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Thread: Subaru tuning is broken and you wont get a refund

  1. #1
    Tuner in Training
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    Subaru tuning is broken and you wont get a refund

    Let my preface this with this. I understand how much work is involved in this better than most. I totally understand the why and how of how these issues happen and sympathize with the dev team. My issues are with how support handles the issues and the lack of any refund policy for us helping hptuners debug and collect data while also paying them.

    I have burned 600$ now trying to tune subarus with hptuners at this point. It doesnt work. Period. Beware. Even though it is almost completely broken hptuners will not refund the 200$ you spent even though they cant deliver what you paid for. In any other industry that is theft. Legally I could issue a charge back or go to small claims over it but I dont care to find out what hptuners would do to my account with thousands and thousands of dollars worth of credits on it in retaliation.

    Custom os? Lol no. It will break all sorts of mysterious stuff. I have personally seen it completely disable boost control and cranking fuel functions on the ecu making it useless in both cases. The tables are not clear on which duplicates are active at what time so your stuck with 3 of each table and no idea which one should be modified. Obviously these should relate to e85 vs gas but its anyones guess which ones are actually active. Also fun is how the injector sizing just.... changes strategy based on if flex is on or not from lbs to a scaling number that looks like a constant but isnt?

    Speaking of. Subarus generally dont use injectors literal size they use a flow constant.... yet there's this mysterious lbs per hour flow number for injector scaling. When you make it bigger you get more fuel. Smaller you get less. So completely opposite of what should happen. Great! Another two hours of my life wasted finding that quirk.

    Driver demand? Completely breaks the checksum validation and flashing process. Found that out on the side of the road. Nearly had to be towed but I figured it out before the battery died.

    Speaking of. You get to full flash every time even though all the open source tools only flash changed segments.

    Check engine lights? Roll the dice. You can sometimes turn a code off and the light will come on but yet it wont scan half the time. Open source tool can come in after the fact and clearly shows it as still enabled and can delete it without issue.

    Random tables will have the wrong units or will be off by an order of magnitude. Could cause issues for your average home gamer that doesnt catch it. Not to mention the axis is flat out wrong on many.

    Spoke with support many many times. Really fun having them blame cobb for not returning to stock properly even though cobb has their stuff very well sorted. I later confirmed it was bit for bit perfect. They never checked just blamed cobb. Then when I spent money on the subaru update / reflash disk, and updated to the newest OS from subaru to "fix" it the licensing got broken because it apparently links to the os version so thats fun. They did issue credits for that. If I was smart I would have kept them and moved on but nope. Applied them again.

    Spoke with a few reps at SEMA and they swore a fix was coming and that I could get a refund and they were sorry. Nope. Even when the product flat out doesnt work with lots of evidence they just keep it. Support will not even consider it. I get why the policy exists but im not joe schmoe who accidentally licensed a repository file. Iv purchased many hundreds of credits.

    Love hptuners most days and would love to use it for this but right now it should be a free alpha. Not a paid product.

  2. #2
    Tuner in Training
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    May 2022
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    I understand how much work is involved in this better than most. I totally understand the why and how of how these issues happen and sympathize with the dev team. My issues are with how support handles the issues and the lack of any refund policy for us helping hptuners debug and collect data while also paying them.
    I would agree with this. Their retail level customer support isn't trained up well enough on this at all. I had to leverage my work connections to get in touch with someone who would actually listen to me and had enough experience to understand that my complaints were valid. The guys you get when you open a ticket have a "script" and the script involves blaming COBB for leaving behind "breadcrumbs" when that's just not the case. An engineer confirmed our suspicions on this when I got on a call with them a few months back.

    Custom os? Lol no. It will break all sorts of mysterious stuff. I have personally seen it completely disable boost control and cranking fuel functions on the ecu making it useless in both cases. The tables are not clear on which duplicates are active at what time so your stuck with 3 of each table and no idea which one should be modified. Obviously these should relate to e85 vs gas but its anyones guess which ones are actually active. Also fun is how the injector sizing just.... changes strategy based on if flex is on or not from lbs to a scaling number that looks like a constant but isnt?
    Curious about the specifics on this. Back in January when I flashed my first "custom features" map, it bricked the ECU, so I don't have any experience here. Would you get more specific with screenshots and details?

    Spoke with support many many times. Really fun having them blame cobb for not returning to stock properly even though cobb has their stuff very well sorted. I later confirmed it was bit for bit perfect. They never checked just blamed cobb. Then when I spent money on the subaru update / reflash disk, and updated to the newest OS from subaru to "fix" it the licensing got broken because it apparently links to the os version so thats fun.
    This happened to me except it was due to a new build on a replacement ECU. The beta software bricked my original ECU. They still have my old ECU with the engineering team.

    Driver demand? Completely breaks the checksum validation and flashing process. Found that out on the side of the road. Nearly had to be towed but I figured it out before the battery died.
    Didn't experience this when running a MAF-based/non-custom features map.

