Big shout out to Scott Cook @ Tapout Tuning. He was willing to look at a datalog of my original “custom” ATS-V tune for free. I suspected it wasn’t a good tune but my tuner “couldn’t see anything unusual” in the log and stopped responding to me. Scott pointed out some issues with the tune and shared his thoughts on it.
Turns out that the knock sensors were desensitized to the point where my ECM would have been unable to protect my engine in the case of bad gas or rail pressure drop and my boost was poorly controlled.
Because of this I purchased Tapout Tuning’s remote tuning service and couldn’t be happier. I could tell his tune was superior on the very first iteration. The boost control felt much more linear and smoother, and yet still faster than my original tune. He was always very responsive during the datalogging process and would explain every change that was being made using the data acquired during the datalogging. I would recommend Tapout Tuning to anyone who wants to safely tune their ATS-V.