For almost two decades I’ve watched as the people on car forums I frequent go straight from buying a new car to equipping them with a throttle controller. Back then, we called them pedal remappers. Regardless of what they were called, these devices promised quicker and sharper throttle response, like an ultra sport mode, but I just didn’t see it. I didn’t see why you couldn’t just push the pedal down a little harder and save $300 in the process.
My mind has been changed. The folks of Ultimate9 sent me their evcX throttle controller to test in a car of my choice. I was skeptical, but after using this device in my 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton for a few months I finally see why enthusiasts buy these things.
(Full Disclosure: PR for Ultimate9 reached out to us to see if we wanted to test a throttle controller. I doubted that these things worked, so I took on the test. Ultimate9 sent me a unit to test in my Phaeton. This is not a paid review.)
In my experience, the evcX unlocked attributes I never knew my 20-year-old executive car had. The device turned the oh-so-comfortable Phaeton into a sharp and responsive beast, but also gave the vehicle features it never had before like an Eco mode and a lockable throttle pedal. Yet, this device wasn’t entirely perfect. Let’s dig in.
How Throttle Controllers Work
Let’s start by explaining the device itself.
If you own a car with drive-by-wire throttle, you have probably noticed some level of delay in your throttle pedal. You hit the gas and it feels like it takes a third of a second or so for the command sent by the pedal to finally reach the vehicle’s Engine Control Unit (ECU) and execute the command. The signal actually reaches the ECU instantaneously, of course – the delay you feel is programmed in, and some cars have less delay than others. To use a personal example, my second-generation Smart Fortwos have a pedal delay that feels about a half-second long.
This delay contributes the feeling that a vehicle is sluggish to respond, regardless of the vehicle’s actual performance capability. In addition to controlling how much delay there is between pedal movement and throttle response, the ECU also affects the level of proportionality between pedal movement and throttle response. It’s only natural to assume that pressing the accelerator pedal halfway will command the ECU to deliver 50 percent of the engine’s available output. And the ECU may indeed be programmed so it feels like power is delivered linearly, with engine output increasing in direct proportion to pedal movement, when in reality the relationship between pedal movement and actual throttle application is likely a curve. Engineers spend a lot of time adjusting that curve to achieve the throttle feel the manufacturer determines is appropriate for the vehicke in question.
A throttle controller such as the evcX plugs in between the pedal and the ECU and allows you to alter that curve. Now, depending on the settings you choose, 10 percent of pedal input may output as 35 percent of throttle, thus making your car feel quicker off of the line. Or, you may set it so that 30 percent of pedal input results in 15 percent of throttle. The throttle controller may also remove the ramp-up function, resulting in a snap of the throttle when you hit the gas. Again, these systems are all about the feels and should make your old car feel more alive.
To be clear, none of this is making your car actually faster or more powerful. Nor does a throttle controller somehow make the signal from your pedal reach the ECU faster, or alter the engine’s tune. All a throttle controller does is manipulate the signals coming from your accelerator pedal. Your vehicle may complete a point-to-point run ever so slightly quicker, but that’s not extra power – it’s the delay being taken out of your vehicle’s throttle response.
In addition to making the engine feel more responsive, a throttle control can make your accelerator pedal more versatile. For example, a second-generation Smart Fortwo, like many cheap vehicles of that era, doesn’t have a Sport Mode, an Eco Mode, or any sort of selectable Drive Modes. A throttle controller can give an old car drive modes like a new car.
Or, maybe you have a nice car, but it still doesn’t have drive modes, like my Volkswagen Phaeton. Once again, a throttle controller adds a bit more modernity here. Throttle controllers may also help cars that do have drive modes. For example, the Kia Stinger is known for its programmed-in pedal “lag,” even in launch mode. A throttle controller can reduce that lag.
To repeat myself just so we’re clear here, a throttle controller is not going to add horsepower and will not make your car physically faster, but it can make the accelerator pedal feel more lively. For some people, that is worth the cost of admission.
The Ultimate9 evcX
So with all of that in mind, let’s get to what I tested.
Throttle controllers or pedal remappers are sold under perhaps a million brands. You’ve probably seen them under names like PedalCommander (by Banks — see gif below), Sprint Booster, Madness GOPedal, and countless generic units sold on a mind-boggling number of sites. All of these throttle controllers have the same basic function but may offer different features like app connectivity, Bluetooth, user customization, pedal lockers, and more. Of course, buying the cheapest throttle controller from a place like Alibaba may result in you getting a paperweight.
