Blitzkrieg

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NickS

LOL...

Singletrack

Lower prices, that's all I care about : ) As long as the quality doesn't suffer that is.

LUCIFA

competition is gonna happen as Audi becomes more popular...

Downpipes will not stay at the price of $1500+ if there are more than 10 companies sharing the market.

Blitzkrieg

Many of these guys just take the other companie's product and jig right off them. They only hit the car for final fit and finish. Grow some ballz and do your own research and invest your own time and money into it. Is it so hard to be honest?

Singletrack

Yeah I agree 100%.

MichaelTM

I think tuners tend to exaggerate the amount of "research" put into their products. Multiple test-fitting is not really research. I'd love to be proven otherwise, but I just don't think that most tuners have means or equipment to do real research on products for cars as complex as Audi, or any modern car for that matter.

Some claim that a lot of reserach went into DTS or ADS, or whatever else they call it. Come on! Take the Neuspeed lower brace, add a rubber mount for the tranny and there's your ADS. Research? Do we know what happens in a frontal crush with ADS on the car? Will it break off and let the engine and tranny drop? One cannot really expect ANY tuner to crash numerous cars in order to determine this.

And finally pricing. Mark-ups are outrageous. $350 for an aluminum bar with brackets and rubber mounts? If it cost a tuner more than $100 - they are not doing a good job finding a right machine shop.
$1500 for a set of two bent pipes with cheap cats?
Take your car to any decent exhaust shop and they will bend custom pipes for much less than that (and make profit). Given multiple orders price will drop even more... Same goes for exhausts.
By the way, you gonna tell me that tuners don't "jig off" the stock DP's and exhaust to come up with their pipes?

Come on, we all know the tuner's motive. They know we drive expensive cars. They know we are enthusiasts enough to spend money modding them and they know we have money and not always have knowledge. We are used to paying upwards of $300 for BPV's and used to beleive stories of quicker turbo spool-ups due to them. All it took is some defective stock BPV's go bad on someone and tuners immediately used it to push Forge and Bailey...

To sum up: I do respect effort of AWE and other tuners to produce stuff for us. But it is up to them to protect their investment. By the way, I am much more impressed by AWE's silence than by Innovator's lashing out whenever he gets a chance...

That's it. I could be wrong...

Blitzkrieg

Lets take downpipes for one. If a tuner does it correctly there are many aspects to take. They truly want to deliver the best product to you. Now we all know how much of a pain in the *** it is to install these damn things. Imagine the amount of times they have to be installed/ uninstalled and refitted. Time is money and this consumes allot of time.

The last thing a tuner wants is for the pipes to crack and fail. There is a degree of research involved in finding the proper metal alloy that will last the long haul not to mention a flex joint. There is definatelty more to this than running a pipe from point A to point B.

My point is if other companies did this research for themselves they couldn't afford the cheap price until more units are out the door and they recoupe money from research and developement down time.

Barney Fife

Same thing happened there, better for the average guy and the high rollers still have to have what's new. So let the big guys keep paying for the right to let us low lifes get stuff cheaper&lt;G&gt;