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2.0T Engine Computer Tuning & Upgrades

   

Congratulations, you are the proud owner of a highly complex Siemens engine control unit which your Hyundai shares with Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, the works. What does this mean to you? Well, in short, what it means is your ECU is a double-edged sword. This computer has so many sensors jammed up your car's ass that it's able to read things like barometric pressure, ambient air temperature, humidity, this thing even knows if you stole gum in the 3rd grade.

FAQ: "When do I need a tune?"
Answer: When your turbocharger is modified or replaced with a bigger one.


The Good News: When operating a stock-turbo system, ergo your turbocharger is untouched (but you may have all manner of bolt-ons such as intake/FMIC/etc) your stock engine computer - even if it's been flashed with a hot tune - will essentially prevent you from harming your motor, no matter how stupidly you drive it. So if you're happy with a max of 250whp on a Gen1 or 302whp on a Gen2, crack open a cold one and smile, because you have pretty much nothing to worry about, ever, aside from hitting small plants and animals with your car, which is really kind of your responsibility.

The Bad News: It's not really considered sexy to hack & crack a Hyundai's ECU, even if it is a Genesis Coupe, so your ECU is not 'open source'. This means the source code of the ECU's ROM (read only memory) is not open and available to the public, e.g. cars like Subarus and Evos. This means that Not just anybody can flash tune your stock ECU - so your choices are buy from a closed-source supplier (meaning you have to go to them only) or get a piggyback, slap it on and hope for the best. A side note - if you want to go above 2BAR of boost, you must upgrade the OEM MAP sensor on the intake manifold manually with a General Motors 3BAR or a Haltech unit - which plugs and plays with their standalone ECU.


Piggybacks

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of ECU flash tuning, lets address piggybacks. If you don't know that that is, it's a rudimentary little computer that plugs into many of the engine sensors of your car, intercepting data the sensors send before the data gets to the ECU. Before the data is relayed to the ECU, the piggyback alters the voltage of the signal based on what you tell the software to do, e.g. it is 'faking' sensor data so the ECU does what you want it to do, add/subtract fuel or spark, boost, etc. The Pros here are that it's cheap, any tuner can operate one, and it gets results quickly and cheaply overall. The Cons are that the piggyback essentially cuts out most, if not all of the stock safety features the ECU has. This means if you really get aggressive with your piggyback, you run the risk of busting past temperature or boost based safeties without knowing, and doing real damage to something expensive, or worse, rapidly disassembling your engine.

Available Products -

DynoJet CMD - [For 2.0T, 2010-2012] MSRP: $449.00
The CMD has been around for a very long time, and is well-known and widely used in the Genesis market. The Dynojet support staff is incredibly helpful when emailed/called and are a great resource if you choose to go this route. Multiple cars have been successfully tuned with both stock and upgraded aftermarket turbos at many power levels. This tuning solution may be used in conjunction with Dynojet's AutoTune accessory AFR sensor to further improve results. This is an entry level tuning product. It WILL work for your car. If you want the best possible tune however, this is not precise enough to be a BEST solution. As with any tuning product, the results are only as good as the tuner who wrote your tune.

Verdict: Good for Beginners/OEM Turbo Setups/People who are cool with "good enough"


Flash Tuning

This means you are re-writing the data loaded to, or "flashed" to the solid-state (flash) memory aboard your ECU. This is a convoluted and dangerous segment of products for your car, as such, here's a brief and completely unauthorized history of flash tuning the Genesis Coupe, because I feel it's worth knowing the sheer amount of shadiness you can run into tuning this car. If you really could care less, skip down to "available products" and be on your way.


Koreans & Computers: A Colossal Greek Tragedy, Part 1


In 2009, the Genesis Coupe came to the shores of the United States, and with it - a gaggle of visitors fresh off the boat from Seoul. You see, in Korea, at least in 2009-2010, flash-tuning ECUs of street-driven cars was/is essentially a crime. Therefore the people involved in it from Korea are very likely to be less-than savory individuals. In Korea, at some point, a piece of software was stolen from Hyundai. Hyundai is such a vast corporation it might as well own the South Korean government, so at this point numerous suspect coroprations are effectively gutted while investigations are carried out, people sit in jail and wait for court dates, the works. Meanwhile, a handful of the aofrementioned FOBs who magically show up in the states begin advertising flash tuning products for the hot new tuner car - the Genesis Coupe. The turbo model is a major draw for tuners because of the low price and platform design.

The first of these is a company called PowerAXEL, helmed by none other than the same man who ripped Tiburon drivers off for tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention fleeing the country shortly thereafter and successfully avoiding their vicious retribution to this day. Second was SeoulFul Racing, widely known in the Tiburon community for brick-shithouse builds like their daily driven 400whp I4 Tiburon shop car. Eventually others sprang up, BTRCC, Next Generation Motorsports (NGM) got ahold of the same stolen/hacked software package everyone else was peddling, so on and so forth.

The software that was stolen/hacked/cracked by these Korean middlemen and then peddled here - was not a proper open-source program that you could set in front of a tuner and say "tune my Genesis!". No, this software is, at least in most cases (PowerAXEL's being the most known case) not documented in any way shape or form, and features no datalogging whatsoever. Thus, visiting Korean tuners are known to literally sit there in your car and just do dyno pulls and pretty much piss in the wind, see what happens, flip this around here, that there, etc, and imprecisely shoot in the dark. When these guys would sell a "dealership" setup of their software along with the hardware rig - they would insist any tuner could use it, it was self-explanatory, had a manual, etc. - but in more than two documented cases, professional and experienced tuners found that the software did not in fact behave the way the Koreans claimed it did, found mathematical errors in the software, in one case even spent over seven months just attempting to document how/why the software behaved the way it did because it made no sense and not even the Koreans who sold it could tell him.

