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With more and more of these vehicles on the road, a good portion from GM, will we see tuning solutions? Owners of these vehicles are still interested in performance, and with an electric powertrain there's no emissions consequence to turning up the wick.
To HPTuners, it's all likely the same, cracking an ecu or two but the market seems to be completely ignored. Just wondering if they have an eye on the future.
If it's anything like the GMT-900 platform with the hybrid system they will likely never fully support it. The engine computer is more like a slave to the hybrid controller that has all the master functions. Even Greg Banish has said in the past that nobody wants to mess with that stuff.
I was thinking along the lines of the more current Volt and Bolt, as well as the Teslas, Toyotas and Lexus. The trucks hybrid setup was shared with Chrysler and the transmission was an Allison derivative, and yes, no one wanted to mess with that.
But take the gen 1 Chevy Volt and the Caddilac ELR. Both share the same exact battery, engine, inverter, and transaxle. And I mean identical part numbers. Yet GM saw fit to give the ELR 58 more hp and 22 more torque and then bumped it some more for the '16 model year, making 233 hp/ 373ft/lbs over the Volts 149 hp/ 294ft/lbs. That's significant, over 25% on the same hardware, and that's not hot rodded beyond their own durability/warranty criteria. I've read the '16 ELR got a hardware change in the transaxle for durability, but the transmissions are identical otherwise, and not that expensive.
Seems like low hanging fruit to plop the ELR programming into a Volt, and gives you an idea to the built in margins of the powertrain.
Then there's the diy ev crowd. One guy took a Lexus hybrid transmission from a rwd GS450H, lopped off the bellhousing and using a hacked inverter runs it in electric mode stuffed under a BMW. 0-60 in around 3-4 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ksx8vicqAs.
There's a lot of power in these motors.
Here's the BMW project page. https://hackaday.io/project/4649-diy...recycled-parts