The throttle controller I tested is the Ultimate9 evcX. Ultimate9 was founded in 2015 by Australian 4×4 enthusiast Tim Tettamanti. He was on a mission to solve what he thought was one of the biggest problems with modern cars. As I said above, so many models are known for throttle lag regardless of how many ponies are under the hood. Tettamanti wanted to put an end to that. The company’s first product was the EVC iDrive and later, the company added the EVC and evcX product lines to its portfolio. Ultimate9 cut its teeth with Australian car enthusiasts but has since spread its wings around the world, including here in the United States.
As of writing, Ultimate9 sells OBD-II diagnostic monitors, battery monitors, heads-up displays, and flashlights, but the company’s core product remains the throttle controller.
Currently, Ultimate9 sells two different throttle controllers. There’s the standard EVC, which gives you an Eco mode, the sharp and sporty Ultimate mode, and an Adapt mode, a dynamic mode that sets a level of intervention based on how hard and fast you hit your accelerator pedal.
Then there’s the flagship evcX, which gives you the previous features but adds Bluetooth connectivity, an app, and a lot more modes to play with. We’ll get there in a moment.
I installed the evcX in my 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton V8. Installation is said to be plug-and-play. One end of the harness plugs into your accelerator pedal while the other end plugs into your factory harness. That’s it, right?
The reality of the installation procedure highly depends on your vehicle. In my case, I could not access the Phaeton’s accelerator pedal without breaking out my torx bits and pulling down a lower portion of the Phaeton’s dashboard. Once that was done, then the device was plug and play. My total installation time was about 30 minutes due to how convoluted the Phaeton’s dashboard was to work with.
From there, you have two choices. You can stick the evcX to a removable dashboard mount, or you can stick the evcX directly to the dashboard for a cleaner install. The Volkswagen Phaeton has a gorgeous interior, so I decided to go with the more permanent install. I stuck it to the parking brake release lever, threading the USB C cable through the dashboard to the throttle pedal. It looks nice and isn’t very intrusive.
Modes
I tested the Ultimate9 in each of its settings. I started with the Factory Mode, which is designed to replicate the vehicle’s stock configuration. True to the device’s word, I couldn’t tell the difference between the Phaeton in its actual stock configuration and the evcX’s Factory mode.
Next, I moved to Eco Mode, which is designed to smooth out throttle response. Now, the Volkswagen Phaeton already has a fine accelerator pedal. It’s one of the smoothest pedals I’ve ever used and that makes sense. I mean, it’s basically a Bentley with a Volkswagen badge, so coddling occupants in the lap of luxury is the goal. Well, the evcX’s Eco mode makes the pedal and throttle response even finer.
Despite the naming, Ultimate9 says Eco Mode is great for when you really need to have fine control of your throttle, such as when you’re trying to get through loose, uneven terrain. If you go off-roading, you know how accidentally stabbing your throttle can get you stuck, so Eco mode tries to prevent you from burying the throttle. For a road vehicle like the Phaeton, Eco mode makes the car even gentler than normal and makes the car feel slower, so much that someone sleeping in your vehicle won’t even wake up in heavy traffic.
Ultimate9 says Eco mode is also great for if you need to do low-speed maneuvers while towing a trailer. Again, the whole idea here is to dull pedal response to make slow driving easier. Eco mode also comes with 9 levels of sensitivity, which makes it range from making your car feel like it’s working in slow motion, to more or less the Eco mode you get with a new car.
Next, I tried the Lock Mode. This one is pretty self-explanatory: It disables your throttle pedal entirely. You can then disconnect the screen and take it with you, making the car harder to steal since the pedal isn’t going to work at all. I can confirm that it works!
Next up is Valet Mode, which is designed to stop valets from taking joyrides in your car. Throttle response is dulled below factory settings and the evcX imposes a 50 percent maximum RPM limit. In my experience, that’s just enough to make sure your car can still obey the speed limit while someone is parking your car, but makes it un-fun to drive and thus, hopefully not attractive for a joyride.
