Slashdot Mirror
Hack Your Car
gurps_npc writes "The New York Times has this story about hacking your car's chip. You can get significant horse power and torque boosts (+18 horsepower and +70 foot pounds of torque in the given example), as well as improve (or decrease) fuel efficency. The car companies do not like (surprise surprise) people personalizing their vehicle's programming and warn of burning out your engine with bad code, and voiding your warranty."
People have been doing this ever since computer controlled fuel injection has been in style.
If you peruse eBay, you'll see people selling replacement chips for around $400 that are supposed to add this many horsepower.
But if you think you're going to get another 70ft/lbs of torque in a Honda Civic by just doing that, think again.
As well, changing these values can be dangerous. I have a friend who quite messed up his Buick Riviera (he added fuel injection) by messing with the values. There was a huge table of values to fill out, and each had to be precicely tuned to achieve the right mix of performance and mileage. This is no easy task.
Vonal Declosion
When I was taking Real-Time programming we discussed car code. The prof said it has a 7 year development cycle and takes about 2 developer hours per assembly instruction to write, test, and debug the code.
I don't see a hacked code being anywhere near as reliable. Even if it makes the changes you want, your car might end up stalling as often as windows crashes.
Jason
ProfQuotes
That doesn't cover damage you cause by dicking with the computer.
And when your engine wears out sooner, it's not hard to argue that the changes you made to the computer caused it, if those changes pushed the engine harder than normal.
That act is mostly applied to replacement parts, not performance tweaks, especially potentially damaging ones.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I don't know what he's talking about. My '86 Toyota Camry doesn't have a chip, except where that modded '04 sports coupe flew by me.
Altering Your Engine With New Chips
:P
Hooray, I get to be a whore today!
SIGFEH
No different than overclocking and many people have been very successful doing this...
Because we all know an internal combustion engine, with hundreds of moving parts, metals with critical temperature points, etc, is exactly like a CPU.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Answer:
First up: I didn't say that drop-in Electronic Control Unit (ECU) upgrades for otherwise stock vehicles were outright fraud, though some companies in that market have certainly been snake oil merchants. I just said that a drop in chip isn't likely to be good value compared with various actual mechanical upgrades. Powerchip, like various other chip vendors, will charge you several hundred Australian bucks for a new chip.
Now that I've said that, dig this.
A while after I put my piece on ECU chips up on the Web, one Wayne Besanko of Powerchip contacted me.
He did not offer any independent evidence to support Powerchip's claims. Nor did he point out anything I'd said that was wrong.
Instead, he offered me money, plane tickets and accommodation if I'd travel to Powerchip's HQ and write a "white paper" on Powerchip's products.
He didn't say "here's a bucket of cash, if you write what we say", but our correspondence led me to the firm belief that, um, only one viewpoint on their products would be acceptable, were I to take up the offer.
So there's that.
And, again, as I write this, I remain unaware of any proper independent testing that indicates that these pricey drop-in ECU chips are good value, compared with a variety of actual mechanical modifications.
Sure, you can get a bit more juice from a stock engine by goosing up the ECU programming; drop-in chips from reputable companies like Powerchip don't generally do nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few cars, particularly turbo diesels, that have sub-optimal stock ECU programming, leaning further towards the "green" end of the scale and away from the "performance" end than their owners would choose, given the option.
The particular oddities of individual engines (in high performance cars, at least) may also benefit significantly from custom-tuned ECU maps, even if you aren't going for new cams, an after-market turbo, blah blah blah.
But drop-in chips aren't tuned for individual engines. They're one-size-fits-all. If you want a chip that fits your car's engine in particular, you have to go to a speed shop that'll test your engine and blow an EPROM to suit.
In the vast majority of cars, I think it's quite sensible to say that if you aren't making significant mechanical modifications to your engine, then the money you'd spend on a "hot chip" would be better put towards those modifications (or, you know, spent on the rent or something, but we're not talking about sensible life choices here). I think that even something as simple as a less restrictive air filter is likely to give you more horsepower per dollar than a hot chip.
Even Powerchip themselves admit (or, at least, did admit at the time I corresponded with Wayne; I haven't groveled through their specs lately) that a 15% power and torque gain from a plain chip swap is unusually high. Figures closer to, or below, 10% are common. Some people would question even that - but even if you get a whole
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
I would never drive or be a passenger of a car that is running my own firmware.
