Context: I have a Ford Taurus AWD with a naturally aspirated 3.5L V6 (288 hp & 254 lb-ft, stock). It had reached the point in life where it’s old enough that I’m ok tinkering with it, but new enough that it’s still worth tinkering. There was also zero info about tuning this engine and I wanted to fix that. So I brought it to a dyno.
I went with an HP Tuners ECU. The only other “mod” to my car was a set of one-step colder spark plugs; everything else is stock. Edit: I also stuck with 87 octane.
The shop managed to increase the peak wheel horsepower from 217 hp to 231; and the torque from 203 lb-ft to 222. Increases of 14 hp and 19 lb-ft, or 6% and 9%, respectively. Assuming the parasitic losses is the same, my new power at the crank is roughly 306 hp and 278 lb-ft. Pretty similar to the stock 3.7L that Ford made.
But as you can see from the graph, other areas improved even more. Some sections received 20+ lb-ft, and 15+ hp above 5000 rpm.
Mileage seems to have improved, too. However I still need to test that more. I’ve only had this tune for a week now.
I haven’t done many hard accelerations, but it does feel a little faster when accelerating. Pre-tune, I remember feeling a surge in power around 4000 rpm; I’m glad the dyno proved me right.
In terms of feel, the most noticeable difference is in city driving. The engine feels so much more responsive when I start to press on the pedal from a standstill. But not in a jerky, aggressive way (unless I choose to floor it); it’s still a very comfortable daily driver. It just “feels” more put together, if that makes sense.
Total cost for the dyno and tune was around $1500-2000. Plus any extraneous repairs they required me to do before I could go on the dyno (I.E. I had a leaky transaxle seal that cost $525 to replace). So, I see why not many people choose to get their cars tuned. At the same time, I feel this was worth it for the science.
If anyone has any questions, I’ll try to answer them as best I can.
I saw this while browsing from All.
Can you please explain the graph?
It seems like tuning did what you wanted but was it what you expected?
Not OP but it’s a decent amount of money for not a lot of gain. Spending almost $2k and only seeing a moderate increase. Unfortunately since it’s not turboed or super charged this is about what he can expect right now with moderate modifications. Though I’d have at a guess his fuel efficiency may be 2-3 mpg better with the tune you can really optimize to a specific car with tuning.
Pretty much. You can only do so much with a naturally aspirated engine. So if you want big gains from a tune, get a turbo’d engine.
I could turbo it, but I don’t want to drop that much money on it at one time. Plus I’d have to replace the transmission because Ford only rated the 6F50 for 300 hp and 280 lb-ft.
So that’d be another couple grand on top of the couple grand for the turbo.
That’s just way more than what I can afford.As for mileage, 2-3 mpg actually feels about right. The computer is saying higher mileage than stock, but it’s not a huge gain. I need to do more driving before I can say just how much better it is.
The graph is showing horsepower (green lines) and torque (blue lines) over the engine’s rpm range. The solid lines are the stock run while the dashed are the tuned run. I wasn’t expecting huge gains. And most car people I talked to said not to expect much; one friend thought I wouldn’t get more than 10 horsepower. So the gains I got were actually better than I expected. But not by much.
The main reason I did this was because I couldn’t find any data on tuning this engine. Ford put these engines in a lot of cars (Taurus, F-150, Explorer, Flex, Edge, and all the Lincoln vehicles), so there are a lot of them out on the road.
And I know I’m not the only person who’s thought of tuning this engine. So I figured I’d take one for the team, tune mine, then share it with the world so other people can decide if this is right for them.
What year is your car? Just curious?
And now that you’ve done it if you could go back and make a different decision, would you?
It’s a 2015 model. So it’s far from new at this point. But it still has much less than 100k miles, so it still has a good bit of life left in it.
If I could go back, I’d probably do exactly the same as I did.
I actually plan on going back because I have a couple more things I want to do (ported intake manifolds, high flow air intake, a new exhaust as mine is getting rusty), but I’ll be adding those periodically. I want to see what each part does to the tune.That’s awesome! I’ve always wanted to do stuff to my car but I never do and just end up buying a different car.
I’m looking into having my car cammed with a tune, the local specialist in the car has already done other work to it and shown to be an expert. We’ll see if I go through with it or not.
