Chip Tuning the BMW i8 – chip tuning in hybrid vehicles

A perfect design and great driving experience, a super-sport with fuel economy under 8 litres per 100 km even with more aggressive driving! That’s the all-around perfect, luxury sportscar from BMW – BMW i8.

We got hold of this beauty by BMW, the hybrid i8 model. It’s fitted with a synchronous hybrid engine with high-performance electronics, an integrated charging module and a generator mode for its kinetic energy recuperation. Zero to a hundred in 4.4 seconds and a maximum speed of 250 km/h.

The BMW i8 has a hybrid all-four-wheel drive. The combustion engine drives the rear wheels while the electric motor drives the front axle. The petrol engine is equipped with 6-speed automatic transmission, the electric motor with two-speed automatic transmission.

The combustion engine technology is the BMW TwinPower Turbo, Straight High Precision Injection, and a fully variable Valvetronic distribution valve.

Now, we would like to thank our customer who lent us his car for three days so we could properly test it. Our test drive fuel economy, with no lavish driving, was low at 7.5 litres per 100 km.

I must say, the car is a complete head-turner. Wherever we stopped, people flocked in crowds around us. And when doors opened vertically, people went crazy taking photos. It’s a pity that all of us on the Quantum Team already has a partner, because finding a gorgeous girl driving this car would be no problem at all 🙂

But back to work. First, we read the engine control unit data. BMW decided to fit the car with a Bosch MEV-D 17.2.3 ECU with internal memory and a TC1793 microprocessor. The unit bench takes the reading directly and, apart from from the processor, a back-up of the EPROM is done. Subsequently, we did the ECU back-up, as well as the optimisation and engine-map adjustment in the ECU. For obvious reasons, this car’s chip tuning was measured at the professional MAHA test room of our partner Škoda Auto Jarov.

The petrol engine performance is 170 kW, with a torque value of 320 Nm. Together with the electric engine, they come close to a performance of 266 kW and 570 Nm. After the tuning was done, performance of the petrol engine increased to 195 kW and 432 Nm of torque. Overall, the full power of the system is now 291 kW (396 hp) and torque is 682 Nm.

Quantum chip tuning, professional engine map tuning. All modifications are done individually for every car and firmware in the control unit of a given engine. Our work is our pleasure. We want to be better, we want to stay ahead of the rest – and not only on the Czech market.