Red bullet installed

Where are the manuals and dyna that state otherwise? Show me.

what’s the obd going to show you? Your not able to notice an improvement in acceleration?

 

[QUOTE="gboss, ]It seems like a lot of people using red bullet report a noticeable difference...[/QUOTE]

Especially in PWR mode the Red Bullet makes the engine more responsive. Stab the throttle and the car takes off quicker than it ever did before.

 

The claim made for this product has consistently been:

• (a) it makes valve timing changes happen faster than with the stock valve, and
• (b) because of (a), happy things with performance and drivability ensue.

Last Wednesday, mr_guy_mann put up the first (known to me) direct test of whether (a) happens. The test was done by scoping the crankshaft and camshaft sensors, which had already been identified two years earlier as the way it would have to be done. Data from OBD-II would not suit the purpose because of the delays in polling OBD-II and getting replies.

The work does have (for now) one methodological weakness, small sample size; it was well designed in taking multiple runs with each type of valve, but having purchased only one sample of each type, it cannot (by itself) rule out whether the single sample of any of the valve types was a dud. But it is a very good start on getting some basic information about this product that has been overdue for a couple years now.

 

He said that you could just push the pedal more in the other modes for the same result, but the results aren't the same in real life.

 

Ah, if only Toyota understood how these cars they build work.

 

Right, this is what we need to measure. Maybe there are actual performance gains or maybe there is a felt sense of performance. Definitely will be interesting to find out.

Comments in this video are claiming red bullet increases mpg over stock:

I’m leaning toward getting one just to run some tests.

 

Responding to #84 is tricky because a couple different things have been touched on in this thread: (1) what the Red Bullet product does or doesn't do (whatever the selected driving mode), and (2) what the different driving modes really do or don't do (whether with a Red Bullet or with the original valve). To me #84 seemed to be about (2), but maybe not.

The whole thread's becoming an interesting study in what "real life" can be, and what people who don't measure stuff can, sometimes quite sincerely, believe it to be.

On the (2) topic, one interesting real-life question is whether the ECM even knows which driving mode is selected. We know from the wiring diagram that the go pedal and the mode buttons are not connected to the ECM but to the power management control ECU, and if you view that ECU's data list in Techstream, you can read back the go pedal position and the state of the ECO, PWR, and EV modes. You can also read the target RPM and torque that the ECU has decided to ask for from the ECM.

If you pull up the ECM's data list, you don't see any information about the go pedal position or the selected mode. You do see the RPM and torque that the power management control ECU has requested.

On the (1) topic, we already have some threads in the "I bought this product and now let me talk about my felt sense of performance" vein. I would love to see some more efforts along mr_guy_mann's lines, directly testing whether the product does or does not advance the camshaft faster, which is the fundamental claim being made.

Now, what will it mean if the thing is found not to be advancing the camshaft faster, but there is still a "felt sense of performance"? Could the F.S.O.P. still be something real? Maybe, but that would certainly be a back-to-the-drawing-board moment to come up with some way to explain it.

FWIW, the description under that video ends with "This was brought to you buy MaxJen International Taiwan" (who is also the PriusChat member promoting and selling this product), and out of the six comments, the two that actually claim power or economy gains are both from the same Taiwanese YouTube account that put the video up.

 

I'm curious myself if the new non-red Red Bullet performs as well as the original red one. If you do decide to purchase one I would become familiar with how the engine responds now in both normal and PWR modes. I rarely put my foot to the floor but rather maybe use 1/3 to 1/2 throttle in most driving situations, but you might drive differently. Try and come up with some real world situations that you can compare the two solenoids with. Say merging into heavy traffic or getting across an intersection from a dead stop. Find some situations where having a quicker responding engine would be helpful. Can't suggest any ways to test for better fuel economy. There are to many variables to take into account.

 

Well, I am about to do a cross country trip in a little over a week. This would be a great time to test real world results on the highway, city, etc. I also have a OBDII hooked up to my android phone, but it sounds like we're all interested in real world tests (up-to-speed times, merging times, mpg, etc.).

@Max Taiwan - would you be open to a loaner of some kind if I post findings here on the forums?

 

There is also interest in directly testing whether the thing does what it says it does (adjust intake timing faster than the stock part it replaces).

If it doesn't, that won't necessarily mean you see no variation in your tests of "up-to-speed times, merging times, mpg, etc."; it'll just increase the challenge of explaining any such variation you happen to see.

