Thank you, this was a good information. Hopefully they'll make things right despite it being late.
Sounds to me like that ship may have sailed.
But there is more to the story, of course.
Let me make it clear, I never asked him to say anything in public and in fact was pretty emphatic about the opposite. So not sure where this free advertising stuff and related accusations comes from, but I am not the one who engages in that practice. For sure, if that was my practice then shife would not have posted like that. And I would have chosen someone who was easier to work with and only post sunshine and rainbows.
So the rest of the story.
Eric bought a tune back in 2015. Then the e-mails started, and after a few of them I got caught in a bad mood after some unrelated stuff and decided to just offer a refund than deal with it. Probably not the best way to handle it at the time, but there it is. I can be somewhat impatient and impulsive at times but that's just me. Then after thinking about it some more I saw that it might be useful to have a different and critical perspective, so I asked him if he would be willing to offer some independent insight on some stuff I wanted to try. I had already given a refund on the tune, so I offered a free DSG tune as compensation for his trouble. (When it became available, which FWIW it is still is not for the Mk7 as I write this.)
I told him from the start, that I keep the stock EGT limiters in place, even though some of my competitors make a regular practice of disabling the egt limiters and even changing how the sensor reads so it never reads high enough to trip the limiter. (and when they do that, the actual temperatures never show correctly in OBD when they get too high, either) IMO I would rather have the user be aware that they need to back off than sweep it under the rug. Anyhow, I let him know ahead of time under what circumstances the EGT limiter may make it self known and to expect it.
Then months later, a few e-mails about finding the egt limiter, july so i will assume summer hot weather. And the EGT sensor fault. Then since it was the first time I had ever seen any instance of that, there's me asking what driving conditions, was it regen, etc, and asked for logs. (never got logs that I asked for, or for that matter, any logs, despite asking several times and offering to provide the UDS templates for VCDS) Asked for the fault code readout showing the freeze frame, which was useful info to have. 90 mph full throttle in 4th gear. Perfect, info to work with now.
I thanked him for the info, and (even though it is not a problem with other customers), it was useful info and I would work on it. But not give him anything until I was personally able to test on our own GSW- which was out of commission because of airbag issues.
Then there's the matter of the flash counter. I decided that his ecu should be backed up your ecu before any more tunes were sent. I offered to do this backup for free. The flash counter is getting too high and before too long even VW won't be able to flash it when it reaches 65. (this actually happened to me when I was on the dyno) If we back up the ecu on the bench, then we can restore the flash counter back to what it is at the time of the backup. Otherwise you would need to buy a new ECU. That wouldn't be ideal.
And back in october I let him know I hadn't forgotten about him, we just got the GSW back on the road. He said no problem his concept of time is kind of fuzzy anyway becuase of difficult projects at work. So no problem.
And then here we are, more than 100 e-mails later and several phone calls. You would think it would be common courtesy to have a heads up... Hey dude, I'm going to bash you in public and go nuclear and do what I can to ruin your reputation? Nope. You have my e-mail, you have my phone number, and the guys always answer the phone at kermatdi because I typically don't deal with customers directly. But you are not a paying customer either. I would not typically ask a paying customer for development feedback, or expect that someone I am working with would just go ballistic in public without some sort of consideration.
Let me just wrap up the EGT thing by saying, all the diesel truck guys know that EGT is one of the prices of performance and if it gets too high you just back off. People install EGT gages so they can know what their egt is doing and act (react) accordingly. Doing so allows higher performance but the price is you just back off if it gets too high. Simple as that. It's not something that I have a lot of complaints on, but based on your feedback adjustments have been made.
So I will reiterate, once more so it sinks in... EVERY ONE of the concerns Shife has mentioned has been 100% addressed and solved.... and the current production tunes have even more power than ever before!
So this long story is kind of moot at this point.
Your new tune is ready, but it's ok if you don't want it. Probably best that way.
