The Overlander Overhaul: Performance Edition - Mountain State Overland

This is John with Overland Taylor Tuning, right? Yes sir, yep. Yeah, so John was actually with us at Adventure X-Fest. I think somebody said, hey Jason is your truck tuned and I said no. Huh? That would have been Andrew. Yeah, I've kind of had some mixed thoughts on the process just because I'm comfortable with the way the truck drives. Everybody bitches about it all the time. Oh yeah. I talked to John and he said, hey let's give this a shot. Let's go out and do a test and see what it feels like and try to capture it on video. So we actually have a GoPro up here so hopefully maybe I'll turn the lights on on the dash. Maybe you'll be able to actually see the tach and you can kind of see the shifting. We're going to be climbing up the mountain. The speed limit's 45 miles an hour. I'm going to try to average 50. I'm going to try to stick it to 50 and drive as aggressively as I can, obviously in a safe manner, just five miles over the speed limit, right? Yeah. We're going to give it a shot and I'm completely stocked right now as the tuning goes. So once we hit the 45 mile an hour section here, which we're rolling up on right now, I'm going to mash it and get us right at 50 and try to stay there all the way to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Okay, so basically the common complaints with these third gens is everybody talks about the gear hunting. Going down the highway, they're just trying to go up a small grade or something like that and then the truck downshifts and it'll downshift again and then it'll upshift and it just can't figure out what gear it wants to be in. And part of that I think is kind of lack of where the power is and the power band. Maybe it's not really where it should be for where you're cruising. A lot of people correct this by rear gearing and that is also a great solution. Even in conjunction with the tuning, rear gearing is great. But mainly so the gear hunting is what everybody wants. You're also looking at some horsepower and torque gains. Obviously not a ton. It's not a race truck. We're just trying to make it drive abilities mainly the main goal of the overlay and torque tune. We're really not trying to push it to its complete limits, but we're trying to make it safe, reliable, more fun to drive because everybody wants to enjoy their truck and you put a bunch of heavy gear on it and the next thing you know you got a pig on your hands. Yeah you need to. I'm really interested to see how this is going to work out. So just so that you can see our miles per hour, I've got the overlander on here so you can see how accurately I'm trying to keep it right at 50 miles an hour. Right now my gauge is off by five just because I've got larger tires on the truck. So the tune is specifically adjusted to tire size and gearing? So we basically have two different tiers as far as tire size goes. So 31 to 33 and then in your case you'll be 34 to 35 inch tires. And then as far as the gearing goes we have set for different differentials so we can do obviously stock green which is 390 on these trucks unless you have a manual. Those are 430 I believe from the factory. We do 456, 48 which is what you got and then 529s. All right so we are now starting to climb uphill just a little bit. I'm just a little bit over and under 50 miles an hour trying to stay and pay attention to the road here obviously. We've got a pretty clear stretch here but like I said we're starting on the climb right now. I don't know if you can actually hear it probably not but it's definitely shifting up and down back and forth. It's hunting yeah. Yeah so based on your experience having driving a Tacoma you know I mean is this normal? I don't think this is the hunting like that going up a grade is I don't think it's normal for any vehicle. I understand it's because it's you know the transmission is trying to find the optimal gear for the power band and to where it's not under as much load but I think at this point it's it's trying too hard. You know it needs to pick a gear and stay there. Of course you can put it in S mode and kind of lock do a lockout you know so it doesn't go up but it'll still downshift I believe in it. In ECT? Yeah. Yeah it'll still shift. Yeah. I haven't really been so I pull a raft trailer up Sandstone Mountain in West Virginia pretty much all summer long and I can notice a little bit of a difference when I put ECT on and it helps control the shifting a little bit but it's still up and down up and down up and down. Well I think the ECT the main thing that the Toyota did from the factory is they were just trying to make it hold the gears longer. Yeah. So people that are really trying to stretch it out or like towing or going up the hill or anything of that nature. Yeah. And of course with our tune on the ECT we will have our first setting which would be without ECT on and then our second setting which is generally more responsive people want the more responsive one for ECT for towing or climbing hills. Okay. But that's purely in the pedal. Yeah. The numbers everything in your tune is still going to be exactly the same otherwise. Ship flying around here now we're taking a sharp turn here all right so I'm trying to get it back up to 50 so I'm hitting it pretty hard we're definitely on a steeper grade right now ears are popping and all being said too I've got a full