Quote:
Originally Posted by choneofakind
So... burning question I've been wondering for a while now:
Why is it that in the motorcycle world, piggyback ECU's like the power commander or Bazzaz are commonplace, but in the car world, standalone ECU's are typically the way to go? It's strange, but it seems to generally be true. My "car guy" friends swear by standalone and think that piggyback is a waste of money, and my "bike guy" friends all have piggyback units and there doesn't seem to be many standalone ECU's for motorcycles. Any theories?
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I suspect there's several contributing factors that drives bike market compared to autos.
1.
later adoption of EFI on bikes only in last 10-15yrs. This leads to lower percentage of bikes on street being upgraded having EFI anyway (compared to autos).
2.
fewer tech-savvy EFI tuners. Fewer shops (and percentage of shops) with EFI experience, much less with EFI systems upgrades.
3.
bikes' mapping doesn't need much adjustment. Typically upgrades on bikes don't yield large improvements like on autos.
I think all above (and others) are in a vicious circle keeping EFI-upgrades on bikes in dark-ages. Big part of it is autos have been more choked with government-regulations and emissions-controls for much longer. So when converting street-car into race-car, removing these restrictions yields large enough improvements in flow, that factory ECU cannot be modified or piggyback-adjusted enough to work well. Street-bikes on other hand, have fewer regulations, so they tend to be in higher state of tune right out of factory. Bike upgrades tend to yield smaller improvements and factory ECU can be retained and tuned with just piggyback adjustments.
Auto's regulations also have part in this rift. Ever since 2000 or so, OBD-II regulations required opening up ECU's programming. This allowed lots of tuners to decipher their coding and do wholesale re-mapping of factory ECUs. A lot of tuners are getting Honda ECUs and harness from junkyard cars and using Hondata software to turn it into programmable standalone EFI system for different cars, such as Eclipse.
Back in mid-'90s, I was able to re-map Bosch Motronics on Porsches by erasing and re-writing 2764 EPROMs. Was also able to inject additional code with IDApro, such as ignition-retard based upon ambient air-temperature. This has now pretty much been open-sourced with TunerStudio and Moats Ostrich.
Bikes on other hand, are more closed systems with few tuners able to crack ECU settings. Those that do, charge arm & leg for this service or sell the software at extreme prices. This has damping effect on bike-upgrade market and drives many end-users to piggyback/interceptors that allow them to make their own adjustments. And most end-users don't have tech-background to wire-up their own standalone EFI system with custom harness.
And one other aspect is those end-users themselves. As a group (bell-curve), bikers who upgrade their bikes doesn't seem to be as tech-savvy as those upgrading their autos. Even last bastions holdouts for carbs on autos, muscle-car crowd and NASCAR, are gladly embracing EFI. They've found that tuning for boost is much, much easier with EFI and getting +600bhp out of small-blocks is routine now, whereas before, it costs A LOT more money and time with carbs for similar outputs.