dpjones

After speaking with Sam, I realized that it would have cost me less money to send my car to GTM. Also, my car would have had a specific tune for it which would likely yield more power from the kit. Even factoring in the cost of shipping my car to and from GTM, I would have paid less for more a better tune. To elaborate on this, GTM provides two different turbo kits:

1) One is a “Turn Key” kit that includes all the parts and the tune (ECU Flash). This tune is a general tune that will be safe for the car. This kit includes the fuel pump and injectors, but does not include the down pipes or external waste gates. The full retail price of this kit is $8495.
2) The other is a “Tuner” kit that does not include the tune (ECU Flash). It includes the down pipes and external waste gates, but does not include the fuel pump or injectors. The full retail price of this kit is $7995.

If you send your car to GTM, you would get the “Tuner” kit and purchase the fuel pump and injectors. The full retail price of this is $8694. If you send your car somewhere else, or do it yourself, you would get the “Turn-Key” kit and purchase the down pipes and the external gates. The full retail price of this is $9595. Right off the bat there is a $901 savings. If GTM does the turbo kit, they will then put your car on their dyno and custom tune it. Even charging an amount for this, the cost would still be less and you have a custom tune which should yield better results. On top of that, where Sharif charges the full retail price for the turbo kit, down pipes, etc, GTM usually provides discounts, as you would expect, when you purchase in quantity. I have evidence of this from another customer of GTM. Then after removing the sales tax, I feel I would have spent a significant less amount of money, and had a better performing car, not to mention all of the problems noted here.

Sharif touts how he is capable of tuning the VQ37VHR motors. He told me several times on the phone that if he had to, he could tune the car. He also told me that he could get more power out of the motor if he tuned it. While I was in Georgia picking up my car, Sharif even told me that he wants to get himself and other in their shop training from Uprev to be able to tune the VQ37VHR motors. I can't think of a reason that he would need this training since he kept telling me how good he was at tuning them.

To add to this, Forged charged me $565 more than GTM's Internet (Retail) price for the down pies and external wastegates. When I picked up my car I brought this to Sharif's attention. He took the difference off my bill, but he made it sound like he was losing money. He told me that he paid more for the kit than $1100 retail price. It was hard for me to keep calm with him looking me in the eye telling me this. A simple mistake may have been made, but why can't he say that instead of telling me that now I'm paying him less than what GTM charged him? I have the purchase order from Forged to GTM showing exactly what he ordered and how much Forged paid GTM for the parts. The purchase order showed Forged ordering the Stage 1 turbo kit, and it showed that Forged paid below the internet/retail price for all of the items from GTM. This all leads into why I feel he didn't want me ordering the parts and bringing them with me....he gets the parts at a discount and makes a profit off of them....so basically I had to pay the Sales Tax, and full Internet pricing so he could make more money. I would have saved a bunch ordering all of it myself (no tax and some discounted pricing), and even more sending it to GTM...even with having to ship the car.

Sharif kept assuring me that my car was ready to go, all they had to do was get the ECU Flash. Once he finally got the flash (I believe this was around 2nd week of October), then more came up.

1) First my car wouldn't run for more than a couple of seconds. After 2 days of switching out injectors, trying this, trying that, they found the fuel was bad. Sharif says they had to wait on a modification to the fuel pump assembly so they left my fuel pump out leaving the gas tank exposed. Why was it left exposed?

2) Forged Performance then found an exhaust leek and that my Camp 2 was not hooked up to the Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT) sensor. This cost some more time.

3) My car has the All-wheel steering and Sharif found that my car wouldn't drive straight...the rear wheels were steering the car wrong. Again, several days of delays, and finally the Nissan dealer there reset some things and all was good. This is to be expected I guess when disconnecting the Steering Coupler...although I will say that when I installed my HFCs, I disconnected it and didn't have any issues.

I know of no reason all of these things couldn't have been addressed before they received the ECU Flash. The factory fuel pump could have been put in and the car could have been started and driven lightly. I had even asked Sharif to do this, but he said it wasn't necessary. It was about 4 weeks after they got my Tune that I was able to pick up my car. The car I had been driving was a lease and had to go back at the end of October. Sharif did pay for me to drive a rental for the remaining 3 to 4 weeks before my car was ready.

Another thing that came up was Sharif asked me if I knew what a wire/sensor was for that was hanging behind my Navigation Screen / Radio. He sent me pictures of it. I did not know what it was. Sharif kept alluding to maybe I had dislodged it when I put in the KP Technology modules in my car. First of all, I didn't appreciate that. I then sent him pictures of my install that clearly showed this wire/sensor was not there. What stinks is that I kept asking him to take it to a dealer and find out what it is. I felt like he kept blowing me off and he didn't think it was important. I'm sorry, but this is my new $40000 car that I have barely had a chance to drive, it is important to me. I don't even think my car had 5000 miles on it when I dropped it off, including the drive to Georgia.

One thing I didn't realize at first was that I would be losing my window washers. This is prudent living in Missouri where we get a decent amount of ice and snow. In my opinion, a shop should mention something like this ahead of time, especially when it involves a safety issue. I only became aware of this when Sharif sent me pictures of my car with the blow-off valves and intercooler piping mounted. The factory location for the washer reservoir was completely consumed by the piping and such. I mentioned this several times to Sharif, and he knew very well that this car is my daily driver, yet he never would even respond about it for a long time, let alone do anything about it. Again, shouldn't a shop like this be able to do something about this? Despite my concerns, I again felt as if Sharif was just blowing me off. The bottom line is, nothing was ever done about it. Why when I asked Sam at GTM about it does he simply tell me, we can make one work? Sam told me there is a company called Denso that makes a kit that will plug directly into the factory wiring harness and can be mounted somewhere else in the engine bay or hidden away somewhere. The installed cost of the kit would less than $100.

Another item of interest is the HKS EVC Boost Controller. When all this started, Sharif explained to me how this could be used to vary the boost based on Engine RPM or vehicle Speed. This seemed like a really good feature to me. David got his car back several weeks before me and I went to check it out. I looked at his manual for the EVC and it mentioned a Scramble feature that could be enabled and the best way to do this is with an external switch. I called and asked Sharif about this. Although not wrong, I feel that when you are paying someone to install something in your car, they should go over the possible features of it and not make assumptions. If not actually installing the switch, at least install the harness that came with the EVC and run the wires somewhere easy to get to. Same goes for the harness for Easy Writer Software...this is an optional harness, but again, I was never even told about this. Sharif agreed to get the Easy Writer harness and install it along with the harness for the Scramble switch. While talking about it, I asked him again about whether it was wired up for RPM and Vehicle Speed. He now tells me no...They normally never do this because most customers don't want this feature. I did want this, as we had already spoken about it, and again, why make those assumptions? He agreed to hook them up. Just a couple of days before my flight to Georgia, Sharif tells me that they hooked up the RPM wire, but they couldn't figure out how to hook up the wire for the vehicle speed. WHAT????