truck of gear in the back you know we've got a canopy camper on here fridges plus all of the stuff that we're bringing to expo the goose gear in the back so we've definitely got a full load on the truck plus this is also a road that not somebody would normally do 50 on either yeah that adds to it yeah but like I've got my foot to the floor right now it is not shifting at all I don't know if that'll change it'll honestly probably want to hold either the prior gear yeah this will be the spot so we're at the top of the mountain right now foot is to the floor and it's not shifting back down again I'm at 50 miles an hour which is great but I can't I can't get it to go back down unless I were to manually shift it back yeah sharp turn all right so we are up here at the Blue Ridge Parkway let's find a place to park get out and get this thing installed all righty we got a noco genius 10 hooked up and we have that on 12 volt supply so that's going to go ahead and maintain our voltage make sure we don't have any dips in his voltage while we are doing the flash updates all right so first thing we're doing we're pulling up bf tuner we got our power supply hooked up to the batteries we're going to check to see if the latest tsp update from toyota is on the truck if it isn't we're going to go ahead and flash that update this is the same update you'd get at the dealer and then after that we are going to be able to load whatever calibration we decide to put on the truck depending on what he wants as far as throttle response goes all right truck is turned around we are at the bottom of the mountain and uh the truck is tuned um i'm not getting aggressive here until we get to the 45 mile an hour section but nothing really feels too different right now it feels like honestly i feel like i'm on my throttle a little bit less and i i could i feel some strange urge that i could actually hit the throttle and it would just take off at this point and maybe go somewhere a little without thinking about it first yeah right yeah right so again we're not in ect ect switch is not on and that's peppy right yes that'll be even heavier i'm going to get us up to 50 miles an hour here and we're going to try to hold that all the way here we go uh we were coming up on it let's go ahead yeah it's definitely it feels like there's something beyond where the pedal is at right now it feels like i could push it a little bit further and it would actually take off but i don't want to get a speeding ticket yeah so let's just keep it at 50 miles an hour yep um it already feels a little bit different um so yeah so tell us again about ect real quick well before we get up the hill so anybody familiar with these third gen Tacomas there's an ect power button down in the center of your dash there typically Toyota wants you to use it if you're towing going up a mountain mountain pass anything of that nature and we utilize the button to adjust your actual your throttle response so when you hit the ect button your throttle response is going to change you can either go to a lighter setting or at most a standard one is for it to go to a more aggressive setting okay all right i'm going 55 i'm going 50 miles an hour in a 45 i've got a dodge on my butt i wonder if i could lose him all right so we are approaching the 30 mile an hour turns um as you can see we're going 55 50 miles an hour and i haven't been hunting i haven't been hunting for gears at all it's no it's stuck yeah it hasn't hunted like it was on the way up before yeah yeah he doesn't have the kind of suspension i've got so i can hold these turns a little bit better he doesn't have those 8100s yeah yeah it's i was up and down all over the place you guys i don't know if you could hear that or see that on the attack i just turned the lights on um but i am i mean i'm even lifting my foot completely off the gas and then putting it back on and it's it's staying in this gear yep yeah and it seems like we're it's a lot smoother we're maintaining better before it was a little jerky because it was you know what gear do i want to be in george i don't know yeah i know right it's weird it's like you know they put a little bit more energy into um you know kind of designing that you know yep toyota did i mean such a better better performance well they've done the tsb updates uh claiming to fix it i know the 20 to 22s people have said are a lot better than the 16 to 19s from the factory um but still i mean we had well obviously you have a 20 so yeah you're well aware of the gear hunting so we did just shift up uh we're kind of climbing on the grader here a little bit um now it's shifted back down it's probably going to shift up here again i'm going to give it a little gas i didn't need to because i was already going 50 mile an hour i just kind of want to go faster yeah yeah here's going to be the real test here yeah this is the steep spot coming up yeah the grades increased here a little bit i'm trying to keep it at 50 so i'm going to let my foot off the gas a little bit yeah now we're trying to bring it down but it's not shifting out and then back in again what about uh descending down a climb um the tacoma in west virginia for me anyway often when i crest over and start breaking and descending it'll shift down into lower gear is any of that tuning impacted um overall i think you'll get a better better behavior out of the transmission in general because the