Never.
Nothing protects you if you take a sledgehammer to the roof of your car. That's excessively stupid and definitely part of "normal use" so void goes your warranty.
You're okay to get your oil change at Jiffy Lube or your repair part from another maker who tries to duplicate the specs. But, that so isn't what's going on here...
What makes you think this provides any useful information to the company? I guarantee you that the auto manufacturer does a VASTLY more thorough test of an engine design than any amateur can possibly do -- fully instrumented, checking all corners of the configuration space, etc. There are in fact generally good reasons why the manufacturer chooses NOT to wring the extra 5% of power out of the engine -- reliability, emissions, efficiency, etc., especially within the context of assembly process and component variations during mass production.
Hackers aren't engineers. Get that through your head. The auto company learns NOTHING it didn't already know when people reprogram engine computers.
Hacking cars does not make you a better customer, it just makes you a hacker. They have your money either way, but from their point of view they are likely to get dinged with warranty repair costs they don't deserve when somebody hacks. And the truth of the matter is, they're right.
Same as overclocking. You think it doesn't cost Intel and AMD money? I guarantee you it does. People break their CPUs overclocking and abuse warranties to get them replaced all the time.
Ever wonder why, year after year, vehicles seem to "gain" HP with the same stock engine? That's because PCMs (power control modules) are programmed to artificially hinder a vehicle's performance. By tweaking timing parameters, shift points, etc., manufacturers can "gain" HP year after year without having to retool for engine modifications.
/. nor the NYTimes to be premier source of automotive knowledge.
Chip/PCM programmers operate by simply modifying the same tables as the manufacturer modifies when they want more HP for marketing purposes. It should be no surprise that the manufacturers are dead set against this.
As for emissions, the new engines and computer systems monitor all aspects of the emissions system. Many states simply plug into the OBD-II computer for later-model vehicles and check to make sure no "fault" codes are set -- that's the extent of "emissions testing." To make an assertion that any modification to the PCM will cause emissions to increase is simply showing one's ignorance as to how today's vehicles operate.
BTW, the OBD-II interface and protocol is an open protocol, available at cost from the SAE. There's nothing "secret" about how these PCMs operate. Of course, I wouldn't consider
Firearms.
There are lots of self-loaders out there who think that adding more powder makes them shoot better. Or they modify their weapons because they read somewhere on the Internet that it would shave off a microsecond or two from the firing rate or lessen the trigger pull. Funny thing is that the people who have used the most bizarre rifles tend to shoot the worst.
Airplanes you say?
I live about 100 yards from a small airfield in South Florida. I was driving to work one morning and noticed a bunch of fire trucks and police a few doors away. Heard on the news later that day that an experimental plane had crashed into a house. I've seen a couple of these accidents so far (well, not the actual crash, but the after effects).
Home wiring...
I've visited lots of friends' houses that have really bad wiring jobs. I've seen lots of outlets that would fail inspection. At my last house the previous occupants had been running a small business from their converted garage. They had installed extra outlets to run the electrical equipment (heater, various electrical motors, etc..). Everything was connected to an extension cord with a bunch of daisy-chained power strips *behind the wall*.
The truth is that turbocharged cars can benefit greatly from aftermarket ECUs, or "chipped" stock ECUs. There are lots of options out there, and gains of 80HP just from a chip are not unheard.
I have verified these claims myself using my own car and the local 4WD dyno. In the case of my car, the tuner claimed a 57 crank HP improvement, and an extra 93ftlbs (also measured at the crank). What I found is that these numbers are, in fact, conservative. I have the dyno plots on my computer and would be more than happy to post them if any critics or skeptics want to be shot down.
Most car stuff is pretty simple because there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. You can also trivially check the connections you've made to see if they are good before you crawl out of the spot you're in. Some things have to be tightened/loosened in stages and in a specific order, so provided you're following the proper instructions for the job, if you do it at all, and you do it properly, you can't leave something out.
