Quote:
Originally Posted by ImportConvert
Stillen's presence on the forum that I have seen is polite/professional.
My thought is that my and other's angst is stirred because of consistantly low dyno numbers from those with the Stillen SC, as well as the issues Stillen had with bringing the SC to the market. It appeared to me, an outside observer, that the whole thing was very hap-hazard and had serious issues regarding the tune that weren't corrected before it hit the market. The way people rip on Nissan for not having an Oil Cooler on the NISMO from the factory, this is 10X worse in my opinion. The whole "No 2 cars are the same" thing is certainly true, but Diablo and LS1Edit and Predator and all of those canned tunes seem to have no issues improving stock tunes across the board. Stillen shouldn't, either. Maybe (probably is) there is something I don't know, but I always heard Stillen was good, quality, expensive-but you see where your money went- type stuff. This SC kit has not struck me as such. The hardware looks great. The implementation, not so much. I sure as hell wouldn't pay that much for what amounts to a 100whp* increase on a stock car when there are other options available.
*Backed up by track times and dyno numbers I have seen for the setup with a standard pulley.
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I see what you're saying and believe me, what you all felt about the initial release struggles was nothing compared to what we have all experienced here at the shop. In regards to the issues that you describe, no doubt there were some issues with a few of the early installations. Some issues were caused by the installation, some were caused by glitches in the factory NISSAN tune that were unknown until UpRev was able to find them. The good news though is that all of the installations that are being done now and the customer's who were experiencing issues have been sorted out or are in the final stages of being sorted out. Keep in mind, out of all of the kits that we have sold only a VERY small percentage have actually had any issues. I'm sure everyone has heard the saying that you don't hear from the happy people, you only hear from the upset ones.
Unfortunately the issues that some of the early adopters experienced have cast a shadow over our testing and our development. A lot of people have made statements along the lines of "if they really did that much testing, all of this would have shown." I know how much testing we did because I was closely involved in a lot of it. Some members of the forum will remember when I brought our test car up to the So. Cal LA meet back in February or March. Right before I put miles on the car Steve took it to Mammoth mountain to do cold weather, high elevation testing. Carrying all the way onto Virginia City near Reno, NV. We also took the G37 5AT to El Toro air force base and flogged on it out there. We also completed some installations on beta testers that very few people knew about. Before a single kit shipped we had probably 5 cars running in perfect order with thousands of miles on them.
In regards to power output, it really depends on how you look at it. When we did that initial release that dyno was still during winter. All of the dyno tests performed recently have been during summer which means higher temperatures and higher humidity...two things that hurt power. I think it was last week that we had a G37 hard top convertible automatic trans with heavy aftermarket wheels that put down 430 horsepower. During summer we had a bone stock 370Z with auto trans that put down around 415. I'll bet if we put that same car up again today we would probably "make" another 15 horsepower without changing anything.
Another car that we installed a kit on just before SEMA completed the installation friday afternoon and drove straight to SEMA from our shop and has been great ever since with the standard R8 tune. Another car drove from Georgia straight to SEMA and back in a week (around 4,300 miles IIRC) with our standard kit and R8 tune with no issues at all.