So while a flash tune will get you some power increases, beware the huge risks to your engine. “A lot of people who program flash tunes understand computers, but know nothing about your diesel engine. “Would you let a computer hacker play with your diesel engine?” asks Andrew Bourne from Diesel Care. Slave tuners purchase the tuning files from the master tuners, and simply use a laptop to connect to your computer and upload the new tune to the computer, potentially without any clue about what’s actually going on.

That means considerable expense, something very few ECU tuners in Australia have the finances or technical know-how to pull off.

Master tuners spend a lot of time refining their ECU tune with multiple dyno runs and tests and often for each individual customer’s vehicle. There’s a big difference between a ‘master’ tuner and a ‘slave’ tuner. Here’s the thing a lot of people don’t understand. ECU ‘Tuners’ – Are you getting what you’re paying for? We all know the saying ‘if it seems too good to be true, then it usually is’, and while we’ve spoken before about ECU tuning of modern common-rail diesels, this time we’re opening up the floor to Diesel Care to discuss their side of the story, and why they’ve banked their business’ reputation on the Steinbauer range of performance modules. It seems that everywhere you look, there is another person offering to come to you, plug in a laptop and get seemingly magical power figures with little more than a software update. One of the newest modifications to hit the 4WD scene is diesel ECU tuning, also known as ‘flash’ tuning. Diesel Care weighs into the power modules v ECU tuning debate with their side of the diesel powerup story

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