Now let's say you're upgrading your brakes. In order to do this you're going to have to change (at least some of) your fluid, because it's going to have to come out of the system, because you're going to have to bleed it. So you change your calipers (one at a time so all the fluid doesn't fall out of the system immediately, which is inconveniently messy) and you install everything. Before you put a wheel back on, you check your connections; it's an obvious thing to do. Two bolts typically hold the caliper on, and there's one fitting where the brake line connects. (Drum brakes are much more complicated, I'm talking disc here.) But before you even put the wheels back on you're going to be bleeding the system, and any leaks will be apparent at this time because you're going to have to visit each wheel to accomplish this. In fact typically brake bleeding involves two people; one at the wheel to open and close the bleeder valve, and another in the car pumping the brake pedal appropriately. (There are tools which make this easier, the best of them is the speed bleeder. Most of the pumps and stuff don't work.) So just by the nature of the job you're going to see if there's something wrong. Most automotive work is like this.
Hacking your ECU usually primarily involves altering rev limits, and a "fuel map" which is a two dimensional matrix of throttle position to RPMs. This is where you can get into trouble, because you can make the mixture too lean which will cause pre-detonation or "knock" which can damage your engine (pistons, valves, rods, crank can all be damaged by early detonation.) But today's fuel injected cars are often fairly idiot proof in that unless you completely change their code and don't just change some values in a lookup table, they have assorted failsafes which they use to alter the behavior of the car even after the fuel map is consulted. For instance you can stop detonation by retarding the timing (beyond a certain point) and if your engine has a knock sensor (most things made in the nineties and later do) the car will automatically retard timing when it detects knock. It will also make the mixture leaner or richer based on feedback from the O2 sensor for the purposes of emissions, but this is also good for power, because the more efficient you run, the more power you will get for a given amount of fuel delivery. There is certainly more to it than this, but it's a broad overview. Altering rev limits is pretty risky too, because if your engine is not balanced well enough to make more RPMs than the limiter, you will destroy parts of your engine, like bearings, by revving it up that high. It's definitely not a good idea for older motors which haven't had a rebuild in some time.
Cars are moderately complicated, especially these days, but anyone smart enough to work on computers successfully is smart enough to work on cars, too. It mostly requires the inclination.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For those of you who are surprised, let me tell you have people have been tweaking chips for a good number of years. You can get aftermarket chips for pretty much any sports (and not so sports) car. However, the biggest gains are achieved only when you combine an upgraded chip with a number of performance parts such as headers, exhausts, turboes and superchargers. If you do not understand how cars work and have not done any performance tuning, you might be better off by going back to hacking your Linux box.
First of all, there are no cheap power gains. Just replacing a chip will not turn your grocery-getter into a Porsche. Secondly, if you do get enough extra ponies, you will have to upgrade your suspension and brakes; otherwise, I will see you in a telephone pole around the corner. Finally, not every engine can hanle a lot of horsepower, that is, even if you do upgrade everything but leave the block in a stock condition, you will have a greater chance of blowing it.
Normally, you would install any performance parts that you have and then tune the chip so it is optimized for your configuration. Is the chip worth the money by itself? Unless your car has forced induction it is; otherwise, it is a waste. Normally, you have to do a combination of things in order to get a significant increase in power. For example, Stage 1 upgrades include getting a new ECU and increasing pressure in your turbos, Stage 2 would require an additional part, usually an exhaust. Stage 3 may require changing your turbos or getting some upgrades for them; by the time you get to this point, you will notice the impact on your wallet. This varies from car to car, my knowledge is based on what I know about Nissan 300ZX and Subaru WRX.
If you do not have turbos or a blower, there is nothing much your chip can do, but void the warranty.
Also, when you get the stats, make sure that you understand them correctly. Ten extra horses to the flywheel are not equal to the ten extra horses to the wheels. If you are still nutty about all this, take a look what you can do to Subaru WRX, Audi (turboed models) and Corvettes. The latter do not have forced induction but are proven to be very nice when it comes to updated ECUs along with some performance parts. P.S.: Yeah, if you feel like replying back to me and telling that your Honda does wonders with upgraded chips and how it can beat anything on the road. Do not bother, please. I have been there and done that.
Let me tell you a true story:
The 2002 MINI Cooper S (a **GREAT** car BTW) was delivered with Engine management (ECU) software V1.3.0. It worked fine.