From there, I tried out the Anti-Slip Mode, and that required me to wait for some rain. Now, the Phaeton uses Torsen-based 4Motion AWD, so this sedan is already exceptionally capable when things get slippery. Using the Anti-Slip Mode dulls throttle response and there are nine sensitivity settings to choose from depending on the slipperiness of the conditions at hand. The whole idea is to help prevent loss of traction in rain, snow, ice, or mud that might otherwise occur if you apply the throttle with anything less than the utmost smoothness and precision.
This Anti-Slip mode feels just like the Rain-driving mode in any modern car. As I noted before, my Phaeton doesn’t have any driving modes, so having a more or less Rain Mode is pretty cool, even if I rarely drive the vehicle in the wet, anyway.
From here, the system has three modes remaining. I spent most of my time in the Adapt Mode, which is supposed to give you a dynamic throttle response based on how hard and fast you’re hitting the pedal. Honestly, most of the time it was hard to tell if Adapt was doing anything at all. I did notice it sometimes, but most of the time my Phaeton drove largely as normal. It’s possible here that Adapt works well enough that the changes are not really felt unless you’re looking for them.
Most people will be buying this throttle controller for the Ultimate mode. This is the mode that really cuts out the throttle lag and cranks up the intensity of your pedal inputs. Once again, there are nine levels of sensitivity here. Ultimate mode on level 1 gives my Phaeton a snappy initial tip-in but otherwise feels like stock.
On the far other end is the Ultimate9 mode, which gives the throttle pedal an immediate snap, followed immediately by a response like you just welded the pedal to the floor. If you’re driving a two-wheel-drive car, you might even get the tires to chirp because you’re going from no throttle to full throttle in just a snap. In the case of the Phaeton, my head got kicked back into the headrest and I got to watch the RPM needle race toward redline.
Again, this isn’t making the car faster, just taking out all of the factory delays. Driving the Phaeton in Ultimate9 was actually pretty weird. The Phaeton is supposed to be this easy, smooth, and gentle ride, but Ultimate9 mode was making the car try to cosplay a sports car. It was equal parts hilarious and fun because the Phaeton clearly wasn’t designed to launch off of the line quickly.
Using the Ultimate mode and its nine levels of sensitivity made the Phaeton feel more sporty in most situations. If I hit the pedal to pass, the car quickly downshifted and built speed in what felt like faster than stock. It felt similar when punching the throttle on hills and when passing slow tractors on country roads. Driving around in Ultimate mode made me realize that Volkswagen baked in a lot of lag to make the Phaeton luxurious. Now, the Phaeton had its own Sport mode.
Finally, we arrive at the last mode, which Ultimate9 calls the Launch mode. Ultimate9 says that Launch mode is based on the aforementioned Ultimate9 mode, but is optimized to reduce wheelspin. I have no idea how this is supposed to work in practice because again, my Phaeton is a full-time AWD vehicle. Launch mode felt exactly like Ultimate9 mode and if there is a real difference I did not feel it.
Limitations
Here’s where we arrive at where the Ultimate9 evcX shows some cracks.
A lot of the people who will be buying throttle controllers will have older cars and you may need to consider your vehicle’s quirks and condition. If you’re like me, your car never had drive modes and it was never designed with something like a throttle controller in mind. Your car may not be designed to account for having a massively more aggressive pedal response. This can have some unintended consequences.
For example, my Phaeton has about 255,000 miles on its odometer. Prior to installing the evcX, I made sure to drive the vehicle hard through all gears to make sure things were still good. They were. In most modes, the vehicle shifted as designed.
However, the vehicle did not always react well to Ultimate9 mode. Sometimes, and this was only in Ultimate9 mode, the engine’s RPM would shoot up near redline during gear changes. In every other mode and at lower Ultimate sensitivities, the vehicle would change gear as it should and not flare. Unfortunately, huge RPM flares during shifts can damage a VW’s transmission, so I let off of the gas between each shift in Ultimate9 mode as a precaution.
I’m not sure if this is a weird artifact of the throttle controller’s impact on the accelerator pedal or just the fact that I’m driving a high-mileage VW, but it’s worth noting. Again, it didn’t happen with lower sensitivities and in the other modes, but when the controller was set to 9, it seemed the transmission seemingly didn’t always know how to handle things. Also, this didn’t happen when doing full-throttle runs with the evcX disconnected. I think this part is important because not everyone buying a throttle controller is going to be driving a brand-new car.
