I thought I read once a long time ago that if you used a Micro Tuner on a truck that you couldn't use it on another truck except for a code reader. Is this true? Is the Micro tuner "married" to its first truck?

Thanks for all the info,
Mike

 

Well yes and no. First no the Micro Tuner is not “married” to just one truck however the “performance” program is, unless it is downloaded back into the Micro Tuner.

It works like this, you take the Micro Tuner and connect it to your truck and upload the performance program. As long as the performance program is uploaded into a truck, any truck you can no longer use the Micro Tuner to upload the performance program into another truck, say a friends truck or a second truck you may have.

Now if say a friend wanted to try out the Micro Tuner performance program you could go back to your truck and return your truck to the stock program. That is accomplished by downloading the performance program back into the Micro Tuner. Now you take the Micro Tuner to your friend’s truck and upload the performance program into his truck. As long as your friend has the performance program you will NOT be able to load it into your own truck.

In other words only one truck can have the performance program loaded. You can go back and forth to any truck the Micro Tuner will work on but only ONE can have the performance program at one time.

It makes perfect sense, especially from a business view point. Who in their right mind would develop something that only one person would have to buy and then load the performance program into every Ford truck he could find, possible charging them all a little money, or having 10 people go in together to split the cost so they could all have the program.

A business like that would not stay in business long before going under. I don’t know the Micro Tuner business, but I have developed programs for running automated test stations and they can take a very long time to develop. I do not sale them because it use to be a part of my job. However if I did do it as a business you can bet I would charge everyone that used my program to recoup the development cost as well as make a little profit to put back into R&D…

 

That makes perfect sense. Thanks alot!!

Mike

 

Hi Mike,

01 XLT Sport gave you a great response in his post (thanks 01!).

No, the Micro Tuner is not "married" to any 1 vehicle. It has one and *only* one limitation in this regard, and that is, it can be used to tune 1 vehicle **at the same time**.

After you return the first vehicle you used the Micro Tuner on back to stock, you can then use the Micro Tuner again to go tune any other of the long list of vehicles & engines it will tune.

The Micro Tuner has to be able to store your factory program so you can return to stock. Thus, it can be used to tune only 1 vehicle at a time, as all the rest of the memory inside has to be used for storing the 1000+ programs for every different PCM revision Ford ever made. All the drastic & fatal financial damage that would be caused by having the Micro Tuner be able to tune an unlimited number of vehicles at the same time is an issue, but even more so, it's the problem of needing to be able to return each vehicle back to stock & thus have to store the factory program, and be able to analyze it automatically to do the lookup to match programs that causes issues here.

When you connect the Micro Tuner to your vehicle, it will first download your stock factory program and store it internally, so you can return to stock at any time in the future. Next, it examines your stock program which is has stored, and then does an internal lookup to find the correct code-matched Superchips performance program that exactly matches your individual vehicle (not for all similar vehicles, it's for *your* vehicle's exact PCM software revision). Then it brings up the menus on the LCD screen that allow you to either take all the various defaults and upload the performance program, or go into the custom menus if you have a specific need to change certain things, and *then* upload the performance tuning. Once all of that is completed, it will tell you to disconnect the unit on it's LCD screen, very simple & quick!

As 01 mentioned, one of the nice things about the Micro Tuner is the fact that you can lend it to a friend if you have a buddy that wants to check it out, a lot of people do that.

This is really just a re-hash of much of what 01 said to you in his informative response. If you need to or would like to go over anything in more detail about the Micro Tuner (or anything else performance-related about your Ford), please feel free to give us a call, our phone number is listed below.

Good luck with your truck,

 

Your very welcome...

I knew Mike would be by, and his answer's are always better...

I have to say I can't wait until the Micro Tuner is available for the 4.2 (V6) which I have. I only knew the answer because I go over these threads here to read up so when “one day” the Micro Tuner is in my hopeful hands I will be already to go…

If you haven’t dealt with Mike from Superchips I think you will find, especially from reading all these threads that you couldn’t ask for a better business or person where customer service “really” is number one.

 

Yikes. Don't give him too much credit. LOL... keep in mind who you're talking about here... it's 01 XLT...

LOL!!

JK!!

RP

 

RockPick:

This is the wrong room, it is not padded and it appears your white jacket has come loose...

 

Ahh, just the outer white jacket.

The inner one is nice and snug... her name is Jennifer and she's a nurse.

RP

 

Excellent response! I am impressed

 

My snug "inner jacket" is a nurse also.

 

Well... Okay. Confession.

My wife's actually a teacher...


LOL...