Cost Of Custom Tunes

[Fat-Tony]

Yes but if it wasn't for someone traveling interstate like that to fix up the mess left by FIST automotive, someone would have been without a car. Always a good and a bad side, we know how you feel about the issue though

[Adam]

I was thinking more towards SA than QLD.

[our06t]

as adam said accessability is one of the biggest factors I spent over two hours drivin through places I never go ,and had to organise time off work to get my first custom tune ,and to be honest it was cheap $400 dollars but it was a cut an paste 3runs on the dyno and there you go ,well guess what half way home got stuck into the car and it ran like sh*t , I now use a good tuner 45mins away I can drop the car off after work and when there's any dramas it's only a quick trip and it's sorted

[Fat-Tony]

I was thinking more towards SA than QLD.

I think you can blame trough lolly for that one lol

[SCRIBR]

who's fat-tony? :ifiusethisimafag:

[Fat-Tony]

some dumb f*ck, cockhead *beep*

[Nazgul]

I am in Qld.

Jimmy

[jetute]

I was quoted $995 for a tune, I also live in QLD...

[Nizpro]

I seen heaps worse and the same and there are cheaper tunes out there. You should really question how many hours your car spends on the dyno and how many hours of the operators time you are using to justify the 900-1000 dollar rates.

Well I don't know about 5 runs. Last retune that was done on my old car we spent 13 runs on. But that was sorting the boost to be a nice flat line, timing to be as hard as we wanted to push it on and a couple of flashes were used to get the auto settings spot on.

Could have been done in a few runs less, but Danny and myself were fussy with it and wanted the best result for power, economy, and drivability.

Even so if you take into account reflash times for BA and BF over 10 runs there is a BIG difference in time. Almost 10 mins to get the flash from PC to car in a BA, over 10 runs that's 1 hour and 40 mins the car is sitting on the dyno wasting time with just flashing a rough estimate would be a 20 min saving of time between a BA and BF. At even 5 runs there probably 2 hours worth of work. Then there is time taken to put hte car on the dyno, strap it down etc. Take into account the price dyno time ect you could expect to pay 400-500 dollars for a tune that would have 5 or 6 runs put into it.

Taking this into account you seem to believe that $83 dollars per flash is ok, meaning your retune was worth about $1083.00

Unfortunate part is, with a more fussy tuner you are paying for wasted time do the reflashing process. Not something that can be helped either.

But yeah as I said, when pricing the tune make sure your tuner of choice can justify his price, you would ask questions if the car spent 2 hours on a dyno, had 5 different flashes put into it and you were asked to pay 1000 dollars for the tune

Adam your first post at the top seems to suggest that a $1000 tune is over the top in price and yet as I have high lighted in your next post you also believe that for 5 flash’s you would be looking at around two hours of dyno time. Then you said Danny and yourself spent 13 flash’s just doing a retune on your car. Danny would have already had a file on it and that we would all think was pretty good to start from. Using the above calculation, your 13 reflashs for a retune works our to be 5.2 hours. Now the next point of interest is how many people were working on your car during this process. I Know from Nizpro's point of view that both Dave and Myself are involved during the process, one of us for the full tuning duration and the other on and off during the actual dyno running time, so in total you could add another 1.5 hours. I believe you would think this is fair.

Nizpro charge $1150 for a new customer starting from scratch and compiling three custom tunes. We drain the fuel from the vehicle when doing tunes for different fuel and then redo ignition and boost maps to suit those different fuels. Using your above estimates plus the time for the extra tunes and draining the fuels at $150 per hour works out to about 7.5 hours, and as you say there is then the time needed for the auto trans that really need to be done on the road not the dyno. From that point with existing customers we offer 1 hour free touch up tuning at every service and for new or extra parts and tuning $150 hourly rate. This normally works out to about $200.

A BF manual is certainly the quickest to do as you pointed out and some time can certainly be saved. However we made a business decision to keep the tuning price the same across the board as is simply gets to difficult to explain to customers the differences in pricing based on a hourly rate. You can imagine the sh*t fight on a forum when someone copied a bill for $1800 bucks because there vehicle had a case of bad torque limiting and the dreaded get off medium throttle misfire and took an extra 5 hours to get right.

You are very correct, using your words...

Could have been done in a few runs less, but Danny and myself were fussy with it and wanted the best result for power, economy, and drivability.

This is certainly the case, the fussier you are the longer it takes the better the results and the more expensive it costs. Tunes that cost $500 are normally petty quick and pretty ordinary. Most tuners that I have spoken to during our training seminars are only charging this price they tell me, to try and get customers while they building a reputation and learning the software.

So does any price high or low guarantee a fantastic tune? In a word NO.

Why?

Well you might be lucky and get a cheap tune from a workshop that does not fully understands the real in house cost of time and wear and tear on there equipment and yet are very good at tuning, while not so good at business, or you may find someone that does it after hours and it is not their main income, be quick they may not be there that long, so the after sale service may be a bit hard to find.

On the other hand some companies will tend to look at what others are charging and increase their prices to match however this does not guarantee a good tune.

Once again Adam you are correct, a customer should ask and fine out what they are getting for the money.

1. Results are very important in terms of power levels

2. Information and direction for further modifications

3. Economy

4. Reliability

5. Customer Service

6. Back up service

7. Warrantee

Cheers Simon

Edited 22/07/08 06:42 AM by Adam

[Fat-Tony]

Simon I couldn't agree with you more, however I will clarify what I meant in the first post, which it ties into point I made elsewhere.

You would agree that back in the early days of tuning these cars more time was needed to get the things right, obviously for the more experienced tuner of these cars tuning time would have been cut down by now. What could have been done in 10 runs could be done in 5. I have, and I could be certain you have seen tunes by workshops that seem like they have had either bugger all time put into them or the tuner doesn't know what they are doing. People are paying quite good money for these tunes and not getting the many things yourself and I list above out of the car. So hence the whole point of questioning what is done for the price of the tune, are you paying for actual time spent on the car, workshop profits or the inexperienced tuner.

Only way you could figure out if the time was actually spent on your car by an experienced tuner is that if you got what you listed above

1. Results are very important in terms of power levels

2. Information and direction for further modifications

3. Economy

4. Reliability

5. Customer Service

6. Back up service

7. Warrantee

and not to mention drivability.