 

If real life tests showed the Red Bullet offered some verifiable improvement wouldn't that mean that static tests that showed no benefit were flawed in some way?

 

Because the "static tests" are well controllable and directly assess the claim of what the product does, and the on-road tests of supposed resulting effects are much more subject to confounding influences and difficult to design good experiments for, the implication normally points the other way.

If you're a product developer with an idea that a product by doing X can achieve desirable outcome Y, generally you start by developing something that demonstrably does X, and then you can start testing it to see if you were right that doing X brings Y results. If you don't have a thing that does X yet, you stay at the drawing board rather than sapping people's time installing it to see if they get Y.

There are certain kinds of products and certain kinds of marketers who, shall we say, depart from that storyboard. There have always been such. It can be a good reason to do some independent testing that starts with the basics.

 

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned another controversial product that everyone who has one claims it improves throttle response...

A throttle controller module, that remaps the throttle response curve. Most have several user selectable settings, kind of like the OEM ECO/NORM/POWER settings.

Maybe if paired with this Magic Bullet, oh wait, that's a blender lol, they'd be in butt dyno heaven.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

My favorite from the annals of PriusChat was throttle body grounding kits.

Claim: the wires Toyota ran to the throttle body aren't big enough. They slow throttle response.

Pitch: You'll make your throttle response better by adding extra ground wires ...

... which you'll attach (hee hee) under the mounting nuts of the throttle body to the manifold ... locations with (hee hee) measurably no continuity to the TB motor or sensors you think you are grounding by doing this.

And still came the posts from testers adamant that their butt-dynos were onto something.

 

That is a fair point and I tend to agree. To play devil's advocate - many situations exist where tests 'in the lab' never work in the field and visa versa. This could be anything from soft psychology research studies that claim test subjects responded in X way to stimulus Y...all while failing to point out the various biases that were used to select the 'random' tests subjects and the effects that a lab environment has on the said subjects. We can also look at more technical areas like stress analysis and fluid dynamics where the majority of engineering on a given product is based on simulations....yet, real world testing is still required and nearly always yields mild (and sometimes moderate) differences.

Granted, we're talking about a f'ing solenoid here but the possibility of noticeable gains does exist. Are the results affected by air flow, wind resistance, temperature, road vibrations, magic fairy dust that gets sucked into the intake? No way to know until you're out on the road. Yes, there is always the possibility of the placebo effect when we pop the red pill, but I'd wager to bet there could be something more here given the non-snakeoil testimonials that I've read from several longterm members on the forum.

Agreed, someone with the right equipment would need to test whether intake timing is faster than stock. It would be great if Toyota engineers occasionally browsed this forum and could comment.

 

To cut through some of that, it helps to remember that it is a f'ing solenoid, and if you are thinking "the possibility of noticeable gains does exist", then there has to be a reason you are thinking that. You can examine your reason for thinking that changing this f'ing solenoid could create a "possibility of noticeable gains", and if you recognize the reason to be "because it makes the intake timing change faster", then you recognize that reason applies or doesn't, depending on whether the product does that. Which is something that can be found out.

The car is already equipped with both crankshaft and camshaft position sensors that can be scoped. That is exactly how the ECM itself determines the intake timing in real time, and is perfectly adequate for an experimenter doing the same. An oscilloscope of two channels or more counts as "right equipment". Indirect methods, such as polling the ECM for "what's your timing advance?" would suffer from hard-to-characterize reply delays, as recognized for a couple years now, but directly scoping the sensors does not.



That testing is already being done. Its chief weakness at the moment is small sample size. The materials and methods are ok. The tests were done at a couple well-controlled engine RPM values by sending known, controlled duty cycle signals to the valve. There is no role for "air flow, wind resistance, temperature, road vibrations, magic fairy dust" to play in those results.

 

Jesus you guys beat shit to death it’s $125. Takes 5 minutes to install all you need is a 10 mm socket.

 

Good point, that's less money than some of those TB grounding kits were. How could it not be a better value?

 

Nothing more stupid than a grounding kit that will make more horsepower. Lets hook a scope probe to those lol...And all the grounding wires are bright colors so it must be cool!

 

So if the value of a grounding kit is (what good it does ya) ÷ (what ya paid for it)

... and the value of a Red Bullet is (what good it does ya) ÷ (what ya paid for it)

... and the Red Bullet is priced less, how could it not be a better value?