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GM's new turbo engine rewrites the rules of torque control-and locks out tuners
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PedroBatista 1y agoYes, because GMs problem has been too little AI in their engines. Given the recent past about sensors and reliability I’m adding even more will be great for reliability and cost. I’m sure this design came from the committee of geniuses who brought us the wet belt. Rant over. (Sorry)
- nottorp 1y agoIt's so they can sell you subscriptions for different engine behaviour profiles and for unlocking the full engine power.
- tentacleuno 1y agoHaven't we been using electric motors and smaller turbos to get around lag? I drove a 3 cylinder MHEV EcoBoost that seemed to use the electric motor(s?) quite well. It seems like a good idea in theory, though I can understand the negatives of electrifying the powertrain. Definitely an interesting topic. I remember hearing about the days of the early 911 Turbos (if my memory's correct) where you'd get a bunch of boost all at once... We've definitely come a long way!
- aredox 1y agoThis plans for premptively spinning the turbo - which requires electric ones.
- nubinetwork 1y agoYou could always do what race cars do, put an electric motor on the turbo so when you go back on the throttle, you get instant boost.
- westmeal 1y agoYou can use antilag as well to achieve the same effect without electric turbochargers
- lan321 1y agoBad for emissions though so it'd never be OEM. Edit: Also bad for the valvetrain. 4T engines aren't really meant to be run as 2T..
- tentacleuno 1y agoIsn't anti-lag (the type that invokes combustion in the exhaust, anyway) terrible for turbochargers, long-term?
- westmeal 1y agoIt's bad for everything but it's awesome
- Zak 1y agoPorsche is doing that on a road car now. It can also act as a generator to limit maximum boost instead of opening a wastegate. https://www.motortrend.com/news/2025-porsche-911-gts-t-hybrid-992-tech-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.motortrend.com/news/2025-porsche-911-gts-t-hybri...
- rasz 1y agoAudi has been shipping electric compressor for 5 years now. They are prone to failures and they are on second revision now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volkswagen_Group_diesel_engines#4.0_V8_TDI_310-320kW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volkswagen_Group_diese...
- Zak 1y agoThat's a different design; Audi uses a separate electric supercharger to fill in boost while waiting for its conventional turbochargers to spool up. Porsche is using a motor/generator built in to a turbocharger to spool it faster, and to recover energy at maximum boost.
- Peanuts99 1y agoIt all sounds quite complex when you can just drive the wheels with a motor directly.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoActually all of the car sounds really complex. How about we just pull it with a bunch of horses?.
- littlestymaar 1y agoHorses are really complex beasts too, better just walking around.
- SecretDreams 1y agoThe human mind is complex as heck, we should give up on harvesting them for walking.
- bluGill 1y agoHorses are very fuel inefficient. Sure they burn 100% renewable hay/oats, but they burn a lot of them. Worse they burn them even at idle so those who don't use their horse constantly still pay for the fuel. Horse emissions are really bad too.
- Reubachi 1y agoIn your opinion, where does "the buck stop"? I feel similar to you in that complexity over time only locks out the user. However I certainly do not miss a choke or having to mess with a carb in general on my road going vehicle.
- tentacleuno 1y agoI don't miss that either (in fact, I know the ECU can do a much better job), but I do enjoy engaging with the car, and thus drive a manual transmission. I'm fairly confident I can get better efficiency and control as opposed to the same transmission with a computer changing gears for me. From what I've heard, it's somewhat of a rarity in the US, but it's very widely used in Europe.
- aetherspawn 1y agoThis is stupidly redundant in the age of electric vehicles, especially now that there are plenty of price parity options even without subsidies.
- criddell 1y agoNobody is buying a Corvette because it’s the most sensible car for their needs.
- aeonik 1y agoIt's the opposite, people only by corvettes because it's the most sensible option for their needs. They need a fast sweet car, and not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ultimately it's rooted in the need for procreation, social status, and play.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lotsofpulp 1y agoI have never seen someone within procreation age drive a corvette.
- PaulHoule 1y agoIn the 2008 financial crisis the owner of the building I worked in had extra cash on hand so he walked into the Chevy dealer and walked out with the Corvette they had in display for $35k which he thought was sensible.
- wepple 1y agoI’m optimistic and hopeful about electrification, but gas cars are simply not going anywhere soon. Increasing their efficiency might not be the ultimate endgame, but it sure is a positive increment.
- pornel 1y ago
- mips_avatar 1y agoAs a part of my capstone class in undergrad we toured a gm plant with our sponsor. And our sponsors were total jerks to the employees they met. I don't think with that much animosity directed at their workers management really has time for innovating.
- ungreased0675 1y agoSounds fascinating, and slightly terrifying to drive. Don’t think I’d be able to resist doing some software quality testing.
- HPsquared 1y agoIt sounds similar to what transmissions already do. There's a lot of "prediction" getting the car ready for what the driver is likely to do next. Dual-clutch transmissions especially need to anticipate the next move as either an upshift or dowshift. This is just extending that idea to the engine itself.
- M95D 1y ago> leverages predictive algorithms and real-time combustion analytics to not only reduce turbo lag but actually anticipate it. You know what that means: There will be lag in all unanticipated situations.
- bluGill 1y agothere always was. However the way you drive is not very unique and so odds are they have anticipated everything you will do in the real world. (this doesn't mean they can solve lag for all those situations, only that they already know about them: if they can't anticipate it is because of some other factor).
- M95D 1y agoLet's not fool each other: it's for people who can't anticipate.
