[alerighi]

In a sense it's something car manufacturers have made for years. Most of the time the difference from one model of a car and another with more power is the mapping on the engine control computer.

Till this day it wasn't a problem since this was not really locked down, and despite the fact that is illegal, people did modify the car software to unlock more power quite easily.

But... that "locking" of feature kind of made sense, since a car with less kW pays less taxes (at least in my country you pay more if the car is more powerful) so selling a locked down model was also an advantage for the user that wasn't interested in having more.

Locking down heated seats... it's just a move against the user. Buying a car you payed for that seats, since they are there, why the manufacturer should ask you another fee to use for something you already payed? To me this shouldn't be possible.

[eschneider]

I've done a fair bit of work with engine ECUs and remapping for more power is almost never "free". It's not like manufactures are offering different power outputs strictly via software, though sometimes they'll make different _tradeoffs_ between power/drivability/reliability.

I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine. And for some applications, that's just fine.

[sawjet]

>I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine

Can you explain this? How does remapping an ecu make the idle different?

[eschneider]

Sure, you're basically running the engine with a different tuning and you can't optimize for everything. Getting more peak power, or a broader power band out of an engine often means sacrificing smoothness in other parts of the power band.