The 2003 MINI Cooper S was delivered with ECU software V1.3.2. We believe the changes were to accomodate the Diesel version of the MINI that was due to appear in Europe - but there may have been other changes too.
v1.3.2 worked well - EXCEPT when the high ambient temperatures of a Texas summer combined with 'Reformulated Gasoline' (not sold in all US States - and not seen in Europe). With that combination of conditions, the car would roll forwards 10 feet and stall if you accellerated moderatly hard from a standing start. This came to be known as 'the stumbles'. When it strikes, it can actually be quite dangerous because you could in all likelyhood be stalled out right in front of an oncoming vehicle.
Both ECU electronics and engine mechanics are IDENTICAL between the 2002 and 2003 models - so this had to be a software bug.
It took a LONG time to figure out why some cars were stumbling. The owners' clubs first noticed that only 2003 cars did it - then we discovered this was only happening in the summer - and only in Texas and (IIRC) Florida - but then we heard that it wasn't happening in New Mexico. So we initially ruled out the 'high temperature' theory. However, New Mexico doesn't have reformulated gas.
So when we realised that reformulated Gas is sold in Texas and Florida - but not in New Mexico, we thought that might be the issue...but then we found that it didn't happen in New York (reformulated gas - but no high temperatures).
The whole thing was also confused by the fact that the MINI's ECU has adaptive software. When we had a few days of cool temperatures, the problem DIDN'T go away - and you had to run three tankfuls of non-reformulated gas through the car before the ECU would un-learn the stumble.
It's a tribute to the 'community' spirit of MINI owners (and lots of long threads on several mailing lists) that we ever figured out WTF was happening to our cars at all.
It took six months to pursuade BMW/MINI that there was truly a problem (by which time temperatures had dropped and we couldn't reproduce the problem) - and another 6 months for them to fix it and get a software upgrade out.
Meanwhile, the 2002 MINI's were still running V1.3.0 just fine in all temperatures and all gasoline types - and 2003 MINI's were stumbling all over the place.
Owners of 2003 machines were begging the dealerships to downgrade their cars back to the 2002 code - but dealerships were either unable or unwilling to do that - we're still not quite sure why - but it's likely that the security system in the MINI's ECU somehow prevents that.
This is a CLASSIC case where we'd have *killed* to have an OpenSource solution so we could fix the problem ourselves...either by simply reprogramming our 2003 cars with 2002 software (kindly donated by a 2002 owner)...or by doing a 'diff' and figuring out what was actually wrong.
Even without the source code, it would have been possible to do a binary dump from one car to another - but for the fact that these ECU's are protected by a barrage of 'challenge/response' tests (the details of which are a closely guarded secret). If your laptop fails to provide the correct response to the challenge, the car literally shuts down all software functions for THREE HOURS!! This effectively foils any effort to do a trial-and-error test to reverse-engineer the challenge/response system.
So - whilst it MIGHT be dangerous to allow people to randomly hack their cars, there are also dangers in preventing them from doing so.
www.sjbaker.org
Hang on - Americans don't drive cars, they drive agricultural machinery with leather seats, aircon and cupholders. One of the principal features of this type of vehicle is enormous mass of between 2 and 3 thousand kilos, thus it's perfectly understandable that one of these things should require over 300 hp so it might keep a reasonable pace with delivery vans, passenger cars and pizza mopeds.
Normal passenger vehicles in the rest of the world are plenty fast if their engines produce 200hp. Sadly, Americans don't know about the rest of the world and think motorsport equals monster trucks, drag racing and something called an 'oval'.
That was classic intercourse!
