Aging car and your tune
 

Hi,

I am sitting here at a conference listening to this MD present about adjusting medication dosages as we age. As we age our bodies may no longer metabolize drugs efficiently which may result in a toxicity among other issues. So these dosages need to be reduced and adjusted.

It got me thinking about a tuned car and age. If you tune a car its likely more aggresive for more power.

My question ... As our cars age will a tune that is ideal and adjusted for the vehicle today be appropriate years from now?

I know our ECU is designed to calibrate settings based on necessity. The ecu may keep the car running smooth and it does not age like other mechanical components. But, thats not ideal in my eyes.

Perhaps retuning down the road is a good idea or maybe their is no coorelation to the human body. Either way its interesting to think about.

Retuning is recomended by some people and tuners that I hear from. this is recomended every year or two as climates do change, gas, ethanol, parts, spark plugs etc etc etc. its like going in to the doctors for a check up. some do it, some dont.

Sensors will age and lose their accuracy over time. The O2 is the one that will need changing and will really change the way the car performs over time.


Apart from that, just keep an eye on things and keep the car serviced well.

I put in my OFT Stg 2 E85 tune with 58K on the odometer. Runs strong with no issues. I could see that once we get into the 150K area we might start to see loss of compression, gummed up injectors, less efficient fuel pump etc as reasons why we might start to see a loss of power. Not sure if a tune can correct for that or not.

It is actually unlikely we will see gummed up injectors with e85 since it is a very good cleaner.

Eventually the car will age such that it simply will not keep running. However, that isn't 10 or even 15 years down the road.

My parents had both a 1985 Nissan Kingcab and a 1987 Honda Accord that did this to them, but by the time they did (Nissan was the first to go, and this was back in... 2006 I think), they were very old and had been daily driven all their lives and had regular proper maintenance done on them. It's just that they'd be eating new seals and hoses like none other, as if they aged the new parts just by having them installed. It got to the point where my parents were spending a car-payment's worth of $$ each month to keep the cars in "running but unreliable" condition. Their mechanic bought both vehicles from them b/c he wanted to see if he could still fix whatever the problem was that he simply couldn't locate.

Anyway, those two vehicles simply got OLD. But they each had, I think, over 200k on their ODOs.

That's really the only age-related issue I've personally seen in modern automobiles, and I think ours may stand up even better than those 1980's cars did in the long haul, provided they're taken care of properly.

it will be interesting to see the need the chg AFR due to aging fuel pumps and desensitized 02 sensors. I cant imagine it will be anything dramatic.

Great points. And just realized you have a tag that states certified Browncoat.... Shiny.