[BLUE-BU]

I know GM strongly does not approve of modifying the programming so tread lightly and be careful who you let modify your tuning if you go that route. I don't care for the transmission tuning either and am seriously considering getting a tune for my car. I talked to an experienced local tuner shop who works on mostly high end modifed Corvettes and the like and can do the work but at $125 and hour and a 2 week backlog, I decided to do some more research. This led me to White Automotive who seems to be an experienced GM tuner that supplies an off the shelf tune for the Malibu 3.6L in addition to Pontiac G6 and Saturn Aura. I believe he was associated with Vector Motorsports previously. I contacted him by email and he seems very knowledgable about this car and it's quirks. In fact he owns and drives an 08 Malibu with the 3.6L and has been refining a tune for the last year or so. He indicated he's sold 150 reprogrammings for these particular cars alone. He's spent considerable effort retuning the transmission TCM with shift points that are now responisve to throttle position instead of the non intuitive logic the stock programming follows. They offer a tune that flashes both the ECM and TCM. Realize, the TCM is contained inside the transmission on these cars so you can't just send your module in to be re-programmed like some other vehicles can. The way White get's around this issue is they send you a PDA computer (deposit required) with the tune pre installed and then you connect it to the car with the supplied cable and let it do the flash. It will reflash both the ECM and TCM together. He seems to be most well known with the Pontiac folks and he posts on some of the Pontiac forums under the moniker name GTprix I believe. The phone number listed on the web page is not working at the moment although he indicated it would be up next week. He is still reachable by email. Here is the link.

http://www.whiteautoandmedia.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=52&category_id=17&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=54

I have no first hand experience with their product and other than trading email, don't know how good it is. I recommend doing the research and coming to your own conclusion. Since GM will try to void your drivetrain warranty if they know your programming is modified, I probably won't report further on this if I do the install. Big brother is watching you know.

 

[BLUE-BU]

I though "GTprix" sounded familiar and I recalled that I have seen his posts on http://www.efilive.com/.

I wonder how much he charges for his tune. Another important question for me would be how to flash the original software back...Just in case, say fuel mileage is not good or something else is not to your liking....Is he going to send you AutoCAL (I presume that's the device he's using) again? That might get awkward, so it'd better be cheap

His flash is $299 which is a pretty good deal I think. I have the same question as you though about getting back to stock and need to ask about that before I purchase. It would be a deal killer for me if I can't back out the custom tune for whatever reason.