The other problem I have is with compatibility. As many of our readers know, I own 15 cars, many of which are compatible with the evcX. All of my Volkswagens can use the evcX. However, I cannot easily buy the harnesses that would connect the evcX to my other Volkswagens. Instead, Ultimate9 wants you to buy an entire different evcX unit for that other car. The evcX costs $249 per unit. That gets expensive quickly if you want to use it in more than one car.
So, I would suggest that a future version of the Ultimate9 throttle controller have some sort of quick swap capability. The device already quickly disconnects from the USB cable, so just take that a step further!
Resident former auto engineer David Tracy is curious about how these devices somehow pass the legal sniff test. The companies that market these devices say they’re legal in all states, but David notes that the EPA isn’t fond of anything that might change fuel economy and emissions. I didn’t see a notable change in fuel economy during my testing.
Changed My Mind
Throughout all of this, I was shocked that I’ve been wrong for nearly two decades. I’ve long thought of pedal remappers and throttle controllers as snake oil.
However, as the Ultimate9 evcX has shown, they can be very real. My Volkswagen Phaeton now has a ton of driving modes and they’re far more customizable with those sensitivity settings than a new car. I can set the evcX to Eco mode for a gentle cruise or put it into Ultimate9 when I want to giggle between stoplights. True to the company’s advertising, the throttle controller also kicked the throttle lag right out of the door.
So, the big question then becomes if these changes are worth $249. I think it depends on the vehicle and what you’re looking to get out of it. While it’s super awesome that my Phaeton now has a Sport mode of sorts, I still largely drive the car as the luxury vehicle it was built as. So I probably wouldn’t spend that much on a throttle controller for a Phaeton. With that said, something like this does sound like it’ll make my Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI a lot more responsive.
In other words, your mileage may vary. If your vehicle has horrible throttle lag, this might be $249 worth spending. If your car already has a snappy throttle and all kinds of driving modes, maybe spend your money on some other mod. One thing I can tell you is that at least with these name-brand controllers, they’re not just blowing smoke.
Can you explain something re your disclosure at the top?
At the end of the article, you phrase things as, “now my Phaeton drives…,” “my Phaeton now has a sport mode,” which sounds like you are keeping the unit. I didn’t see any mention about either returning the unit or paying for it. If you or Autopian didn’t pay for the unit, then the assertion that “this is not a paid review” falls into question.
Did I miss something in my reading? If so I apologize for what may sound like an accusation. If I didn’t miss anything, then some clarification is in order — your disclosure may need a little more detail, one way or the other.
I agree, it seems like it was paid but with the ability to keep the product for free
A ‘teaching people with whom you have a complicated enough emotional relationship already thank you very much, how to drive mode” would be worthwhile.
I an referring to where said person presses the gas pedal, car accelerates, startled person is thrown backwards and lifts the pedal, car decelerates and moderately annoyed person presses the gas pedal, pissed off person is thrown backwards again and lifts the pedal, car decelerates and angry person that thinks the whole point was to humiliate them presses the gas pedal, cursing person is thrown backwards while using language reminiscent of The Exorcist, but without the head spinning or vomiting, slams on the brakes, gets out of the car and won’t soeak in a normal tone of voice for the next three days.
Covering that use case would be a good thing.
I was wondering how an inline device could remove lag from the ECU’s programmed response, and just as I suspected…
…it’s spiking the throttle input (flooring the throttle) to force a fast ramp-up, then dropping back to the desired throttle setting.
If I can help it, I won’t ever have a gasser with anything-by-wire or telematics, but if I did, I’d be looking for an ECU reflash first.
Similar to my thoughts, as far as: if the either the pedal sender unit or the receiving ECU has a time delay in its programming, a product that intercepts the signal midstream and then modifies it then sends it on its way cannot remove a time delay, it can only add delay.
The only way I can conceive of removing delay would be if you knew that an ECU will delay the response to e.g values between 8 and 25, to never send those values. Which would not be useful.
‘Flooring’ the throttle does nothing to reduce the programmed lag, it’s easy to check, with more or less any reasonably modern car. In mine I used to play this ‘game’ when waiting in traffic: I would try to floor the accelerator completely and release it immediately as fast as I could, and the goal was to have the engine ‘react’ as little as possible. At my fastest, the RPM wouldn’t even rise above 900-1000RPM (from about 6-650 at idle).