By tweaking fuel/air mixtures and ignition timing, the two main adjustable performance variables without removing or replacing parts, you are also drastically changing combustion byproducts. The ability of vehicles to meet emissions standards is largely dependent on the fine tuning the engine computer provides. The computer monitors exhaust gas composition, intake air volume, engine temp, air temp, throttle position, RPM, barometric pressure, etc. and mixes the optimum fuel/air ratio to minimize emissions for a given performance curve. You aren't just voiding the warranty by tweaking, you are violating federal air quality laws. Some don't care about the air they breath, but they might care about dying. (See next point)
A finer point is the consideration of incomplete combustion. There is an inverse relationship between performance and fuel efficiency. Where does all that extra fuel go to eak out that last bit of horsepower? It exits the combustion chamber in the form of partially combusted hydrocarbons (HC's) and CO. It takes too long to burn fuel completely to CO2 and H20 in a high performance envelope, so it is wasted and accounted as the cost of performance. Normally the HC's and CO exit the exhaust into the air in a off-street high performance vehicle. In a street production vehicle there is a catalytic converter between the exhaust manifold and the air. It is designed to clean up any residual uncombusted byproducts, normally a small % and runs around 1000-1500 degrees in temp, but it has heat shielding/insulation to protect the vehicle. If you changed the exhaust, through tweaking for performance, to release a higher percentage of HC's and CO, the catalytic converter will convert it to CO2 and H20. The problem is that there is much more combustion to complete and the cat's temp will rise drastically. Then your car catches on fire.
You might think this is a rare event, but it happens occasionally when engines are poorly tuned or leaking oil fumes in the exhaust and aren't checked out for emissions. Part of an emissions test involves analyzing exhaust gases prior to entering the cat. Converters are so efficient at finishing combustion that they can mask oil burning and overly rich mixtures.
I have seen several cars burn up this way. The funniest/most ironic happened to a police car. The police department was pulling strings with the emissions department and getting rubber stamped emissions stickers for their cruiser fleet without actually running the tests. One hot summer day a cruiser melted by the side of the road and started a moderate grass fire. It was determined through mechanic logs that the car had been using much more oil recently, but nothing was done to figure out why - just kept adding oil. All that oil was burning in the cat and eventually the heat shielding burned through and the car ignited.
Just like overclocking, you gotta do something about the excess heat. The tweakers might want to remove the cat (a violation of federal law) or keep a fire extinguisher in the car and the fire department on speed dial.
I used to turn wrenches for a living before going to med school.
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
DISCLAIMER!!! The above statement is unfortunately not based on the posters personal experience.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Garage operators across the country say they are seeing more cars with burned-out engines, partly because reprogrammed chips sometimes supply too much fuel and allow turbo pressure to exceed recommended limits.
I suppose this could make sense with a turbo engine (more gas AND more air), but more gas by itself will just cause horrible emissions and, if anything, a low operating temp. A rich mixture does not fully burn, and indeed ends up cooling the engine some. A lean mixture will burn up an engine. A rich mixture will just smell bad and piss off the EPA.
(Perhaps inevitably, the hacker culture has also produced automotive pirates who buy legitimate chips from makers then copy the programming onto blank chips, selling the results at sharp discounts.)
Need I say anything? "Hacker culture" != "Pirate". Grr.
Partly to combat hackers, many carmakers are using encrypted chips in new models or, like Toyota, have done away with removable memory chips altogether. That has the e-mechanics shifting strategies, either by downloading new software directly into the computer's hard drive...
Hard Drive? In my car? From the factory? Think not.
You pulled that "100 hp" out of the air: nowhere in the article is such a claim made.
However, significant gains can be made in some areas without running afoul of your first failure mode. If you are willing to commit to always using high-octane fuel, for example, then you can safely derive significant benefit by changing the ignition advance settings in the ROM maps.
Other useful features can be added to your ECU as well. Consider the products from TechnoMotive. You can add security so that the engine will only start if you tap a secret code on the gas pedal. You can make instrumentation display many different data -- helping you prevent the types of failures you mention. You can even have bugs from the manufacturer fixed:
ObDisclaimer: not associated with TMO in any way, but have heard great things from their customers.
Not entirely true. Cars are tuned for fuel efficiency. Thats because the manufacturers have to have an average fuel efficiency, and these days they got lots of trouble making up for the SUVs...
So you can get more horses if you sacrifice efficiency. Note also, the Dodge viper and the Dodge RAM shared versions of the same V12 engine. One tuned for high horses, other tuned for high torque.
You will not be wearing out your car with the modifications these controllers allow. You are just adjusting variables that the OEMs already have there.
If they allows this off the line, the govt would probably force them to figure it into their average fuel economy. There are no "underclocked" cars.
The only thing OEMs don't want is you diagnosing your car, or any repair shops fixing them. The dealerships push the OEMs hard on that aspect.
Oh oh I seen this episode ... this is where they made Kit evil by putting an Atari 2600 cartridge into his car stereo!