A few weeks ago I was in Florida for work and decided to take my car to TTP Engineering. Scott was an avid poster on my regional forum and he seemed like a trustworthy guy. The vehicle was tuned by Scott himself and made impressive numbers. While I was at his facility I stated several times that I may need to turn off my EGR or EVAP as I was getting an SES again. I clearly stated several times, "If it's still on I'll just turn it off."

Scott made no comment.

This is where the problems started. I soon realized that my ECU was locked; it no longer responded to normal ECUFlash initialization codes. "Odd," I thought, but I gave Scott a call instead of jumping to conclusions. He informed me that he uses "proprietary XML's" when tuning a vehicle. I asked why he did not tell me this before or while I was there but did not get a clear answer. Instead Scott shared stories about his falling-out's with some other EvoM members (local to me) who took his maps, modified, and sold them for profit.

Trying to be understanding, I thanked him for enlightening me on these details, but asked for access to the Periphery Bit controls in my ECU. He promptly responded via eMail and sent me XML's. At that time I told him I'd need more access later on.

That time came sooner than I thought, when I bent my rear o2 Sensor on a speed bump as a result of the new Tein S-Tech's I had installed and I needed access to my ECU to enable the Tephra MOD that I previously had access to. Again, TTP's pesky lock on my ECU prevented me from doing that. Once again I PM'd Scott. On August 1st at 12:49AM, I asked Scott for access to NLTS so I could access other Tephra functions such as Rear o2 Simulator. Later on I noticed Scott had gotten online and even made comments on several threads, but I received no response from my PM. I began to suspect the Periphery bits were the end of the line for me. I wasn't privileged any further as far as my own ECU goes.

I waited until Monday morning (The 3rd of August) so I could give him a chance to at least be in business hours. Monday morning came around and I noticed he continued to make comments on other threads, but I received no reply to my PM.

At that time I started considering alternatives. If I was going to be ignored for trying to access my own ECU, then it wasn't going to be without a fight. I PM'd one of the Mods Monday afternoon and explained my situation. Almost immediately after I PMed this mod I received a response from Scott:

This instantly irritated me as I shouldn't have to PM a Mod to get a response out of a vendor. I asked the Mod if this was a coincidence, to which he replied:

At that point I responded to Scott and explained I'd like the NLTS functions and rear o2 simulator plus all other Tephra functions because I quickly realized it's annoying having to ask someone permission to access one's own ECU. This is when it started becoming very personal and insulting.

I became irate then, but decided to be tactful still in my response. Scott was threatening to provide no further support if I was to go on with a negative review.

What happened to the good old fashioned, "I'm going to do everything to earn and keep your business." model? Scott was not. With that, I responded:

Finally, Scott lost the last of his professional bearing, and became downright rude:

This is when I lost interest in conducting any further business with TTP Engineering and sent Scott the following:

I left it at that and confirmed whether these are grounds for a negative review and now I am posting.

I'd like to summarize for those who don't want to read the entire review:

Scott at TTP was ultimately rude and unprofessional. He profits off of products produced by reverse-engineering accomplished by hackers/modders in our community, yet locks his OWN CUSTOMERS out of his work and therefore their ECU's. This is a disservice to his customers.

Furthermore, should you request access to your ECU, Scott will ignore you, or be downright rude and personally attack you. I now have to figure out exactly where all the tables are in my ROM so I can progress toward my goals with my car.

Needless to say, TTP Engineering does not deserve any more of my business, nor do they deserve anyone else's.

 

good to spread the knowledge. very unprofessional on his part and no business etiquette whatsoever. hopefully this wont get deleted, but the truth comes out sooner or later. its very common to see these types of posts on other local florida forums on TTP and the type of business that is being conducted there.

 

This has been cleared through a SuperMod.

No mud-slinging, nothing personal, just facts. I wouldn't do business as Scott does, and I certainly don't reccommend this Vendor to anyone who enjoys the freedom of adjusting their ECU.

 

I read the whole thing and all I can say is I don't feel like dealing with them at all I can understand the time it may have taken for him to get back with you because they are a business and probably do get lots of messages over the weekend, but what he said and is sounding like he is going to treat customers that even **** him off.. He still needs to act professional since it is a business and treat people the customer with the up most respect. I know there where times in all my jobs and businesses that I wanted to just tell customers they are stupid and are retarded but you have to remember to be professional and act professional regardless. Work with people the best you can and they should work with you too.

I hope that all can be resolved but I don't know what will happen in your situation. GL with what ever you do or happens man

 

Posts unrelated to the OP's situation, second hand stories about TTP, etc will all be removed. This isn't a troll thread.

 

I'm not a dumb person. I've hacked and modified quite a bit of things in my life. No one can stop an enthusiast from tinkering with things. Not Mitsubishi, not Sony, not Microsoft, and I'll be damned if TTP stops me.