Depends on the algorithm. I’d be surprised if it’s a fixed time lag or a fixed ramp rate because both would be really unpleasant. But a proportional ramp function for the pedal input and a PID loop around the butterfly/RPM would feel a lot like a heavy flywheel which would be more familiar to drivers.
I like call these “throttle remappers” more like “pedal pushers”. They’re not remapping the computer’s internal pedal position vs. throttle angle tables. They’re not removing any inherent lag programmed into the system.
The only thing they’re doing is virtually pushing the pedal farther than you are. You can get the exact same effect by simply pushing your gas pedal further down.
This is one thing I hate about the GX460. Push on the pedal and nothing happens. Keep going, and nothing… nothing…. nothing, until you reach 70% throw and all hell breaks loose. It drops 2 gears and heads for redline. I don’t need a 100% throttle at 25% tip-in, I’m just looking for a 1:1 linear response between my foot and the throttle plate.
30 years of drive by cable has programmed ME. I’m obviously harder to reprogram than a pedal.
Its all good fun but know that some cars with aggressive tunes may see more knock when the throttle is allowed to move faster.
When tuning my Evolutions it was a nice change because the Evo IX I started with was cable throttle. Some aggressive timing cells were fine under most conditions but would knock under abrupt throttle tip-in or tip-out. This meant I had to lower values in those cells because with a cable throttle I couldnt control the speed of transients.
On the Evo X it had electronic throttle but a rather aggressive pedal mapping which made it feel fine. At exactly the spot the car would tip-in knock, I could simply dampen the electronic throttle speed just a hair and the knock would go away.
Adjusting these things may result in more engine knock but you wont be able to tell. Just a regular 1-3 degree knock duration tune may see occasional 4-8 degree knock events and over time adjust the octane value slightly lower to compensate.
I put one on my V70 R-Design and was a big fan, it had an extremely lazy throttle stock so it was nice to not have to hammer it all the way down all the time.
That delay is the torque management system, it’s suppose to cut down on drivetrain wear and tear
Would this help with rev hang?
I think David Tracy is on to something: Throttle response has a significant impact on emissions. If you want to know more, look for Jason Fenske’s video (Engineering Explained) on the matter, he explains it very well.
I had one of these on my Civic. It made a huuuuuuuge difference in throttle response. I never ran it on the highest setting because it would induce wheel spin at 40mph on my all seasons. I’d put it in valet mode if someone else ever had to move my car, because the minimum setting was like 20% of stock.
Why did I put one on a relatively new (2019) car with sport mode? Because sometimes when you get on I45 you need to get over two lanes and mash the pedal to the floor to not get rear-ended because someone in front of you thinks merging at 35 is fine….
Ideally it would have just had more torque, but my new Mazda 3 turbo solved that problem. It certainly doesn’t need one of these.
I as well have a new Mazda3 turbo and getting out of the way is not a problem for it (close to Atlanta resident so we have I85/285/75/400/etc to deal with).
I do feel like the car has a something of a delay though when not in sport mode. But nothing that isn’t overcome with a slight bit of preemptive throttle or just being in sport mode.
I’ve heard that VersaTuner and one of their base tunes (which are VERY conservative, think 10 HP) fix that but I haven’t tried it yet. I’ve only driven the car in manual so far and I find sticking to sport mode and 2nd or 3rd gear while merging fixes a lot of that. It pushed VersaTuner pretty far down the list of things I’d like to do to the car.
I always thought that these “pedal commander” gizmos were kinda dumb. My opinion has not changed.
Same here. You don’t need to spend a cent to “remap” your foot response and it achieves the exact same thing. Snake oil
I didn’t see it on the article but can this be used in electric cars? They are pretty fast on their own but making the throttle more chill will benefit me changing tires quicker
Not as quick*
My Bolt has a literal button that does this.
My mom’s 2011 Exploder could’ve used this. It had plenty of power if you mashed the gas, but trying to drive it normally would hardly do anything.
The car with the WORST throttle mapping I’ve ever driven is a city fleet f150. Its a 200Xish base model, with a V6. For some reason, the boys at ford decided 3% throttle is actually 70% throttle. I have a feeling it was to sort of mask how underpowered the V6 is in a fullsize pickup, but the illusion is extremely fleeting, because once over about 35 mph, you quickly realize the truck has absolutely no balls. Makes for an extremely irritating and jerky driving experience.
