCKis300]

This fact is true of all Toyota/Lexus models. It's proprietary ECM has proven to be a tough cookie to crack. Just about every other major manufacture has had their programming cracked and flash tools and chips are readily available.

About the only applied solutions to Toyota's have been piggybacks that intercept the inputs and outputs of the ECM to skew signals. It's a more expensive and invasive solution, with limitations as to how far you can tune things. But it has been proven to work.

I've been in the Lexus market for the past decade tuning piggybacks and standalones for turbo'd IS300s. The same piggybacks (Emanage Ultimate, AEM FIC, etc..) could be easily applied to the Hundy to tune A/F and timing.