Thanks to WestSideBilly for allowing me to share my experience, albeit a negative one.

 

I have to say that nothing in this review troubles me that much. TTP is very responsive to messages and spends a lot of time sharing info. on this forum. Sure they do it to promote their business, but they make this forum a better place.

I hear you on incorporating tephra, etc. freeware, but you have to admit those tunes have a lot of proprietary stuff in the tables that goes way beyond the tephra and other ecu community mods. I would hope that TTP is donating liberally to tephra and others, but I don't think they should need to make their tunes open just because they incorporate those ROM mods. They should however probably make sure that customers know that in advance.

I have to say that if those quotes of TTP's PMs are posted without TTP's permission, that I would disagree with the mod's apparent view that that is okay. Just my personal view.

 

Actually we did state that "we would see if the bits were turned off under known periphery bits"

Based on our observation, the known 0/I bits were correctly flagged.


Its states on our site specifically that we use proprietary roms for our custom tuned vehicles

It wasn't but a few hours before the custom tuning work we did on the ecu tried to be exploited by the customer. He asked for access to the periphery bits and as he stated, we promptly sent him custom xml file for access to periphery bits.

There is no lock on your ECU, we use as our website states, proprietary XML files designed custom for use with our tuning computer.

You asked for technical assistance at 12:49 AM twelve, forty nine, just short of 1am on a Sunday morning for access to NLTS and because you did not get an instant response at 1am in the morning on a Sunday morning before church, you made an ASSUMPTION that we were not going to assist you further? REALLY?

Our business hours are Monday-Friday 11am-7pm, FYI.

If anyone has received extraordinary care after these hours, we are doing it on our own time in between managing our personal and family time.

To reiterate, our hours are M-F 11am-7pm, coming in first thing in the morning on the first day of the week, we are buried with about 200 emails and 175 PM's outside of at least 15 voicemail messages.

This does not count the appointment traffic, current phone calls and emails coming in LIVE at any moment.

If you were expecting to be jumped ahead of everyone else that has messaged us, we're sorry. Just as our instant message away message states, we will return messages IN THE ORDER THEY WERE RECEIVED.
Such as what? Blackmailing us by sending a message to a moderator about changing your feedback rating and 19'd ing all your posts about how you liked your car when we were done?



That's all you would like to accomplish here and the moderators have made us aware of this fact.

It was bad enough that I almost had to call the police from you trying to start a fight in the parking lot with another customer of ours.

I don't know what your deal is guy, but we have done what we were supposed to do, gone above and beyond to meet your additional requests after the dynotuning session and work we performed on your car.

You PM'd a mod around the time I got to the office about noon and before we even read their pm to us about your intent to blackmail us, we had already responded to your PM.

That's interesting, because the PM we received from an administrator was:


And we asked you if you would like NLTS turned on. You asked for access to the tephra mods and we began to make an xml for you to gain access to those areas. While we were working hard for you we received an email from the mod stating you intended to make a negative thread if you didn't get what you wanted.

At that point we felt disrespected for the work we have done and were continuing to do. We agreed with admin that you had no intent to actually want tephramods at all, you just wanted to exploit our data.

We proceeded to ask you what your intentions were and why you were trying to change your feedback rating after all that we have done for you and were continuing to do for free. We along with site admin felt that you had malicious intentions regardless of what we did for you and no matter what we did, it would not be good enough.

Immediately after we posted the review thread on your car, my PM box filled up with messages from other NC site members stating to "watch out" for you. That all you do is complain. And that you have asked many of the NC members to do work for you, they bend over backwards only to have you shaft them without payment in the end.

I was surprised when we heard this information, until today.

We do not succumb to blackmail, sorry to have to tell you this.

Our feedback ratings exceed all 175,000+ members of the site, and it didn't get built that way over 4 years from screwing people over. That is for sure.

I would like to summarize for those who want to speed read.

Olmoscd was a customer whose car was running high 12's AFR on pumpgas 22psi when it came in. The 1050cc injectors were scaled to 513cc with a MAF translator and 3" blowthrough when it came in. It had a cel upon entering the shop.

He spoke about his map being used for racefuel and pumpgas. We had to explain that there is no such thing as a safe dual purpose map. You cannot run a racefuel tune on a pump gas and would be ineffective in vice versa. He was confused.

Based on the AFR as the car came in on, I was surprised there was not damage from extreme cylinder heat of race fuel afr's on 93.

We spent a few hours on his very unique modifications, taking care to safely maximize the power and torque on 93 octane.

We got the AFR dialed into a safe range, we customized mivec, timing, boost, periphery bits, made custom scales for his wacky maf translator offsets.

In the end, he had a huge performance gain of 50-60tq and 30+ whp on his 3076 AFI turbo.

