Ya know, just to buy into all this, I reset my 6MT yesterday. I gotta say....NOTHING.....almost 8000 miles on my car now, the only thing I noticed was the gas pedal seemed more sensitive. Maybe this is what you guys think is this big "reset in power" cuz thats all I noticed. Figured it was nothing more than the throttle by wire being recalibrated after 8000 miles of use. As far as out ECU's grannying our cars, I highly doubt it. In my CHEVY when I changed the intake the ECU automatically reset the curves...hell when I first started the truck the engine bogged to 100 rpms, sounded like [censored], then came back to a perfect idle. Thats how ECU's work as far as "adjusting your fuel/air curves". Oh yeah, and if this were really true, all youd have to do is dyno your car significantly under the manufactuers claimed hp, and you can get a new car. After the post I made a week ago I did some research into manufacture hp claims. The last Grossly overrated car I saw (the 2001 miata, at 20 hp under factory claims) was involved in a lawsuit where owners sued mazda and all recieved their true 152 hp miatas. I doubt infiniti would be setting themselves up for this type of situation. Just my $.02 though.

2003.5 G Coupe premium. 6MT Black/black
Come join the G35Driver chat on EFnet. Channel name is #G35Driver. Catch me on aim (Xtreme03s10) if you need help setting up mIRC.

 

Well the 6MT has more power anyway and the AT certainly is a big part of the resets popularity and attributes to much of the improvement...but why the *&*_+& does my injen roar 3 times as loud each time I reset and then over 3 weeks get quiet again. I mean the sob will resonate on reset like a mustang cobra...and then it goes away - obviously not the TCU!. I give up trying to debate it in a meaningful way here, the sedan guys are much more helpful in this area

2003.5 DP Sedan (Everything but Nav)
Injen CAI
10 Wire HyperGround
Crawford Plenum (V4)
H-Liner
Polk Tweeter Upgrade (EX-3500)
Coming Soon: Lite Crank Pulley, Motion Sensor

<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small"><EM>Edited by SixFive on 04/14/04 05:22 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

I'm not an engineer first of all. I just like to live my life and opinion through fact and logic, not folklore and fable. To understand these phenomenon, I lurked for weeks, then when I had a compilation of stuff that sounded fishy (ECU reset and grounding wires) I began reading published journal material that addressed the related topics. I posted a couple of links for example only. You can do your own research if you'd like. I found nothing to support the notion that the ECU is adaptive to driver behavior insofar as changing fuel/air ratios go, but I did learn quite a bit about how the trannys worked, the history of them, and what their purpose was. I see lots of people confusing the two separate issues, and a lot of vendors capitalizing on those misconceptions. Here's one thing I did learn that pertains to your point about a louder intake:

The MAF measures the amount of air in grams per second. Since x grams of air per sec are flowing at y rpm there is only one correct injection pulse to maintain a certain exhaust excess air ratio. This is what the O2 sensor measures (not the A/F ratio). When the ECU knows this, it delivers the fuel and spark accordingly. At WOT a completely different equation comes into play that isn't germane to this point. Things happen in the MILLISECOND realm. when we're dealing with spark, fuel and air delivery.

So tell me, how could resetting your ECU possibly make more air come into your engine? How could it possibly make less fuel come into your engine? The only thing that adapts to driving style is the tranny.

Sorry, but I trust a bunch of engineers that design these things a little more than I trust your ear or your fiancees ear. Maybe there's just something wrong with your car.

 

I'm a mech engineer as well, although I haven't practiced it a lot in the last 10 years, and I think that car computers in general would purposefully NOT get too complicated in their calculations. Slight adjustments might be fine but to be honest if car computers were running complex programs trying to determine drivers driving habits, rather than basic air flow (measured in volume/sec btw), possible temperature measurements, and such I'd be more concerned about having a reliable system that would fail often (aka a Microsoft run PC) and leave us stranded. Controlling basic inputs into the engine should be all that is done IMO lest code start to rule how a very mechanical engine runs. I think the issue comes down to maximizing for either HP or efficiency (MPG) and I don't know how Nissan's approach was taken....could be they allowed for both, but its hard to say.

The tranny note about Auto's having additional calcs being performed makes sense. I"m assuming this would only affect when shifting occurs, no?

When all is said and done, unless any one of us happens to be the engineer that wrote the sw or designed the board or has a copy of the functional spec then its a bit tough for us to reverse-engineer how the system works outside of how my *** feels when stomping on the pedal. We can't really stop the insanity unless we have more info!! 8^)