If you purchase a flash-tune from literally any supplier at the date of this writing, it is an imprecise and non-user-tunable flash tune that was written on hacked/stolen/half-baked software by someone who may or may not have known what they were doing. If you pay one of these companies to real-time tune your car, they are doing it without proper datalogging to precisely tune the car, and you are getting a very coarse tune, and in some cases a dangerous one.

The only use of this Korean software on your car I would ever recommend in good conscience is a canned tune that is purcahsed WITH a known/tested turbocharger upgrade kit, such as BTRCC's 16G kit which includes a complete new ECU with it that is already flashed. Granted this tune is not a PRECISION tune for YOUR car thats been absolutely dialed, but it is known safe and the power output is known within a given tolerance range, e.g. this is a safe bet.


Available Products -

PowerAXEL VEOCOM & PowerX Module - MSRP $[VARIES]
Since PowerAXEL's fearless leader was recently caught stealing/cheating by his primary supplier, CM Network of Korea, he's had to switch to an alternate supplier of hardware. This brand is now trafficking hardware under the name Sterlin F1, which you might have seen stamped on an excessively expensive exhaust for the car a while back. Don't bother trying to ask them for a VEOCOM so you can learn to tune ECUs yourself, you're better off poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick. The 1st generation PowerX modules they sold were decent enough flash tuners that stored three tunes, quality was lacking in the hardware, but the PowerX V2s were apparently assembled by drunken hamsters. Canned tunes have existed from various people who have come and gone through PowerAXEL's doors, but due to the astronomical shadiness level, it's impossible to tell what you'll get today.

* A few shops offer decent tuning products they have developed using PowerAXEL's original rickety-ass software, such as Beyond Redline Performance, however most shops who originally bought the VEOCOM have since sold it for cash or hookers, because frankly it just didn't pan out.

Verdict: Don't touch these guys with a thirty-nine and a half foot pole, not if your life depends on it.

SeoulFul Racing SFR Canned Tunes & Real Time Tunes (live events) - MSRP $550 / Live Tunes Vary
Operated by the infamous Jay@SFR, also notorious within the Tiburon community prior to his time with the Genesis - SFR requires you send your ECU to them (turnaround time 1-4 days) and allow them to flash it with a canned tune, if you are operating on a stock turbo setup. This again is a good-enough setup where they ballpark your tune based on their experience and the mods you list for them, and you get a decent enough setup. Real-time tunes of your custom turbo setup are dependent on you affording to fly SFR's tuner to you, or bring your car to them, which means Pennsylvania. Quality of their tunes ranges far and wide depending on who you ask. SFR is notorious for building cool whiz-bang cars but never actually selling what they built. They also have a long reputation for talking a big game (read: lying) to get the sale on "exclusive" stuff you can get anywhere else. In the end though, fact is, there are plenty of people rolling around with SFR canned tunes on their stock turbos who are happy with it.

Verdict: If you can afford it, and you like it, go buy it, it's the American way!

BTRCC Canned Tunes /Turbo Kits w/ tunes, live events - MSRP $500 / Live Tunes Vary
Operated by the generally well-liked Sam Lee, BTRCC has a clean reputation. While they are more expensive, their product involves shipping you a NEW stock ECU, which means no downtime, and you retain your stock paperweight. Their site also has the only user-friendly customization system for selecting how your canned tune is setup, meaning you get the most accurately ballparked general canned tune possible. They also offer options for use of the Korean experiment tool's race map template, which means safeties such as the stock ECU's torque limiter (protects transmission and rear end for 100,000 mile warranty life, etc), fuel adaptive and catalyst overheat protection tables are essentially eliminated. Very cool but it also kills your cruise control, so bear that in mind.

Verdict: We're still not able to tune this car ourselves BUT this is about as good as it gets.


Standalone ECU Replacement

A standalone means you are removing your ECU and throwing it in the Goodwill bin. Standalones come in two flavors - plug and play, and manual installation. I only list the Haltech plug and play because frankly if you're installing any other kind of standalone, you'd never even consider reading this guide because you're either too stupid to take my advice or you know what you're doing and you're building a race car - or you've built one before. Hardwiring a standalone typically means you are gutting the car of accessories - things most of us require out of a daily driven car - such as keyless entry, a radio, air conditioning, things that are controlled by the Body Control Module (BCM). Now, a pug-n-play, that means you retain a whole car - and gain the ability to fine-tune absolutely every aspect of the motor.

Available Products -


Haltech Platinum Pro Standalone Plug & Play
The End-all, Be-all, Final Tuning Solution for the Genesis Coupe, Period - MSRP $1300+
The Haltech Platinum Pro Standalone is a full replacement - you remove your OEM engine computer, bake it into a fruitcake, and install this one. You plug this thing in and turn it on - with a laptop and someone who knows what they are doing. Haltech's software is the industry standard in user-friendliness. If you have the most basic idea of tuning ECUs, you can sit down with their user manual and learn your way to a fine tune. There is literally nothing the Haltech does not do, nor that it cannot by way of accessories.

Verdict: The only way to fly. Sell your grandma, kill a bum and sell his liver, do what you gotta do, but get one of these.