    Random tables will have the wrong units or will be off by an order of magnitude. Could cause issues for your average home gamer that doesnt catch it. Not to mention the axis is flat out wrong on many.
    Are you talking about the requested torque tables being in "newton/meters" etc?

    Speaking of. Subarus generally dont use injectors literal size they use a flow constant.... yet there's this mysterious lbs per hour flow number for injector scaling. When you make it bigger you get more fuel. Smaller you get less. So completely opposite of what should happen. Great! Another two hours of my life wasted finding that quirk.
    Do you know anything else about this? I have some injectors in a box ready to go in, but I keep hearing about this. Why can't we just put in a pound per hour with the voltage offset and be good?

    Speaking of. You get to full flash every time even though all the open source tools only flash changed segments.
    You're right. Five minutes each flash. Pretty annoying/time consuming.

    Not to mention the axis is flat out wrong on many.
    Which ones?

    Love hptuners most days and would love to use it for this but right now it should be a free alpha. Not a paid product.
    It is disappointing. I wish it worked a lot better..

  3. #3
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    Yeah, I'm stuck in closed loop with the wrong reference for final fueling base causing it to pull 30% fuel no matter what. I've totally disabled all injector requirements for OL/CL transition, no dice. I'm so pissed I didn't see this post before hand or I would have just searched online for ECU Flash definitions on this 2020 and said fk SD.

  4. #4
    Tuner jaz|TUNING's Avatar
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    I built a map for a shop this week and when the tuner there went to load it, it bricked the ECU. I did warn him about it, but it was a route he needed to try. That was my last shot at Subaru on HPT. Honestly, I wish they would remove support for this platform.

  5. #5
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    Was his VCM editor fully updated? I've flashed mine at least 10 times and had no issues.

  6. #6
    This sounds terrible.

    Is there anything similar to HPT for Subarus? I?d love to tune the car myself instead of paying someone for a protune.

  7. #7
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    Honestly, it's not as bad as some of these guys make it out to be IMO. I can't speak for SD tuning, but the MAF based stuff seems to be pretty on point with the custom features patch applied.

    Evans performance has a great course on tuning our cars with HPT, if you're genuinely interested in tuning it yourself I would recommend purchasing that course. There's TONS of valuable info and tools that will get you on the right track.

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  10. #10
    Potential Tuner
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    I have been tuning a 2020 Sti using Hp Tuners. The time to flash a rom is annoyingly long, about 5 minutes. And I cannot get it to flash without connecting to the internet which is also annoying. The boost control/wgdc table definitions are weird from what I am use to (Ecu flash) but other than that this has potential if HP Tuners just puts a little more work into it. The car is just a downpipe and intake and I have not tried to add the FFS and launch control as I am scared to brick it...

  11. #11
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    You're better off just using ECUFlash and a tactrix cable. The opensource community is huge on the Subaru platform, if you need patches (SD, LC, FFS) there is merpmod and also DIMEMOD (which I personally think is better than the Cobb Custom Feature ROM minus the live tuning).

    I've tuned hundreds of Subaru's with ECUflash and have never had any 32bit ecu brick, I attempted to tune one car on HPT, after several hours of fiddling around it was finally running alright and then ended up bricking after a few flashes.

    I love HPT for domestic cars and will continue using it for that but there are far better options for Subaru.

  12. #12
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    Lets start a class action lawsuit for our refunds plus damages.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by awd4days View Post
    You're better off just using ECUFlash and a tactrix cable. The opensource community is huge on the Subaru platform, if you need patches (SD, LC, FFS) there is merpmod and also DIMEMOD (which I personally think is better than the Cobb Custom Feature ROM minus the live tuning).

    I've tuned hundreds of Subaru's with ECUflash and have never had any 32bit ecu brick, I attempted to tune one car on HPT, after several hours of fiddling around it was finally running alright and then ended up bricking after a few flashes.

    I love HPT for domestic cars and will continue using it for that but there are far better options for Subaru.
    Do you happen to have ecu flash defs for a 2020 Sti?? Have not been able to find any

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by rjb813 View Post
    Do you happen to have ecu flash defs for a 2020 Sti?? Have not been able to find any
    sent you a DM

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by awd4days View Post
    sent you a DM

    Hey could you send it to me too please?

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by jaz|TUNING View Post
    I built a map for a shop this week and when the tuner there went to load it, it bricked the ECU. I did warn him about it, but it was a route he needed to try. That was my last shot at Subaru on HPT. Honestly, I wish they would remove support for this platform.
    You can NOT touch any throttle tables or it bricks. Use DimeMod and tactrix. HPT is awful with support as well. Had a client come 4 hours away for a tune spent all day trying to get the software to work. Ended up open sourcing it and of course no credit refund. From now on I only use HPT for Ford/Chevy. Dodge/Jeep support sucks just as bad.