wade

iTrader: (1)

On my upcoming build, I am going to go Coil on plug.

I am stuck between buying an AEM or Autronic. I have used autronic and loved it, had no big issues with it, but the cost for me to get another is a lot higher than finding an AEM for my car. And, cost/money is a big thing in my budget.

I hear issues all the time with the AEM, little bugs and glitches here and there. So the savings of a few hundred dollars seems not worth it and makes me lean back to the more costly Autronic. They both have their pros and cons I am well aware of.

Is there any added insight you guys can give me?

SOrry for the rant/noob sounding thread, but I feel I can get some good insight from a good few of your guys.

PrecisionH23a

Both are wonderful systems. The deciding factor for you is really going to be what your tuner is most comfortable working with though. AEM has really ironed out any issues that they used to have.

wade

iTrader: (1)

Yea, I have heard they have cleaned up the AEM alot. I have been hearing and reading Joe Simpson is having some issues, kinda curious what is going on.

Turbo-charged

aem's support is really good from what ive seen.

not sure if you saw how my car ran this weekend compared to how it has ran all year. all i did differnt was unplug one aem box and plug in another. the car went 9.9, 9.8, 9.7, 9.6, 9.6

makes you wonder. i need to talk to whoally tomarrow and see whats going on.

tony1

I'd take an AEM over an autronic, not to mention the fact that you don't have to wire it all up.

wade

iTrader: (1)

joe, yea i saw the car. did you figure it out? I tried to call the shop today, but it was too late. I was in indy and witness it.

TOny, I feel ya on the wiring, but i also like to make my own harness to make it simple and clean NOt to sure what i will do yet. I hear AEM has gotten alot better tho lately. When i had aem 5 years ago, i couldnt get it to work nor any tech support

Turbo-charged

all i figured out is that putting a new box in the car and it ran consistent. problems that randomly popped up with the old box were...

antilag only worked sometimes. when it didnt work, the car would just fall on its face.

dattalogging is inconsistent. i only got the computer to pull 1 log in indy.

AFR at indy read a solid 11.2-11.3. put in the new aem box and afr's actually read correclty rather than holding a steady value.

with the new box the antilag sounds totally different even with all the same settings. however with the new box, the antilag wont work at anything less than 7500rpm.

the weirdest thing of all on the old box is that when i first got the T1 trigger kit, we had to find out the coil dwell settings that worked for my car. after that tony came up with all the coil dwell settings that were for the software update or something i think. one day my car randomly had a 6k rpm rev limiter. remembered tony came up with the new dwell settings for the new software....entered them into the computer and the limiter went away. this makes NO sense because there was no software updates done.


a buddy of mine does a lot of high dollar rallye cars. they use motec in all the high dollar cars....m8? i guess it is. for whatever reason he likes the autronic stuff when compared to an m4 in some of their lower budget projects. im still kind of confused why. he wont even consider using aem.

they alway say its best to go with what your tuner knows....but it seems like there is problems with every system out there other than motec. i know tony and art had a hell of a time with the autronic stuff. i love hondata but its easy to outgrow. aem seems to work good when it works...but i havnt pulled a good log out of it since i put my trans in the car...and now my boost controllers all screwed up and since i cant get logs i cant properly set up the timers. i also had electromotive in my car too which just wouldnt work in my car for whatever reason.

im in the same boat as you. im not worried about COP...but i want an EMS that i can trust to do what i need it to do every time, and that will pull a log every time.

wade

iTrader: (1)

i just see alot of high hp cars with dizzys mis fire. Never seen too many that ran good. ? Even those MSD dizzys suck

tony1

Me, Joe, Art, and many others have had good luck with the cam trigger and a single channel ignition setup (just using the dist. to distribute spark). The problem with the distributors is the triggers inside, which the cam trigger solves. You don't necessarily have to go COP to fix the dist. problems.

Turbo-charged

thats whats cool about the T1 kit. you get the cam and crank signal from the cam trigger kit..........you can completely gut your distributor and take everything out of it other than the cap and rotor. this eliminates the missfires, all the distributor does is distribute spark.

i just saved you a lot of money. paypal me some money or something

i have a distributor, tony has a distributor, steve's 8 second hotrod car has a distributor, eggum has a distributor, i dont remember if chuck does or not?


you can use the distributor, you just cant use any of the sensors inside of it lol

wade

iTrader: (1)

thanks tony. we were talking about me getting a kit from you earlier today. : If you get a min, PM me what it runs so i can get a running tally.

wade

iTrader: (1)

joe, if u told me sooner, i would have gave u straight CASH MONEY in indy

Turbo-charged

me and tony just said the same thing damn near.

im so tired of dealing with crap from EMS's. the motec stuff doesnt seem to be nearly as expensive as i thought it was.....ive never used it....so my word isnt really worth a damn......but its one of those things where i think its worth the extra money to know your EMS is never the problem.

we will have to see how $ goes in the offseason for me. on motec's sight right now doing some reading. it almost seems like motec is the last step for my car to sort of have everything bullet proof.


anybody ever used bigstuff? ive only seen it on one car.....and a local mustang.

i never realized the honda motec stuff came with a badass harness too....hmm

Laosakademiks

iTrader: (1)

aem f/s in sig

DaveF

there is a motec m4 forsale on ebay for 900 buy it now

AutoLab

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by tony1 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">I'd take an AEM over an autronic, not to mention the fact that you don't have to wire it all up.</TD></TR></TABLE>

i normally side with just about everything you have to say man but I have to ask, what is with all the hate towards the autronic system? I know ray hall is unfortunately difficult to deal with and the dealer network in the states has kinda gone to ****, but we know thats his own doing and it sucks. but seriously, Autronic is am amazingly easy system to use that has control and reliability of systems costing 2 and 3 times as much.

