Do truck tuners and other supposed mileage boosting equipment work?
When auto designers design their engine control computers, they have to shoot for a “middle of the road” tune of the engine. With powertrain reliability and driver experience at the top of the list. They don’t want the thing stumbling and backfiring and idling funny. Even if it saves gas, people in general won’t like it. There are ways to make a car run more efficiently, but they *may* be at the detriment of long term reliability. One way is to simply run the air fuel ratio lean, which is literally less gasoline going into the engine than it might be calling for. This may save fuel, but causes the engine to run hot, ping and also causes more harmful exhaust components. Another possibility is that with advances in computing power and knowledge of engine tuning, it is simply taking an older car and running it with a more state of the art engine tune. As for the things on the website, they may be true. *IF* the truck in question is suffering from the things those devices claim to fix. For
Based off of a glance at the products homepage, the main things this thing would do are limit RPM and limit maximum speed. This is basically what ctmf was saying, where you don’t necessarily change the engine, you just change your driving patterns, except that this device does it for you. To me, that would be very irritating, as there are times when I expect my car to respond quickly to certain input. Probably the only other thing it does that would really matter (assuming your truck is relatively well maintained) is that it changes shift patterns. My guess is that it would basically shift your truck into higher gears as much as\as soon as possible. This limits your ability to accelerate, and decreases RPM, which would both lead to increased fuel economy and decreased responsiveness.
