Lately we have been hearing plenty of commotion surrounding a performance chip for cars and trucks that we have heard does, or at least comes close to, doing what it claims to do with adding horsepower and torque. So even though this isn’t directly related to sports (technically it is since drifting, circuit racing and tracking is still considered a sport, right?) we are going to write our experience with this supposed magical chip everyone seems to be talking about.
So apparently you can only purchase the chip from the companies eBay store, and there’s nothing wrong with that, plenty of companies offer exclusive products solely for eBay, so I’m not knocking the company. By the way, the companies name is Great Lakes Auto Corp, so anyways we went ahead and ordered the Supreme performance chip 4.0 (which cost us $71.44) from their eBay store for the 2019 Silverado 1500 5.3 V8. Shipping was free so that was a nice touch but lets not get ahead of ourselves until we actually test the thing first and see what it does.
So the company claims that it’ll give the truck 20 to 55 more horsepower and 15 to 40 extra torque and that seems pretty possible since its not claiming 100+ horsepower and torque like some of those other chips on eBay. So it looks like the way this chip works is by tuning the computer in the car and making things more efficient, like the spark ignition advance, air-fuel ratio, engine stability idle and some other stuff I’m not too educated on. We read that it does this by plugging into what they call an OBD2 port which is basically that black plug under your steering wheel that you plug your diagnostic code reader into. Anyways, so I placed my order on Monday and received it on Friday, considering shipping was free and they use first class mail I think that was a pretty short time in my book. I would have paid the extra $10 for shipping Priority mail but I really wasn’t in any hurry.
So I received the chip, it came in a big white padded envelope with eBay’s logo on it which is pretty cool, it looks like the company might be working directly with eBay so that gives them a little more credibility. So I opened the package and inside I found another smaller white padded envelope with the Supreme performance chip inside, it also came with a card with step by step instructions but really that wasn’t really needed since all you do is plug it into the obd plug thing under the steering wheel, but I guess there are some people who aren’t smart enough to use a plug on their own. So after a few minutes the chip was up and running.
So the chip needs to be driven with for 200 miles so it can download data from the trucks ECU and be able to use the algorithm in it to make the changes that it needs to make to give us more horsepower and torque. We drove with the chip for the next week like normal and by Thursday (the 6th day) we achieved the 200 miles so we really started to look carefully for any differences in performance. We didn’t feel anything new right away, but the company said that the chip works gradually, so we kept driving. Once we reached the 205 mile mark (so 5 miles after the 200 miles that the chip needed) we actually started to feel some real good pickup from the truck when we drove off from red lights. It was something we didn’t expect at all, we were about to lose all hope but then you start to feel the extra power creeping up, you notice that your being pushed back into your seat at take off a little more and more, you notice your tires spin more and more since you have more power being delivered to them, you notice the acceleration pedal a lot more responsive like its connected by a wire to the engine, like the old muscle cars all you do is press and go.
So anyways, we witnessed the extra power, big whoop right? Will the power stay while the chip is plugged in or will it slowly die off like an old phone battery that loses its charge? So we decided to keep the chip plugged in and see just how far we could push this thing. The weird thing is that the more we drove with the performance chip plugged into our truck the more power we kept getting, it was like it was getting better and better the more we used it, the more we drove it, the more we hit full throttle. I guess it makes sense though, that company did say that it would keep increasing gradually so we aren’t sure why we were so surprised, probably since we thought it would either not work at all, or it would work for a few days then go away and die out, but it didn’t so we cant complain.
Another thought crossed our mind, with all of this extra power how will it effect our wallets at the gas pump? We aren’t rich after all so while the power is nice we don’t want to be pushing 10 miles a gallon here! So we decided to test out the MPG of the truck with the chip plugged in. We drove it like this for about 3 and a half weeks and this is what we found:
Before the performance chip we were getting 15 MPG city driving and 20 MPG highway driving.
While we had the chip plugged in we saw and MPG of 17 MPG city and 23 MPG highway. So we aren’t sure if it was just because of the way we drove before of what (even though we were driving way harder and more aggressive when the chip was plugged in) but we actually saw better gas mileage with the chip. It’s crazy how things turn out sometimes.
Anyways, so that was pretty much it, we kept using the chip and everything is fine and dandy. We took the truck in for regular maintenance to the Chevy dealership and per the companies suggestion, we disconnected the chip before bringing it in. So we had the service done on the truck and the dealership was non the wiser, they had no idea we had been using a tuning chip right under their noses, I asked a buddy of mind to hook up his computer to the truck to see if there was any sign of a performance chip being used and he said it was clean as a whistle. Just like that Great Lakes company said, using the chip doesn’t leave any footprint or sign that it was ever plugged in, so nobody but us will know about it, SSSSHHHH its our little secret.
Update: We aren’t the type to advertise or put up a link to the companies page, but we’ve received requests from some readers for the link so here it is. This is the link to the companies eBay page:
www.ebay.com/str/Great-Lakes-Auto-Corp
If you want to search through their inventory then go to this page:
