Siegel Racing

As there has been quite a bit of publicity lately about it, I thought "the community" should know the real origin of OpenECU. Here's a letter from Ecutek:

" Dear US Ecutek Partner.

The market in the US has changed for us all.

We have seen the way that even our own partners have dragged the price down of mapping Subarus and EVOs and quite honestly it has shocked us.

In the past we have tried to introduce some stability in the market. You might want to call it price control. It enabled tuners to earn good money per car. It enabled you to spend time, take care and give your customers good quality work, with a warranty. It gave you and EcuTeK a good reputation. We did not think that this was an unreasonable amount to earn considering the investment that most of you have in your business. As you know every time you open the hood on a customer's car you are taking a risk and making money in the automotive business is hard enough, so the chance to make a good profit for good work, using a good tool has been good for you.

However the market has dictated that customers do not seem to want to pay for the luxury of good work, skilled tuning and back up, therefore there are no longer any pricing recommendations from our point of view.

For this reason we are reducing the license cost to you . We will use the current exchange rate and invoice in UK Pounds but try to make sure that you are paying as close to the same as possible. With this change in pricing we will now strictly enforce a minimum order quantity of 5 licenses. There are no changes to the pricing for EasyECU.

In the US only, there seems to be a culture (with a few notable exceptions amongst our dealers) of "let's make things as cheap as possible" combined with "my product is better then yours because it is cheaper".

As someone who deals with companies all over the world on a daily basis I can say that this method of marketing is almost totally unique to the US. What it results in is that the price drops until such time that there is no profit in the work for reputable companies with sensible facilities, staff and costs. This in turn means that the work is being carried out by less skilled people who do not have the infrastructure or the financial stability to offer customers, warranty, support, updates and in a lot of cases even half decent work.

How can anyone map a 30,000 dollar car for less than the price of a vacuum cleaner and give it the time and skill that it requires?

Taking this discussion further how can you, our partners expect us to provide high quality products, development, support (which is almost 24 hour), training, a North American office without a license cost.

I would urge you to spare a moment to think how much money you have made from Ecutek and how much support we have given on a technical and sales basis to you. Think of other suppliers that you have for highly technical products and compare the quality of their products, support and training to ours (Have any of you ever tried to get telephone or e-mail support for a PC?).

This has been possible because of the licenses that you buy. Please do not think of these as some sort of expensive e-mail. These give you the ability to make money. They provide us with an income that enables us to spend over a million dollars per year on development staff, equipment, overheads and resources.

Some people reading this mail are now using openecu to program customer cars. Some people reading this are openly advertising the fact and are saying in forums that EcuTeK offers the customer nothing that openecu offers. Please don't be fooled into thinking that openecu is the result of thousands of hours work by highly skilled people who understand electronics, software, engineering and vehicles. It is not.

It is always easier to imitate than innovate.

Some of you have bemoaned the fact they we are not developing anything new. You could not be more wrong. However, in our position, would you release new work only to have it appear for free and be used against you by people who we thought were loyal customers and had made significant profits using our products?

As you MAY know the MY07-08 Legacy has a different ECU that cannot be supported with current EcuTeK software or any other product and requires us to develop new hardware and software. This will be fitted to the WRX and STi very shortly. We have been working on this for over a year now. Have the people responsible for openecu been working on this for a year already? Will they be offering this new software and hardware for free to you BEFORE we bring out a product? Do we release this new product to you and see it appear for free soon after and watch the price of mapping these cars descend to 99 dollars?

You tell us what to do because we are currently discussing whether to offer new products into the US market.

We are fortunate that we have a lot of customers around the world that DO have the attitude that they want to offer high quality work and they want to make a profit as well. We also have customers at the highest possible level within Mitsubishi and Subaru (as well as other manufacturers that we work with) who place great value on the work that we do.

We hope that you appreciate something of what we have done for you and that this price reduction will help you compete with a free product.

If you are in any doubt about the origins of this free software then see below just one screen shot that shows our unique data that appear in the openecu products. Also study the names and letter capitalisation. Ask yourself if you were writing software could you come up with EXACTLY the same names for 50 maps and capitalise them the same as us? As well as shortening words like "Advance Mult for Boost Disable" as used in both pieces of software?




All the best

David Power

__________________

djerickd

Damn Americans!!!

platinm

I won't touch OPEN ECU, but I can see where many would. I remember the days when I would pay over $1,200 for the Mastro tune. Then I head of SOG that was at $850. Flattening of the profit scale is a natural occurance and happens in most industries. Look at Flat panel TVs that used to be $15,000 that now sell for $1,500. I don't agree with what has happened here because it's stealing. $850 is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I'd pay that for the piece of mind that people like Scott give me.
It won't take long for these "customers" to begin poppong motors before OPEN ECUs reputation will be damaged. As it stands right now, I don't trust it. I want to pay a professional that has put in hours of R&D time before they touch my car.
Just my thoughts.

scoobywrx

I have the truth about OpenECU.....
I have been running OpenECU for quite some time and I can tell you my car is running awesome. I previously had Cobb Accessport Stage 2 and I wasn't even hiting my target boost and my AFR was crazy. Now its 11.1 and Im hitting 17 psi. I get better gas mileage and my car is 3 full seconds faster from 20-80mph than before. Open Ecu FTW!!!

platinm

I can't say that I'm an expert on this, so I might be wrong. I guess most of my arguement is that I want someone to tune that has plenty of time in cars and on the laptop. Is OPEN ECU legal, I don't even know?

WTFchuck

snowman ftw

SnowMann

The thread title is a little misleading...it should be something more like "The backroom politics of Ecutek"


OpenECU is a generic term used to desribe a movement not a specific software suite.
EcuEdit is the one that I believe EcuTek is targeting with lawsuits and such (as per my conversation with Ben @ Ecutek).

It should not be confused with Enginuity. Enginuity is a free, open source application created for viewing, editing and tuning Engine Control Units (ECUs). Coding on Enginuity began in November, 2005, and is now continuing to grow into a full featured tuning suite.

Enginuity is written in Java and, as of version .20 alpha, uses XML to define ECU versions, meaning it is infinitely extensible and can support any ECU you can retrieve an image from. Any information stored in your ECU (timing advance, fueling, boost, etc) may be altered, making your stock ECU nearly as powerful as expensive stand-alone units, better than piggy back units, and more functionality than commercial software costing in the thousands of dollars.

schoellnasty

It seems like youre confusing the abilities of the software with the abilities of your tuner. I fully agree that you want the best guy behind the computer, but given that Ive seen no evidence as to the inferiority of the open source software, Id rather have that guy tuning with it over ecutek/cobb/utec since its....well free.

platinm

Looks like I just got an education here. I didin't really know what I was talking about. Thanks for no flames. No offense Snow, but I'd still go with SS, because he's always worked on my car.

xxBoost Junkiexx

I can respect that. I think when Jeff flashed my car the first time almost everyone had there doubts in enginuity. Until they either sat in it or ran against it. Now the majority of the poeple that I know are running enginuity flashes.