Electronics are playing a more significant role than ever in the auto industry with big companies like GM, Ford, and Dodge taking the lead. As their technology changes, it forces the performance aftermarket to adapt as well. Companies like Bully Dog are always ready to fill the tuning gap whenever they see the need.
Bully Dog’s latest electronic piece to the puzzle comes in the form of GTX Performance Programmer. It offers a captive color 5-inch touchscreen, grab-and-go magnetic mounting system, and raises the bar for vehicle flash programming. While it is loaded with “canned” programs for add-ons like an air intake you can also use it for custom tuning too.
We talked to David Griffin, Calibrations Team Lead of Derive Systems and he had the following to say, “One of the biggest advantages to our product is the ability to save tunes on the device.” You can have access up to 20 saved tunes on a single device. For instance, you can have a tune for all-motor on pump gas, a nitrous tune on pump gas for 150-horsepower, and a nitrous tune for 300-horsepower on race fuel, and the ability to switch between them effortlessly.
The options are endless, and it’s all within this single controller. You will have the freedom of changing between the different tunes without the need of contacting a custom tuner everytime you want to change boost levels, fuel octane, or nitrous jets. A custom tuner will need to be used for the first tunes, but after he or she has them written, you can swap between the different calibrations as required.
Another impressive feature of the GTX unit is the ability to load data via the cloud. More specifically Derive’s custom server, where a tuner can upload a specific tune for your car. For instance, let’s say you call Dave who lives in Indiana and tell him that you want to pull 2-degrees of timing out of your vehicle. He will write the program and load it on the cloud. Then your GTX device which is located in Texas, will connect to the cloud using WiFi and automatically find the tune.
It’s able to do this because the new tune is associated with the serial number on the unit. All you have to do now is click the new custom tune that automatically shows up on your device which installs it. Gone are the days of needing a laptop and all of those pesky cables to complete this process. How awesome is that?
For more information on the GTX and other Bully Dog products, please check out their website at www.bullydog.com.