They missed an opportunity by not letting you turn it up to 11.
Throttle response is a surprisingly big deal for my household. All of our cars have had excellent throttle response. Some of that was done with tuning while some was factory. Most all of that was with drive by wire systems.
Must be a family thing. My wife says I have excellent throttle response.
sometimes you want your throttle response to be a bit, you know, delayed.
The GR86 has a throttle like this to begin with and it’s one of the things that bothers me about it. Seems to go against the point of a track mode to have less throttle resolution as the pedal travel is reduced. I have yet to drive an electronic throttle car where the response isn’t bad from the delays to the non-linear responses and apparent second guesses on throttle opening it allows. It’s a testament to the thorough incompetence of programmers that they cannot touch the immediate and predictable response of a cable throttle. I want one of these that eliminates lag and replicates cable drivability.
Funny that you mention Kia, though. One of the absolute worst vehicles I’ve driven was a ’16 Kia Rio (and I’m comparing to junk yard-ready shitboxes) and a not insignificant part of that was the throttle “response”. Hit pedal, wait about 1/2 second, engine starts to respond, wait at least another 1/2 second for transmission to transmit “power” to the wheels, wait for rev counter to get to around 4k to accelerate faster than a kid on a training wheel bike. It felt downright dangerous pulling out into traffic and made my early ’80s Subarus with a far worse power:weight ratio on paper seem like finely tuned performance cars.
weird that you mention that, because one of the things that piss me off about Subaru is the throttle opens up too much at the beginning then slowing down, making the car feel almost jerky.
Between the throttle and clutch, when I first got the car, I felt like a learner in spite of about 900k miles driving manuals (clutch takeup was also terribly inconsistent, but that was fixed with a change of the pedal spring), but yeah, it’s like the last 40% of throttle does almost nothing. Why have the travel, then? I don’t know who it appeals to and I don’t think anyone is fooled into thinking the car has more power than it does.
i have not seen any maps for NA subarus, but the gas pedal crap was solved with a tune on my wrx.
Also, for the clutch you can adjust the pedal, where it sits about 2mm lower than the brake, and that will put the clutch starts grabbing right off the floor instead of 33% on the way up.
I had no issues with the height, it was a wonky engagement—sometimes high, sometimes lower, no feel. Not sure why the spring made such a difference, but I’m glad it was so simple. The original feel reminded me of old Toyotas, which were bad even when the technology was inherently better for feel. My old Subarus, OTOH, had excellent input feel, but that Subaru was a different company and that was a different time.
I don’t want to pay all the money for a tune (if I even knew of a place around here that looked trustworthy) just to fix a small thing that should have never been screwed up in the first place. I have no interest in higher rpm or anything that scrapes away whatever is left of the safety margins in the tuning to gain a hair more power, so it would just be the throttle adjustment I’d want and it doesn’t bother me anywhere near enough for the cost.
My mother’s Crosstrek suffers from this. SO annoying.
My Camaro was the opposite. Track mode was very linear, sport mode was pretty punchy and tour in-between the two.
The throttle is always like that whatever the mode, but I didn’t write that clearly. What I should have written is that I would think a car that is sold partly on being a cheap track car should have a linear throttle using the full length of travel for better resolution instead of truncated travel and non-linear delivery. It’s not that it’s terrible, it’s just annoying when the car is so inherently good that stupid things like that stand out more than they otherwise would and these aren’t cost-cutting engineering deficiencies, they’re intentional programming weirdness, so there’s no excuse. The Camaro sounds like it does that a lot smarter and I wouldn’t care if the twins came with switchable throttle maps and this was just one of the options. That is the big advantage to having these things all electronic, after all, (at least for the buyer) and they’re not doing anything with it.
Ahhh, I’ve never driven a Toyobaru, just figured anything sporty-ish with drive modes would adjust throttle behavior as well.
With the Camaro, you could lock the throttle feel in whatever particular mode you liked best, regardless of overall drive mode. Same with steering, although it really only changed how heavy the steering felt, with track being the heaviest. I really just used the drive modes to adjust how stiff the mag dampers were, surprising difference between tour and track modes.
Oooo…Fuel Shark!
