Diesel tuning Software / Hardware options and or requirements to tune diesel engines.

Hi all,

Just throwing a thread out to see if I can get some help. Its a BIG question.

Context below

Looking at tuning Diesels for customers (Australian) in the "towing or tradesman" category who would like a bit more towing torque and or fuel efficiency. Also 4WD enthusiasts who are after mild tunes for fuel efficiency and power gains.

Vehicles include: 2.0 - 3.0 litres TDI and maybe some of the larger american vehicles in country. Ford (Ranger etc), Isuzu (DMAX MUX), Toyota (Hilux, Land cruisers), Mitsubishi (Triton), Holden (colorado), RAM, CHEV, F series Fords.

I’m currently undecided on software packages. I am considering Alientech KESS3 Master or Autotuner. I have also been considering HPTubers it EFILive.

Question:

If there is anyone out there who can assist in a software package that can cover most amount of bases as possible (the KESS3 Master and Autotuner seem to have extensive abilities). Are there and disadvantages with KESS3 or Autotuner?

Remember I am only looking at diesels in my market space as mentioned above.

I'm doing my homework before going through all the HP Academy diesel courses.

Kindest regards

This is a tricky one as usually you'll find that you can't tune every vehicle you want with a single platform. Autotuner is probably one of the systems with the widest support, however it's not an editor - You use Autotuner to read and write files but the tuning or map editing is usually completed in software like winols. To make this just a little trickier, unless you're planning to purchase map packs then winols alone is not going to be much help as you will need to reverse engineer the raw bin file to find and define the maps. Alientech KESS3 works in much the same way however they offer their ECM Titanium software for map editing.

HPT and EFIlive are the easiest options as they do the heavy lifting of finding and defining the maps for you. You can read, edit and write from one piece of software/hardware, however you will be limited to which vehicles you can support with each of these platforms. You can find a list of supported vehciles on their respective websites.

A lot of tuners will align themselves with a master dealer and purchase tuned files from them. If you're planning to work this way rather than mapping the vehicles yourself then Autotuner or Alientech would be suitable options.