Chip Tuning and Remapping your car engine

Most cars built since the mid eighties have computers controlling how they respond to the driver. When you put your foot on the accelerator a computer chip works out how much petrol to inject into the engine depending on the gear you are in, how much you depress the pedal, how hot the engine is and a huge range of other factors.

When a car is sold the factory default setting for the controller chip or 'ECU' is applied to all cars, regardless of whether they will be driven in Abu Dhabi or Aberdeen and regardless of whether the driver is 65 or 25.

However the nice manufacturers leave a 'diagnostic port' where clever boffins can plug in a laptop and tweak the settings for each car to get the very best out of the engine on terms of environmental emissions, fuel economy and of course raw power.

I recently discovered that my 115hp can be souped up to 145hp simply by remapping my car's ecu.

Obviously, don't start tweaking the figures yourself unless you seriously know what you are doing. However there are plenty of very good chip tuining companies out there who will adjust your engine for the local environment and your specific wishes for just a couple of hundred pounds.

Search for 'ECU mapping' or 'chip tuning' and add the name of your vehicle and you will find these tech heads, eager to soup up your car through the power of software alone.

The best thing is, that if you decide you want to go back to factory settings, the remapping process is completely reversible.