Quote:
Originally Posted by -ZS-Carpenter
I don't see how people think a couple extra gears will make much if any difference. 7, 9 whatever, a slush box is a slush box. I'd rather go through the growing pains on this and have something great than trade for an auto |
The swap scene has been evolving well, I am still paying attention and watching. When we first started this, it was a lot more difficult than it looks to be lately. One TCM brand has really risen to the top on popularity, called HTG. I’ve been watching a transition where they are going from tons of customers posting complaining about how helpless and unguided they feel, just ready to give up and put a stock trans back in… to tons of satisfied users in love with the swap and working on refining their trans tuning as they go. It seems like they are becoming a more streamlined solution as time passes… 6 months ago I would have never want to have been responsible for sending any customers down that path.. but it’s getting better.
Another company has released a printed circuit board that basically handles all the wiring you have to do inside the transmission to convert it for use with standalone TCM. This is huge for making it more DIY friendly. You still have to wire it, but this circuit board lays it out and clarifies what you’re doing.
There is another company who had cracked the internal TCM of the older E90 DCT, and were able to take control of it. This is awesome because now they can send commands to the original bmw TCM to tell it when to shift etc, and carry over all the R&D BMW had in the TCM, making it have truly OEM driving quality out of the box. They were originally saying they had no plans to ever crack the M4 trans, but lately they have shown otherwise and that they are working on it.
So it’s not that this project is dead in the water, but that we have sort of been waiting for the right time to strike. I did not want to end up with a dozen+ customers that cant drive their car for a year because the support structure isn’t in place to get them to the finish line with the project.
The 8HP swaps have been picking up and that’s a good thing because it is a great trans and will definitely sway a lot of would be DCT swappers, leaving more DCTs for us and not driving the prices up too quickly.
The mechanical part of the swap.. as you know, designs are finished and proven in use. They can be produced quite literally at any time.