Good point, I thought about working that detail in but felt I was getting a little long winded with my post. I also figured the heavy winds on the return trip without any tune applied mostly canceled out that variable. I added this detail in an edit to the OP.
Yet another piece of info I left out of the OP. I went from SC to CO. So not all the way to the pacific coast. I did take the exact same route though.
Idk if anyone from 5-star reads this forum but my hope is this gets someones attn.
There have been a number of questions asked on their members page and they have yet to respond. Not sure if they ever read these so it might be best to message them directly.
WOW! Sounds like I made the right choice in going with another company...
I really only bought the tune to add smiles per gallon. The truck drives fine from the factory but the power I get with a tune on this thing makes it alot more fun to drive. However, all the detractors mentioned here negate the positive aspects of the tune for me.
What tune did you go with and what is your experience?
Which is........?
Same exact thing happened to me this weekend on my trip with about 20 minutes to go on my way to my destination. When I arrived at destination I returned to stock from tune and everything g has been ok. Haven’t put the tune back on since.I will start this post by saying 5 star's tune does everything that is advertised and the power gains during acceleration are quite enjoyable. I also dont want to bash on 5 star but I have had lots of trouble since getting my tune from them.
First, I’d like to talk about drivability of the truck with this tune. I ordered an adaptive, daily/tow, and performance tune. The first thing I noticed after installing the tune was a much stronger exhaust smell in my garage when parking my truck, probably not a big deal (other than potential fuel economy loss). I assume this is due to the truck running rich to protect itself from running too lean. I also noticed that with any of the tunes provided, while the trucks acceleration and upshifting are improved, any time I am decelerating, I feel my truck shudder hard 1-3 times as it's downshifting through the gears. It's noticeable enough that my passengers have asked me if my truck is supposed to do that. It got so annoying that I took the tune off of the truck and called 5 Star. After several attempts to get a human on the phone, someone answered and we had a great conversation where I was told they would send me an updated tune and that I should try a different tune on the truck in the meantime (I was using the adaptive tune). So, I switched over to the daily/tow tune. The same drive train shudder existed here too. On this tune, one night on the interstate I did a WOT pull while passing a car in a different lane. While passing, suddenly I felt a large drop in power and my gauge cluster flashed a message saying "pre collision assistance not available" and my check engine light came on. At this point the truck seemed to be in some type of limp mode. On the rest of the trip back home, the vehicle was in a low power mode and would not shift gears correctly. The previous mentioned shudder happened every single time I let off the gas pedal. Upon arriving at my house, I hooked up my SCT tuner to check what codes were being thrown and they were P0068 (MAF Throttle Position Correlation) & P0471 (Exhaust Pressure Sensor). I cleared the codes, set the vehicle back to stock, and the truck ran fine at that point. A couple of days later I applied the updated tune that was mentioned earlier to address the shuddering drivetrain issues. I can’t say that I really noticed any change here and at this point I had been trying to call 5 star tuning for several days to talk through my issues. As of now, I’ve called them a dozen times, left a voicemail and sent an email all with no human response.
Now, let’s talk about fuel economy. As I was suspicious about the strong exhaust smell mentioned at the beginning of this saga, I wanted to test my fuel economy on a long-distance road trip I had been planning. I recently drove out west from the east coast and had the updated adaptive tune applied when I began my trip out there. I used mid-grade fuel the whole time (89 on east coast and 87 further west). The weather was perfect on this drive and I experienced almost no traffic. As seen in the attached photo (1), I averaged 17.3 MPG over 1500+ miles of continuous interstate driving. The Rangers fuel tank is not the largest and I was quite frustrated by the end of this drive with how frequently I had to stop for gas and that I could almost watch the fuel hand move down. Upon arriving at my destination, I decided to remove the tune hoping that my fuel economy would go up a little. On the return leg of this trip I still had the vehicle set to stock. Looking at the other attached photo (2) you can see I averaged 19.1 MPG on the return leg of the trip. Some things to note about the return trip are that the trip started with roughly an hour of stop/go traffic due to poor timing on my part. Then, through the entirety of the great plains, there were very heavy winds that negatively affected my fuel economy pretty significantly while watching the instant fuel economy display in the gauge cluster. Also, I used regular gas the whole way (85 out west, 87 in the east). I am adamant about using cruise control and both legs of the trip I mostly had it set between 78-83 depending on speed limit.
I am really wondering if my drivability issues are actually the tune, or if I have one of the shuddering issues mentioned on other threads and the tune just exacerbates it. Is my fuel economy on par with what others are seeing? I'd really like to hear anyone else running one of 5-Star's tunes weigh in with what they've experienced.
EDIT: For clarity I drove from South Carolina to Colorado so there was an elevation gain on the way out there and a decrease on the return trip. As noted, I did incur very heavy winds on the return trip (for about the first 8 hours) so that could have negated any difference there. My feeling is that the winds actually skewed the fuel economy in the tunes favor as once I got out of the great plains, my fuel economy average steadily increased for the next 900+ miles of the trip.
APR tunes are really nice and sorted with a ton of Audi/VW/Porsche experience. I mean heck they are internationally known and are part of some of Audi's international racing teams. So I tend to trust a company like that more than I do some of these smaller tuning shops. I myself had a stage 3 APR tuned 2002 TT 225q back in the day.
Probably why my VW dealership back then was the one who sold and installed my APR tune for me.
