DRTuned - Tuning My Car With My Steam Deck
I own a 2015 Mazda 3. It's far from the fastest car on the road, and after owning a modified Audi A4, and driving some other fun and fast cars, every time I go back to it it feels like a bit of a downgrade (save for the reliability!).
After the reliability nightmare that my Audi was, I have very little interest in buying a car like that one any time soon despite how fun and fast it was, but wouldn't it be nice if my existing car was a bit speedier?
Enter the world of tuning. A car's tune is basically the software that controls the very low-level portions of the engine. It controls engine timing, air-fuel ratio, and much more. Most car manufacturers make a very safe default, or stock tune for their car. They don't optimize it for each and every single car that rolls off the production line, they make one safe tune and apply it to all of them.
This means that there's generally some room for performance gains on every single stock tune in any car. Additionally, my car takes regular 87 octane gas. I can tune it for 91 octane premium gas, and have it make more power still at the cost of the increased price of 91 octane gas over the regular stuff.
DRTuned
DRTuned is a company that specializes in tuning Mazdas specifically. Most tuning companies require bringing your car into a shop, and doing everything in one long, expensive day. DRTuned is a little different. They ship you out the cable to connect your laptop to your car, and send you a software license for MazdaEdit, the computer software for updating your car's tune.
They do the tune in multiple, shorter, chunks of time. You tell them info about your car, what engine you have, what year it is, what mods you've done if any, and then send you back an update tune for you to install on your car. If you've bought their higher tier of tuning, they'll have you do some tests once you've installed the updated tune, and send you a couple of revisions.
Where The Steam Deck Comes In
Unfortunately, I'm in Santa Cruz going to college. I'm far from my home is Seattle with all of my car tools and whatnot, and my laptop is a new MacBook with one of Apple's M-series CPUs. This means that I can't run Windows on my laptop (a virtual machine doesn't work with the drivers for the cable required to communicate with the car) in order to run the software for tuning my car. I also can't use my desktop PC, because that's far away in my dorm room, and I don't feel like purchasing a several hundred foot USB cable to connect my desktop to my car.
However, what I do have that is portable and can run Windows is my Steam Deck. I set up my Steam Deck to dual-boot Windows, and installed all of my tuning software there. That's basically equivalent to a Windows laptop hardware-wise.
Using the necessary dongles and cables to connect my Steam Deck to my car, I was able to upload the custom tune DRTuned had sent my way, and my car now makes some more power!
Effects Of The Tune
Now, even after all this, I wouldn't call my Mazda fast. Before the tune, I had the 2.5 liter 4 cylinder making its stock 185 horsepower. I did a couple of tests, and it got a zero-to-sixty time of about 8.2 seconds.
I haven't gotten a chance to dyno it yet, but given results from DRTuned's many other tuned Mazda 3s, I can estimate I now have around 205 horsepower. The car makes much more torque down low, which makes it much more pleasant to drive around town, as well as being a little speedier. Lastly, I did a couple more zero-to-sixty runs, and got a new result of 7.2 seconds. The tune dropped my time by one whole second, which may not sound like a lot, but given that that was software changes only, that's incredibly impressive.
Since tuning the car, I've noticed no downsides or problems other than the fact that I have to run more expensive gas now. I've even gotten every-so-slightly better gas mileage since the car now makes more power at the same RPM and throttle position, however that only holds true when driving the car efficiently, which I'm not sure the tune encourages.
I'd recommend the tune and this tuning company to anyone with a Mazda who wants a little more power out of their car, but it's important to understand it won't make your Mazda win any races against actual sports cars. I would consider it just a quality-of-life improvement that makes your car more pleasant to drive generally.
Future Plans
This summer, I intend to upgrade to the tier 2 tune that DRTuned offers, which would give me more revisions to the tune, and included changing things like raising the redline from 6,250 to a little closer to 7,000, optionally changing the rev limiter from a soft one (boring) to a hard fuel cut (sounds much cooler and is harder to miss by accident), and possibly removing the speed limiter for my track days. I'll make a new post or update this one when I get to that.
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