[gnjax]

Originally Posted by DRLane

Sorry to hear, but understandably vendors are often operating on tight margins.

Something about the whole review feels skewed. That quoted response from AJ, would imply a lot of back and forth exhaustion... If you settled on a price, why sit on the decision for months before pulling the trigger? I don't think many businesses would honor a quote after 30 days. Lastly, I would suggest "support" and continued discounting are not one in the same. Especially considering you're not the original customer.

I can appreciate it's a huge bummer to drop $3k for an upgrade, but did you complete the install? Are you happy with the new performance?

Of course, I can understand they have tight margins and all (Although this is subject to debate, 400$ for a flashing cable, I doubt the margin is even close to tight on that for example), I'm not a choosing beggar I'm fine as long as everything is clear from the beginning.
I'm trying my best to not leave a skewed review and base my judgement on facts rather than emotions. I am trying to quote only relevant parts of the conversation as we had over 70 e-mails of exchange (mostly at the beginning when I was talking about my then-current kit and underwhelming performances based on a dyno result), but I'm not quoting them out of context to bend things in my favor. I very rarely had bad experiences with business as I usually try to check with them the most I can about a product before ordering to avoid disappointment later on.

I didn't pull the trigger earlier cause I contacted them as soon as I bought the car, but when starting the registration process in my country later on, I was told I had to go through a special testing process as the car was US spec (I'm in EU). Knowing it would take months and require me to put the car completely back to stock, I prefered waiting until that was done instead of going through the effort of upgrading right away and having to take everything back off then on again few months later to pass the tests.

Actually there wasn't much of back and forth concerning the price, they first told me the upgrade would be 3k and what was included in the upgrade (They mentionned injectors and flashing cable). I asked them if I could get the injectors and cable first and get that deduced from my future 625 upgrade order (Because they do not check for tune nor injectors upon registration test, so I could get the benefits from clean new injectors and tune right away, and it would be one less step to do later as it is part of the upgrade anyway). They answered me directly to that question by Yes.

Here are some quotes :

Upgrade to VT2-625 91aki fuel is $2995 plus shipping.

Upgrade to VT2-650 93aki fuel MINIMUM is $4495 plus shipping.

VT2 kits have a water to air intercooler built into the intake manifold, front mounted heat exhanger, with lines, reservoir, and Bosch electric pump.

Upgrade kits would be new manifold, intercooling system, belt, injectors, tuning cable with new tune, pulleys.

You would return your injectors, manifold, and pulley to us.

.. few mails talking about stuff

Me :

Also, if I end up ordering the cable and eventually injectors, will you deduce that from the price of the upgrade to the 625 kit when I sorted everything out on my 550 ?

Answer:

Yes, the new injectors are the same ones as used in the 625 kit.

Note I specifically asked if that would be deduced from my 625 kit upgrade.
Now fast forward to when I ordered the upgrade :

Them :

The upgrade cost is 2995 + shipping to VT2-625.

Me :

Wait i'm confused. When I first asked about upgrading, you told me the vt2-625 upgrade is 2995. The upgrade kit includes new injectors and cable. I already bought that separately, you told me it would be deduced from the price of the upgrade kit whenever i'm ready to do the full upgrade.

Them :

The upgrade cost I quoted you was from a VT1-550 to a VT2-625.

If you have a VT1-550 kit then you already have the cable and the correct injectors. IF you had an older kit with different injectors and you did not have an E-Flash cable for the car then obviously the upgrade kit would be more money since you did not have what was needed to perform the upgrade.

$2995 is for the chargecooler manifold with front cooler system/pump/lines and pulley/belt + manifold attachment brackets + matching software.

The thing is when I asked about the injectors and flashing cable deduced from my order they indeed knew that I had no cable and that I had older red injectors cause they asked me about it when we started talking about injectors. They even told me injectors and tuning cable was part of the upgrade on the first quote they gave me for the upgrade ...

After that there's been a back and forth of 3 more e-mails, essentially me quoting them like i did here before I gave up, they wouldn't even apologize for misleading me I mean how could I have figured this out by myself with the informations they gave me ... Even a little "sorry, that was a miscommunication, although we cannot honor these prices because of our tight margins, we can take off 50 bucks of your order or give you a discount on this or that if you want to make another order with us" would have been enough (And that is how any reputable business would act as well. We're not talking about a 5$ mistake, it's a freaking thousand). It's not even a money problem, hopefully I had the money, it's just about doing business properly and acknowledging your mistakes.

Anyway I went throught cause there's no one else I could buy the upgrade from. And then there was no back and forth about money before the answer I quoted on my first post.
Just me asking if I was supposed to send back old part to get a core charge refund, them telling me yes but there was no core charge applied to my order, and me telling them everywhere I saw people talking about upgrade had a core charge reimbursed and that it amounted to a total of roughly 2600$ for the upgrade after being reimbursed (And proposing an alternative deal as described in my first post).

I agree we did not settle on anything about it beforehand, and that's my bad for not asking this particular question earlier. It was just common sense for me, I don't see why they would not have charged me a core return, I live on the other side of the planet and they don't know me. There's no reason they would trust me to send them back the parts on good will, especially after what happened with the injectors and cable.

To answer your last question, I did complete the install and as I said in my original post, there's really nothing bad to say about the product. It's working fine, and they sure know how to make proper hardware.