GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR VEHICLE WITH HP TUNERS
The European aftermarket and performance tuning market has a major new player, one that has a proven 15-year track record in the USA and Australia
“The performance market is absolutely huge. I was recently at the Essen trade show in Germany, which is open for nine days and attracts over 350,000 people interested in tuning and aftermarket products. Everything from buying a set of wheels to an entire engine build, you name it, you can get it.”
These are the words of HP Tuners’ European Director of Operations Rob Mcintyre. Performance vehicle tuning has a significant presence closer to home, too.
“In Stevenage, not far from where I live, on a Thursday night there’s a club meeting and up to 200 cars turn up,” Mcintyre continues. “The police are fine with it provided they don’t hoon around and do anything silly.
The enthusiast turnout is just eye-opening…”
And this is where HP Tuners comes in, offering a user-friendly way of extracting greater performance from your vehicle’s engine or transmission, all via the OBD2 (onboard diagnostic) port. For HP Tuners’ MPVI2 hardware interface, together with VCM Suite software, this is just the start.
The company was formed in 2003 when a few car enthusiasts decided to take on the immense challenge of improving the calibration product offerings on the market. Starting primarily on GM vehicles, then Ford and Dodge platforms in the following years, today HP Tuners supports everything from Mercedes to Audi, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar, Land Rover and more.
Based in Chicago, HP Tuners is now well-established in the USA and Australia, with thousands of dealers around the globe. Now it has turned its sights towards the UK and Europe, starting with a presence at the Autosport International show from
January 10-13.
HP Tuners’ products are flexible enough to offer support for the motor enthusiast all the way to a dedicated track vehicle. Mcintyre actually has a racing background, having run professional karting teams and crossed paths with the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Anthony Davidson and Sam Bird. Regardless of need, everything from diagnostics and logging, or to the serious recalibration of the engine and transmission, all are available from one sophisticated piece of hardware and software from HP Tuners, and all via connection with the OBD2 port.
Although tuning fans can be stereotyped as the ‘pimp my ride’ crowd who “want to lower the car’s suspension, springs, big wheels, change the turbocharging, change the intercooler, the injectors”, Mcintyre explains that the demographic of car tuners is wider than one might think,
encompassing people of all ages and backgrounds.
“Sometimes it’s the people that are just fed up with the same boring company car,” Mcintyre says, “and they want to do something different to it.
Our customer base is quite wide and varied.”
The same principle applies for the range and type of cars tuned. In Germany, for example, tuning is more commonplace with new cars, while in Eastern Europe the typical vehicle tuned can be significantly older, allowing the enthusiast an easier entry into the performance market.
But for HP Tuners, the primary goal is simple. While many tuning products focus on supplying a Can-based standard tune, a one tune for all, that is not the company’s primary aim.
“HP Tuners is all about providing the most powerful and simplestto-use tools to automotive enthusiast market,” says Mcintyre.
Its flagship product, MPVI2, works by plugging it into a car’s diagnostic port, which connects to the factory ECU or TCU – in effect, the engine or transmission’s brain. In turn, it is connected to a laptop equipped with HP Tuners’ VCM Suite, made up of VCM Editor and VCM Scanner software tools, which allow the user complete control of the car’s electronic calibrations to tune for performance, fuel economy, or adjusting transmission shift points.
“You can fine-tune fuel mixtures, timing, or something as specific as what temperature the cooling fans turn on, and so on, then you reprogram the ECU in the vehicle with your changes,” Mcintyre explains.
The first and most obvious change for an enthusiast is to optimise engine performance to better tailor the engine settings to the car’s location, since standard engine control protocols tend to be broad enough to operate anywhere from the extreme cold of Sweden to Africa’s much higher ambients and lower fuel quality. But its utility stretches far beyond that.
HP Tuners’ key advantages over its rival offerings are three-fold – flexibility, speed and ease of use.
The user can alter a single car as many times as they want without spending any more money in search of the optimal configurations for the vehicle, since each ‘flash’ typically takes between 45 seconds and a minute. By contrast, some rival products can take up to five or 10 minutes to transmit the new parameters back to the car, leaving the dyno static.
“When you give it to a tuner and they’ve not used it before, once they start using it they go, ‘Wow, it’s that easy?’” says Mcintyre. “It’s very intuitive, it’s very easy to use, it gives a lot of flexibility, you can keep tweaking and tweaking it until you’re happy.”
HP Tuners is determined not to underestimate the challenge of the European market. Multiple vehicle ownership is less common than in the US, and HP Tuners is currently in the process of developing software for vehicles that are more popular on this side of the Atlantic, such as various diesel models.
“For instance, we don’t have any BMW software at the moment, so that is high on our list to start developing,” Mcintyre says. “We are working with some major brands and some major names.”
The European arm of HP Tuners has set up shop in Cambridge, where it is developing a dedicated engineering team and customer support base, plus carefully selected distributors to utilise and sell the products to users.
“The market in Europe is growing massively,” Mcintyre continues. “Our customer support is first class and we aim to respond within 24 hours to all customer enquiries and challenges.
“The aim is to service the customer, we’re going to develop HP Tuners’ product for Europe in Europe by Europeans. We can look after you, we’re going to be in the same time zone give or take an hour or two, and we’re going to do a fantastic job.”