We love our Mini
There's no doubt about it, our Mini Cooper S is a great car. Its quick, powerful, goes round corners like its on rails and makes a great noise when pushed hard. Unfortunately it cant, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered economical.
Can we make it more eco-friendly?
We could have the engine detuned in order to get more miles per gallon, or we could have purchased all manner of devices (all crap) promising us an increased range but we chose to go a different way. We chose to make ours more powerful.
More powerful?
Yes, it does sound odd! Making a car more powerful surely means it must use more fuel? But we aren't talking about making a rocket ship that spews flames out the back as it heads to Warp 5, we talking about a slight increase in power to make it more driveable.
The idea being that as the engine is stronger it doesn't have to work so hard to move the car, therefore using less fuel.
Remapping
To get this extra power we had the Mini Remapped. Remapping a cars ECU (Electronic Control Unit) allows you to refine how the engine performs giving you more power, more torque and more miles per gallon.
Having seen what a Company called Angel Tuning did to Adams BMW (Which is now very, very quick indeed) we booked them to remap our Mini.
They came to us and worked on the car at our house. After about 2 hours of playing with a laptop plugged into the Mini the Angel Tuning man had finished and off we went for a test drive.
First impressions where good, very good in fact. There was more power available across a wider rev range than before. It was now more driveable and when you put your foot down hard it really did move. It was fast before, but now it was better.
For the fact fans out there in internet land our Mini went from 163bhp to 180bhp and the Torque went from 155lbs to 171lbs.
Does it use less fuel?
If its driven in the same way as it was before the remap then yes it does, but not by much.
At best it gives between 1 and 2 miles per gallon more round town, not a stunning increase we agree but an increase non the less.
We don't know what it does over a long run as it hasn't been on one yet, but we are expecting a similar increase.
Sadly its very difficult to resist putting your foot down hard to enjoy the extra power, and when you do that its just as uneconomical as before.
So in summary, the remapping has only made a slight improvement on the mpg we get from the Mini. However it has made a car that was already a lot of fun to drive, that bit more fun.