We DO use custom XML files so we can have all the most up to date patches and add ons able and ready to be used to their fullest. Its helps us out here in determining the most up to date, feature rich rom should be used for each vehicle.

Not its intent, but as a safeguard from ones self, the XMLs are not public information.

For a car to come in running 12.6-12.8 on 93 and full boost and the owner not seeing anything wrong with it, we have no issues with our custom rom files helping protect customers from themselves. Last thing we want is for the customer to leave, start increasing ignition timing or leaning out the car thinking it will make more power and then sticking a rod through the block or spinning rod bearings.

If we get a call that someone is irate that they cannot access our fuel and timing maps. I would take that call 1000x over versus getting the call that states, I was messing with the tune and the engine blew, I melted my valves or threw a rod through the block and I'm blaming you!

On the local and even some other areas, we have also had our custom mapping read and resold many times over. This ultimately hurts the whole market for many reasons. Say you bought a bootleg XYZ tune and you spun a rod bearing, the person who thought they were smart enough to tune their own car with a stolen map, now blames XYZ for the bad tune when the tune was never designed for their car in the first place and was a perfect fit for the original owner who was custom tuned.

You claim to be a sysadmin. So do you profit off of a computer innovated by Bill Gates? Are you dis servicing Bill Gates when you plug an IPod into a Windows machine? After all Apple is a competitor? You really have no arguement.

So I promtly responded via email and send you what you need when you ask for it or I ignore you on Sunday morning before church at 12:49am EST?

We regret that the forum has had to endure this public cleaning of the laundry. I am sure it will be clear to most that this is about blackmailing us and not about any lacking of service which we have promptly supplied during business hours.

Thanks for the continued support of the forum and its members as has been done for over 4 years now.

TTP

 

wow, def. the stout response lol. Btw, scott helped me with my pump map when I was having trouble dialing it in and I got responses back at like 2-3 am sometimes so it shows you that if he has time, he will help you!

 

The reason I went with TTP in the first place was because of what you said in your first paragraph. Scott was active in our regional forum and he seemed like a good guy.

I stated in the OP that I mentioned several times I'd turn off EVAP, EGR or whatever else might be throwing a code. You're right; he should inform his customers.Scott made no effort to inform me he was effectively bricking my ECU. I suspect this was out of convenience; he knew I wouldn't get tuned if I was getting locked.

Those are TTP's quotes. [edited] all personal details like family and salary things stayed out. This is all business dialogue that occurred.

 

i was just about to say the same ..when i have a question no matter what time it is i email scott

i dont expect an email back on the weekend or after hours but to my surpise sometimes i will get my questions answered after hours and on weekends

 

There is too much for me to respond to, but I think it's safe to say we'll end in disagreement. A few things:

- I nearly started a fight in the parking lot? You almost called the POLICE? Jesus! I'm a monster!
- I never said your tune sucks. That was made clear in the OP.
- I'm sure you got TONS of PM's from the boys around here.
- Blackmail is a bit much, don't you think? I was privately consulting with a Mod in the case that you became unprofessional and unresponsive. Turns out I was right in that.
- Yes, my car came in running horribly. You figured it out! That's why I came to you scott. Again, I have no idea how to tune, and have never attempted to on my car. What you saw was North Cackalacky backyard built, highway tuned stuff. Sorry it wasn't to your caliber.

Wow. It's surprising you're flat out lying Scott. I'm not exploiting your stuff. In fact, I'm looking at taking my car elsewhere to get completely retuned.

 

I would have to agree with TTP here. You seem to be an unreasonable member with an alterior motive. I would definately say blackmail is appropriate term for this situation.

On a personal note. Scott has taken care of my Evo ever since I found out about their company and I will never take my car anywhere else. He knows the Evo better than anyone else.

What I have learned in my years is the more customer you have (and he has a crapload), the greater the probability of a bad apple in the batch.

 

All I have to say that Scott has never let me down with any issues I have had with my Evo. I can e-mail him at anytime but I wont be expecting a response right away because he also has a life. How can somebody be expecting somebody to be on the computer 24/7 just to respond to an e-mail. Specially after being threatened to do a bad review. If it was me I would say SCREW YOU!!. When things are conducted in a proper way the have no issues being resolved.

 

Yes, you nearly started a fight. With ME! All I did was ask you about your car, and you flipped out on me wanting to throwdown in the middle of the parking lot over some timeslips.

You lied about the times you car ran back in NC, and you are lying again now. If you take a look at your feedback ratings, you have a proven track record of being unreasonable with members and companies. To the point that others have left you NEGATIVE FEEDBACK.

I was embarassed that you acted that way in front of customers out front. I am glad you left shortly thereafter or else things would have turned ugly, thanks to you.

For some people, they are so impossible to deal with, that things always end up in disarray.