Accessorizing Your Vehicle

Are you curious as to how you can crank the horsepower (HP) in your truck? Maybe you just want to know how to play around with an HP tuner? Whatever your reason, here are the different aspects of truck engine performance you can tweak with an HP Tuners VCM Suite.

Torque

Turn the torque up or down in your engine with an HP tuner. Torque, for those non-truck people, is the force that drives the spinning of the axles. Tweaking your torque, then, helps to make the axles spin faster and harder, which allows your wheels to dig into mud and uneven surfaces and get out and off of those sticky surfaces. Torque is different from horsepower, but it is still one of the things that the tuner can adjust for you.

Horsepower

Horsepower is the power inside the engine block. It does affect the torque since a dead or slow engine is definitely not going to give enough torque to your wheels. If you tweak the horsepower in the engine, be sure to tweak the torque as well so that the two are not so mismatched that the truck has a difficult time getting going or has too much power and torque for what you need the truck to do—if that is even possible!

Battery Power

Do you want to conserve battery power? Maybe you want to be sure that the extra "juice" you need for a job comes in spurts, such as when you are trying to pull another vehicle out of a ditch. You can control the battery power used by your truck so that you always have enough power and you are not burning the battery out (or batteries, as some heavy-duty trucks have more than one). If you know that you will be pulling a heavy load or hauling heavy loads all day, program your tuner to amplify the amount of power you will need for the day.

Ready to Get Started?

Buy a tuner. Buy the software for the tuner, like the VP Suite, which is easy enough even for beginners to learn. Then, find the component plug-in spot under your truck's dash. You may need to invert yourself in the truck seat to find it, depending on the make and model of your truck. Plug in the tuner, turn it on, upload your "tweaks" or "tunes," and test out the results of your first attempt of ramping up your truck's performance.