- farmdve 1y agoIt would be an interesting reverse engineering challenge, 20 years down the road when it is more accessible. I spent 1.5+ years on my 2005 car's ECU to reverse engineer most of the maps, since no public tuning files existed. I then went and spent 1 year on the TCM for which again, no tuning files existed. With the patent files, I was able to discover the algorithms and maps, and am even in IDA as I write this, and in Ghidra emulating some code.
- gessha 1y agoIf you have anything written on this, I’d love to read it.
- marcusb 1y agoThe "locks out tuners" bit is pure click-bait non-sense. Tuners will either work around the sensors (as they have for decades) or replace the ECU with any number of aftermarket models.
- tlb 1y agoThe best way to lock out tuners would be for the stock ECU to provide as much power as possible. Although with turbocharged engines, you can turn the power up to the point where longevity goes way down. Still, you could give people a power limit knob they could turn at their own risk to have access to the whole Pareto frontier of performance and longevity. That'd leave no room for tuners.
- Loughla 1y agoGiving users a knob that essentially amounts to "reduce the life of your engine" is a terrible idea. Most people are SUPER ignorant about their vehicles and would be pissed when their turbo died early because they assumed a higher number on that scale was better without trying to figure out what it is.
- zardo 1y agoTo get the most power out of an engine you disregard emissions standards, the manufacturer can't do that without getting fines and recall orders.
- tlb 1y agoEmissions are tested on a standardized driving cycle that doesn't include full-throttle acceleration, so emissions at full throttle aren't counted. Which is reasonable: high-performance cars spend only a tiny fraction of their time at full throttle so it doesn't contribute much to overall emissions.
- marcusb 1y ago> Emissions are tested on a standardized driving cycle that doesn't include full-throttle acceleration Depends on the car. See Supplemental Federal Test Procedure US06[0], required by the EPA for light-duty vehicle certification since 2007. It is also largely irrelevant in the real world: nobody is going to tune a car to have mediocre part-throttle performance but then go all-out on full-throttle. 0 - https://www.epa.gov/vehicle-and-fuel-emissions-testing/dynamometer-drive-schedules#US06 https://www.epa.gov/vehicle-and-fuel-emissions-testing/dynam...
- neRok 1y agoFrom a technical/algorithmic POV - this doesn't sound particularly remarkable, because it sounds about the same as how modern CPU's "boost" themselves. And actually, I think there is similar tech in "speaker systems" already. An "older" one that I've read about is from RCF (an old+big Italian company with systems ranging from desktop to festival size), and they call it [Bass Motion Control](https://www.rcf.it/en/art-9-series https://www.rcf.it/en/art-9-series); > The BMC method works by creating a complete map of the dynamic behavior of the woofer, to generate a custom algorithm that only limits over-excursions. This gives total freedom of signal reproduction to the transducer. When high-pass filters normally protect the woofer motion from becoming destructive but change the phase behavior, the new BMC algorithm breaks conventional rules. Now I don't know how effective RCF's approach truly is, but another company that is doing "big-things" is Dirac. They released a blog post about a year ago titled [Boosting Audio System Sustainability with Dirac](https://www.dirac.com/blog/boosting-audio-system-sustainability-with-dirac/ https://www.dirac.com/blog/boosting-audio-system-sustainabil...), and there is a section called Enhancing performance with optimized components; > By employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, we can make the driving force on the voice coil (the part of the speaker that turns electricity into sound) more consistent, improving the mechanical design and compensating for magnetic limitations. > NLC adjusts the voice coil current to correct force factor irregularities (inconsistencies in the voice coil’s efficiency) without requiring complex mechanical measurements. In tests with an otherwise suboptimal driver, our technology reduced distortion by 10 dB, nearly matching the performance of a well-designed driver.
- datax2 1y agoThis article is covering two different topics and trying to make it seem like one thing that it is not... 1. GM is using an ML model for their "torque management" which is a fancy of of saying a linear feel pedal. 2. This new generation of ecu has more encryption... every new generation of GM ecu has more lockouts. The author alludes to how tuner will not be able to beat GM's torque mapping controls with aftermarket tuning. Sure... but often times turners are not targeting the drivablity mapping of an OEM tune, they are targeting fuel, ignition, and or boost mapping to compensate for better fuels, more VE (turbos), or other power adders. TBH on flagship sports cars, we are on the knifes edge of optimizations for most platforms; most aftermarket solutions are now just lop-siding the maximized "any condition" performance OE's seek for simply more power. Power that typically will sacrifice either low end, drivability, and or reliability. The sweet spot for performance tuning now a days exist in the middle range of vehicles for most manufactures where engines are not focused on their ultimate tuning potential VS reliability. This all being said, these torque management strategies are nothing new, GM is just using fancy math blocks within their ecu that can account for more inputs and a higher resolution. Modern standalone ecus like Emtron and Motec utilize these types of torque strategies to better pair with modern high end transmissions like the 8hp90 and DL800. These transmissions need to communicate with the ECU to ensure power delivery from the engine works with shifting performance and clutch engagement.
- genter 1y agoOEM's are still worried about emissions, aftermarket tunes are not. For example, enabling power enrichment at less throttle opening will improve performance and allow you to run a little bit more timing, but also increase hydrocarbon emissions.
- bluGill 1y agoThere is the big one - OEMs have to meet mandated emissions regulations and governments check (see VW). Aftermarket legally has to meet the same regulations, but in practice (at least so far) they mostly have not been checked, and if they are checked it is only after they have sold something and got it installed on a car, while OEMs get checked before they sell anything. Which is to say aftermarket is generally just trading power/fuel efficiency (often both) for worse emissions.
- johnea 1y agoThat's really awesome! For last century's technology. Will they make a Stanley Steamer version too?