My Evolve Experience! :)

[M3ANMACHINE]

WARNING: Long Read Ahead! tl;dr below

Alright, so when I purchased my 2008 E90 M3, it had previously been tuned with Dinan Stage 2 software, as it previously was running a full Dinan Exhaust system before switching to Akrapovic, and most recently Test Pipes + AE Performance Exhaust. I lived with the Dinan tune for the past year, and noticed that the driveability was really not that great. The midrange felt very flat, and once the car hit 4k RPM it literally felt like VTEC kicked in and the car finally made some power. Not to mention when initially starting the car in the morning and driving down my street, at around 2k RPM the car would buck almost uncontrollably. I dealt with it for a while, mainly because I figured why waste the money on a tune when I technically already have one, but given my previous experience with Evolve on my E46 M3, I was confident that I would gain some good results from upgrading.

Here we go:

So I purchased my Evolve-R tune on June 19th using a returning customer discount which made the experience even better the second time around!

My tuning cable was delivered on the 23rd, only 2 business days later! I was extremely pleased and immediately "Read" my ECU when I got home from work that night and sent the file to Evolve for programming, etc.

I requested the following options:
240E Update ( I was running on 231E)
Stage 2 Catless Tune
02 Sensor Ready
Cold Start Delete
8600 RPM Rev Limit
Overrun & Burble

I was unsure how I would like the Overrun feature, so I kindly requested 2 separate tunes, one with and one without, and Imran said that they would be able to do that without hesitation! Very cool.

So I emailed my "Stock" file to Evolve at around 11PM PST, and received my new UPDATED tune file from Mateen @ Evolve at 9AM the next morning! I was stoked, considering that the follow up email after they receive your stock file says to wait approximately 72 hours.

So here is where things got a bit tricky... None of this is Evolve's fault, but it definitely adds to my review of Evolve and how excellent their customer service is.

The day I received my new tuned file, I obviously wanted to upload it ASAP! So I plugged my car into a battery tender, hooked up the Evolve Cable, and began updating to 240E. Well, with 3 minutes left, the update failed. I tried it multiple times and it still wouldn't work. So I texted a friend of mine, Alex @ Performance Euroworks, to see if he could help me. He tried troubleshooting with me for a bit, before he offered me his phone card information to call Evolve without being charged for calling international rates. HUGE thanks to Alex for going above and beyond to help me out!

So I called Evolve and coincidentally Mateen answered the phone. He troubleshooted with me for a bit, and long story short, sent me multiple other files via email that he hoped would resolve the issue. Nothing worked...
Mateen eventually came up with the idea that my Dinan tune was not allowing me to update to 240E (they have never experienced this issue before). He suggested I head to the dealer to get flashed back to stock. Now, I had just replaced my battery a couple of days before, and needed the battery registered and was planning on heading to EAS anyways, so this was actually kind of convenient for me. So I made an appointment with EAS for the upcoming Monday and sadly had to hold off on Evolving my car for now.

Monday comes along and I head to EAS for my battery registration and 240E update. Tom gets everything going quickly and he mentioned that the 240E update time looks to be a bit longer than usual (likely due to the Dinan tune again). Luckilly, it was a success! I was back to stock 240E software. My CEL came on exactly 23 miles after driving home.

Next step was to re-read my OEM file to send back to Mateen for tuning.
Again, I sent it late in the evening, and received the new updated tunes early in the morning. I woke up early hoping to tune my car, and am very pleased to say that it was FINALLY a success!

Impressions so far:

It has been almost a week since I installed the Evolve tune, and 1 full tank of gas, and I must say, I am not 100% sure if I feel a difference in the butt dyno, but it does feel a bit better. The cold start delete is great in my neighborhood, so I don't wake the neighbors, and the idle stays solid. I immediately noticed the lack of bucking in the early mornings when first driving down my street. The midrange feels much more powerful and the entire rev-range is very linear compared to before.

The burble overrun feature is supposed to only work when the exhaust is pretty hot, and running above 4500 RPM. Not something that will constantly be happening during daily driving which is nice, but I did hope it would be a bit more prominent. But this could possibly simply be due to my exhaust setup.

I did have a nice spirited run this past Saturday, and was able to hear some of the backfiring which was very cool. Mainly on deceleration after a strong gear pull, there would be a nice loud backfire! Pretty neat. Makes me want to buy a catless X-Pipe and be really obnoxious!

Anyways, I am very very pleased with the software thus far, and will be dynoing the car in the near future to see if I gained anything after switching from the Dinan on 231 to the Evolve on 240.

Special thanks go out to Mateen and the Evolve Team, Alex @ Performance Eurowerks, and Tom @ EAS.

Thanks for reading!!!

tl;dr Got Evolve Software, previous Dinan tune was blocking the software update. Had to go to EAS to flash 240E on the car. Evolve tune finally installed. Much impressed, very speed, nice loud wow!

[mkPOTO]

great write up!

[SpookM3]

Evolve is the BEST..