flash is for the engine and the transmission it's all i'd imagine the down shifting that's a great question i've honestly never been asked yeah but uh you will you will soon find out i will you'll have to let me know yeah i will let you know because i'm sure somebody else will ask me that too yeah all right so we're slowly approaching that section where i was trying to put the floor put it down the floor to get it to shift to get me back up to my 50 mile 50 mile an hour goal here um but it is definitely shifting a lot less there is no doubt about that okay so let's let's see if we can get ourselves up to 50 miles an hour you got to watch these turns because they'll get a little sharp yeah it's going though it's going and i don't need to i don't need to slam on the i don't need to slam on the pedal like i was last time i was completely floored at this point and it just wouldn't go anywhere yeah now i'm off the pedal yeah i'm completely off the pedal this feels kind of like a top gear episode or something yeah right yeah we just need to jump it now or something yeah something yeah okay so this is where it was dead so i just pushed the pedal all the way down to the floor and it's shifting up and it's going to take us up to beyond 50 miles an hour yeah no problem yeah no problem at all yeah this is uh this has just reinvented my truck yeah i think it has i want to just pass this car now going right before that was that wasn't an option yeah before that wasn't we've got a really awful glare here so we've got to be careful um but yeah i you know i can already tell a major improvement here there's no doubt about it and i'm not just saying that because i've got the guy doing installation riding with me and i'm making a video it's on video proof this is legitimate anybody can email you know john and ask him if i was skeptical oh he was skeptical we we talked about this he could have got this done you know a month ago and and he you know was skeptical of course you know everybody is yeah well i yeah i'm a believer now well i'm glad yeah thanks buddy of course you know tell me a little bit more about what's involved you know with setting up these tunes it's not just some guy on a computer like let's try this let's try this there's there's a science to it and a process to it right yep so uh we have to give all of our credit to uh john g and justin and i mean they have years and years of tuning experience you know going into the 90s and they've tuned everything from ls swap jeeps to mitsubishi's to who knows what you know i haven't got to talk to him about all that but they develop these tunes on the dyno and it's not just like you said jason it's not them just playing around with stuff until they feel something different they know what to look for they know what they're doing they know what it needs uh and at the end of the day i mean experience you know you can go to school for something like this for a year but they got the the years of experience to back it up and i think that's truly what makes a difference when it comes to producing something like this for customers when you go to the dealer and they check your ecu it's going to report back as stock it's not going to report back as some weird code uh ecu id that the dealer is going to be like hey what's you know what's up with this uh it's going to report back as stock because all the tunes are actually built off of the stock calibration ids that's good to know i mean i was one of the questions i asked you about at venture x fest was i mean because this is a pretty heavy investment you know i mean i'd like to think that toyota is is is tuning the truck the way it's supposed to be turned and that's why we we buy these to come but the reality is is that you know maybe you'll end up selling this after a hundred thousand miles but i want somebody that buys this to have the same experience i did out of the truck so protecting the engine protecting the drivetrain um and and still having the performance that that we expect from a vehicle like this is really important we depend on these vehicles to take us places safely and reliably uh so i mean that's a huge part of this thing you're not just tuning to get a race truck or anything like that if that's what you're looking for uh that's not really what we're after we're after drivability um enjoying driving your truck again uh is is really what it all boils down to yeah because i love driving my truck but i'm really excited to see what this is going to feel like because we're on a flat section right now we're going to you know move to 55 miles an hour but i'm not going to do anything funny with this truck until we turn around and go back up the mountain yep and i want to get on it and see how it feels yep one other i think important note here is this is not calibrating the speedometer at all this is no this is not unfortunately not yeah unfortunately not yep it'd be fantastic if it would but it just doesn't because that's actually impacting what you're registering as your miles per gallon correct yeah so you might maybe get nine miles per gallon in actuality i might be getting nine and a half to ten so of course you're regeared and have bigger tires so maybe you've come back closer to stock and what percentage i'm not sure that there's a chart on tacoma world i think about that stuff yeah but hey like you said it's it's still still going to be a little off