I definitely would never take an AEM plug and pray over an Autronic. I dont mind the AEM, it has gotten better. The early days got me so frustrated with the stupid bugs and tricks that you had to know just to get it to connect that I wouldnt even touch it. Ive been messing with a few cars running it lately and its decent. I dont care for all the crap in the software, I dont need to log my toasters temp etc. They could cut about 2/3 of that horseshit out of there and you would still have enough options and buttons to drive someone nuts.

Ive been selling, installing and running Autronic systems in my cars and my customers cars for almost 10 years now. Ive had one issue with an injector driver in those ten years. I think thats an amazing success, definitely not something I can say about any other single system out there that Ive setup.

-bill

tony1

No hate, just personal experience. I've had nothing but problems on 2 of the 2 systems i've worked with. 100% as far as i'm concerned. I'm glad you've had luck with them, i'm glad for everybody who does have luck with them, unfortunately i was not one of them. I think i'm a fairly sharp guy when it comes to this stuff, and i have a lot of experience with different systems. If i have had a bad experience with a certain system, i'm not going to use it or recommend it, and odd are my bad experience was not due to lack of knowledge on my part.

I wouldn't expect you to think too highly of a system that gave you lots of problems every time you worked with it.

FWIW, Arturbo's car was one of the ones with problems when he was running the SM2 and at the time Ben Strader was almost using Autronic exclusively, he couldn't get it to work right either. We wasted time upgrading and sending chips back and forth, the kind of bullshit that you shouldn't have to deal with when you use a good quality system.

Ben is now almost exclusively Motec, and i will never spend time trying to make an Autronic work again.

AutoLab

What kind of issues were you having with Arts car?

I agree that once you get fed up with something youre not going to be likely to recommend it or jump on the possibility of using it again down the road. But you have to agree that the isolated issues, whatever they were, with Arts car dont even begin to compare to the widespread god awful absolutely ridiculous bugs, quirks, and reliability problems that have plagued the AEM EMS for years upon years.

That is the point to my whole argument, I really could never see someone as inclined and experienced as yourself recommending something like an AEM over an Autronic.

Bottom line is, Im going to make you agree with my point or the next time I see you at a race I will force you to a thumb war, wrastlin' match or a game of sudoku.

-bill

wade

iTrader: (1)

sodoku is the damn devils advocate

tony1

Idling issues, timing issues, not making any power. All issues that completely disappeared when we put the motec in.

Had another issue with a plug and play autronic on a honda, came out of the box setup for the wrong air temp sensor and with timing errors. Plugged in a power fc and worked flawlessly.

I recommend AEM to a lot of people. Their issues in the old days are irrelevant, they have made major changes to their hardware, but the main reason i recommend them is that they are plug and play and come with basemaps that will start and idle a car on the first crank. The amount of time and money you will have into a motec or autronic by the time you get it to that point is pretty significant. Do i think the AEM is better than motec? hell no, but it's a better option for a lot of people.

Let me make sure i get across my true feelings about Autronic, it's one of the very few systems that i will not tune anymore... lol I got strong thumbs bitch... LOL

AutoLab

then I guess theres no getting through to you. If you have strong thumbs and we all know sudoku is a ************ then i reckon we be wrastlin. You might be from texas with steers and queers but Im a KY redneck so I think you will have your hands full. They teach you how to wrastle in grade school here for christ sake

wade

iTrader: (1)

i got $10 on the redneck! after hearing steers and queers.. .i dunno bout Tx anymore

BodyKits NW

Back then it was such a surprise that you guys had problems with autronic. Why? because for awhile there, there was a lot of what people on here like to call nut swingers for that autronic. There was a lot of hype with the system and for awhile there it could have been a pretty good bandwagon. It sucks that you supported a system for such a long time and on top of that you had Ben Strader tuning it and even then no go. I am really glad Art got a chance to just back away from it and check out something else. It was really too bad all that time had to go in it.

I have been using the AEM EMS since it first came out and it has come a long way. At one point there was frustration, but AEM has proven to have good customer service consistantly and has a staff that is quite interactive with there customers. With Tony's trigger setup the AEM EMS is flat out awesome and even without it, the EMS works really well. Unlike MSD, AEM has been able to keep as a supporter of there product. I can be rather stubborn and I hate it when parts don't work out for me, and even then I still try to give the manuf. a chance. Anyways, if you want to go COP, the AEM EMS is probably the easiest option. Again with Tony's kit this is simple to do, and on top of that, you can't beat the instructions. There is also tons of documentation on doing COP with the EMS, making it rather simple really. Overall, when it comes to ease of use, installation, reliability, the AEM beats the autronic hands down.

It honestly is almost unfair because due to the popularity, you can easily get a AEM EMS for 500-700 bucks used. It really is a no brainer. You get the trigger setup, your around 1000 or lil over. You then got a EMS that is easy to install, and will hopefully be trouble free like many others who run it.

tony1

FWIW, i was never a supporter of Autronic, i think Arturbo was the one responsible for starting that talk. lol It was the typical story you get about any new company that came from something. "it was designed by the guy that designed motec" is what i always heard. haha

Arturbo

There are a lot of features we liked on the autronic, but when it came down to making the power we needed for some reason it just wouldnt do it. We spent all year and a lot of money changing everything but the computer. We wish it would have worked out, I really do but it just didnt work out that way. Maybe it was something on my part because from what I am told the person I sold it to isnt having any problems. Either way, once you look at all the cost of everything Motec isnt really that expensive. It does everything I need it to do and more. I have the dinosaur Motec M48 but it still works better than most new systems out there!

On paper the autronic looked like it was an amazing system, but it just didnt work out that way. I still prefer the Autronic software over the M48 software, but when the M48 software works then I could care less what the software looks like even if it is dos.