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I have noticed, that almost all owners of European cars across North Americe think, that their vehicles, even with “localized” names (like Mercedes Sprinter = Dodge Sprinter) have no technical differences to EU specs. They believe that they buy real EU vehicles, and the only additional equipage is local road homologation, or CD with navigation of USA & Canada instead of "Deutsch Fatherland”. Wrong! Most of these fourwhellers have huge differences, not noticeable at the first and even second look. They are stored in ECM (Engine Control Management unit located in the car and involved in realtime control of engine, fuel consumption and efficiency and finally – power & torque of the car. Due to diferent rules in SAE normative for car torque & power measurements to more specialized DIN EU common normative, manufacturers of cars have nice gap of few percent between engine power declared in Europe (where DIN is God and North America. This gap is nice for them and bad for us. They can lower power of the car by some percent and still have same advertised power, as presented in EU. Car may consume less fuel because of such changes, but this is typical between car brands to keep the torque and power of engine as low as it is possible, if only any chance is visible on the horizon. So they do that. I have measured many BMW 335i with 3.0 biturbo engine – US versions have ca. 15 hp lower power than same version in Germany (test was held by changing software for USDM to EUDM, not by replacing cars at the chassis dynamometer). Same situation occurs while dyno pulling Audi 2.0 TFSI or TSI and 3.0 TFSI cars. Same is in beloved Porsche Cayenne 4.5 turbo or GLS. Always lack of few percent hits our eyes at dynamometer graph. I may believe that producers may try to adapt their products to US-market gasolines. But they differ only slightly (as norms differ slightly). What to do? Alternative for European cars is performance chip tuning. Increasing power of cars by specialists clears the gap described above, and comes with nice rancho of new horses. Also fuel mileage can be increased by clever adaptation of ignition angles vs level of boost and alterations in camshaft angles (where applicable variable camshaft control aka vtec or vanos). Audi, BMW, Mercedes or Porsche performance chip tuning specialist can do all that with your car, using European software editor, real DIN normalized rolling road imported from Europe, with all that knowledge base build by European tuners for their vehicles. If you buy car for huge thousands of dollars, it is rather good idea to tune it at real masters, even with their funny European English ;). BTW if you are a real tuner, you can buy Vtechdyno European chassis dynamometer just at Tunexperts in Canada or USA.
CU next time
Jack "Dyno" Simmard, VtechDyno Chassis Dynamometers
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chassis dynamometer, rolling road, performance chip tuning, Audi,
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