Pedal Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo
Pedal Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo
Pedal Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo
Pedal Shark
I’ve seen these before and I always figured if I was gonna do something to alter the car that way, I’d just get a JB4 or a proper ECU tune. The latter of which I chose for both my current cars. If I still had my leased Giulia, this would have been a good option.
What, that horrendous lag between pressing the pedal and getting a result that makes some cars just about impossible to accelerate from a stop smoothly is programmed in on purpose!? Why? Who wants that? Why would you want that? Are there people that actually like that? It’s one of my biggest complaints about modern cars. I would rather drive something old and falling apart.
My Giulia had the most infuriating throttle lag. In heavy traffic where you might need to squeeze yourself into a gap, you could give it full beans and it would just creep for a whole second before taking off.
That would keep me from buying it. Even a great car that I really love like the Giulia.
Programmers. I’m convinced they’re a subspecies whose evolution somehow diverged to the point where every single instinct and idea they have is in opposition to that of almost everyone else.
We’ve been discovered. The time to unleash the master plan is now.
in reality, programmers are your friend. We want all the things we do to be awesome. It’s our bosses, the beancounters, and the lawyers that force us to fuck everything up.
That’s the confirmation I needed! I was suspicious when a new group of dead started arriving on the bottom of boats that floated upside down with Charon pushing them across the Styx with a long pole from the other side, then they’d disembark walking on their hands and Hades would send them through a separate cave entrance. When I asked who these strange people were, I was told they were “programmers”. I asked why they were so strange, but nobody could tell me, so I came up with my own theory.
I don’t know if programmers are my friends and it’s the others who are foes or what. All I know is it’s been a very rare instance since around the time smart phones and touchscreens became ubiquitous that I’ve not been conspicuously annoyed by the programming of something and the pace of annoyance has only accelerated since as even the most unnecessary things become controlled by computer for slower, less reliable, less repairable, and worse operation when HAL 9000 even agrees to comply with my request. Certainly, the friendly NFL cheerleader who worked her real job next door to my lab as a programmer was swell, but that was the late ’90s.
David’s opinion is that it’s done largely to help achieve specific results in EPA testing. Basically, if you’re allowed to punch it everywhere, that may screw up fuel economy and emissions.
We’re thinking about doing a whole separate piece on this about why cars intentionally have some sort of lag built in.
Please do. I came down to the comments section to have this questions answered. I would love a longer explainer on it.
Jason Fenske (Engineering Explained) has you covered (Spoiler alert: yes it’s because of emissions, and it’s quite significant)
Interesting stuff!
My Prius v has 3 selectable modes for throttle response that I think cover a reasonable swath of use-cases.
Unfortunately, the thing I can think most of wanting this for would be my dad’s Sienna…which needs a less-sensitive gas pedal. The thing is fine above 20 or so, but when you are starting from a stop, it is way too easy to lurch forward and I hate it.
I imagine this thing isn’t made with slowing it down further in mind?
It actually sounds like you can reduce sensitivity as well – “Or, you may set it so that 30 percent of pedal input results in 15 percent of throttle. ”
I interpret that as, more pedal less input aka, less sensitivity.
The company Mercedes Metris does this. 10% pedal feels like 50% throttle. Very annoying especially for a work van. On the other end full pedal stomp has what feels like a full second of lag. $250 is kinda steep, but now I want to sneak one of these in before the morning shift.
Can this do more than a VCDS/VAG-COM?
It cannot! VCDS is basically required for these old VAGs. 🙂
Great article on a modification I didn’t know existed before. I think everything I own has cables or linkages. Interesting to think about though! I cannot imagine the legal team required to produce a product like this. It’s like they are asking to be sued by someone, eventually
with my tC, back in the day, others on forums always complained that the throttle had a delay in it that was too noticeable, and I for sure noticed it.
but then when I had the supercharger installed and it came with a TRD ECU reflash that completely got rid of that delay. it was like night and day how more responsive it felt first on the throttle.
I’d love to try one of these on a few different vehicles, but I just don’t see it being worth the money for me right now. I strongly suspect that my Niro could have significantly better throttle mapping than the modes Kia offers, but I also think this would be a ridiculous thing to add to it. Maybe I’ll get one for my next vehicle.
Like you said, the SportWagen would almost certainly be a great use case and make this a solid investment.