BrenTuning

[nisilvia]

BrenTuning

First off, I’m writing this review for the BMW enthusiasts and community around the east coast. It’s my personal experience with a couple well known dme tuners around the area. This situation is from personal experience and I never asked for a refund and kept quiet until now.
December 2015 I bought my first M car which was a silverstone F10 M5 certified and completely stock from a local dealership. I drove it around stock for a year then decided to start looking around for a tuner. I eventually found dme tuner out in New Jersey and got a quote for $2900.00 which is a normal price for these cars. A couple friends recommended BrenTuning to me and I read around and heard nothing but good news and results from BrenTuning. So I emailed them and got a quote for $2500 for a dme/tcu tune. After emailing them back and forth I decided to go with them and support a local business and because he was only 30 minutes away from me.
They seemed like nice professional guys at first. They tuned all different types of cars from subarus to porsches. It was at their new facility which was very nice. Before anything they made me print out a packet asking what I want done to my car and that they can’t be held liable for blown engines or anything that goes wrong during tuning. It also asked me what I want done to the car and I wanted a little more power and for the car to pass Mass state inspection with the tune and the supersprint high flow catted downpipes I had on the car.
It was my first tuning experience, for a pretty expensive car so of course I was somewhat nervous. They told me they needed my car for three days so they could check cold starting the car. After three days they sent me an email saying they needed to keep my car for another week because they blew the capacitor on one of the dmes which the M5 has two. One week became four weeks give or take a couple days. After picking up my car, it didn’t pass inspection so I emailed him and told him. They responded saying they told me not to install the downpipes prior to the tune and wanted to uninstall it and tune it again. I felt it wasn’t worth spending the extra money for them to do the work. I drove it around for a year(2017)and decided to go to New Jersey to see Kevin at labworx after talking to Jairo from Massbmw. Both outstanding guys to talk to and deal with. After tuning it with Kevin we still couldn’t get it to pass inspection and the car became more sluggish as time went on. After going back and forth I decided to drop it off at BMW of Shrewsbury to get it looked at and they said it needed one, maybe two new dmes and I agreed to get the work done with them. They said they would start with one and see if it needed the second after. Well good thing it needed only one dme, the same one that BrenTuning blew and replaced. They told me its not even made for the F10 M5 and BrenTuning coded it to work with the car. This is when I decided to write a post about the situation.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I honestly tried to shorten it down. I left out some minor details but it still pretty lengthy. I’m not trying to bash him or his business. I never asked for a refund or anything but just wanted to give people a heads up. There’s right ways and wrong ways to conduct business and I feel that’s something they need to work on. It could’ve been as easy as him telling me about the dme instead of me chasing the problem around for two years now.

[Bostons_Finest_]

Gotta love Bren

[OpenFlash]

Sounds like it may have been the first F10 ECU that they opened up. For those who have not separated the ECU cases before, it’s easy to slice off a couple awkwardly placed capacitors on the board.

[nisilvia]

Yea, before they use md to open it up but then they would slice off the capacitors. Then they drilled it and now I think Kevin just does it through the OBD port.

[TheHouseWon]

2900 for a tune? A bit rich, isn't it?

[irishbimmer]

I remember that name from the E63 v10 days and they started a tuning war with Evolve..I think they ended up losing.

[nisilvia]

Average tunes around here is $2400- $3000. I actually think the quote was $2999.95 but rounded down because I wasn’t sure. I’m nit so sure about the tuning wars.

[TheHouseWon]

BPM, Mission Tuning, HCP, BM3 are all about half that... Just sayin'

[nisilvia]

Yea, a couple of years ago I didn’t come across those companies. The three companies I mentioned are around the northeast too. I did the options for misison tuning and bpm and it came out a little under 2k. I would put out the extra $400 to go with labworx. Kevin’s a good guy and easy to deal with. When I told him about the situation all he said was bring the car in and he’ll make it right. His actual words were “I have something special for you.”

[schnell1982]

I think $3k was before OBD flashing was available
But there are still some tuners ripping off people. Some tuner in Orange County CA is charging almost $4K and people are dumb enough to pay it

I have heard great things about Kevin and Mo @ DME is great too on the east coast

[M5Rlz]

Sadly I think this is more a byproduct of early adopters on a very hard car to tune.

They clearly handled it like shit and it doesn't look well.

But back in 2015 nobody really had answers lol come to think of it nobody really had answers till 2016/17 lmao


Sorry it was a shit situation.

[nisilvia]

Yea definitely a shit situation. It’s just how it was handled that made it worst. Coding in a different dme that wouldn’t allow my car to pass mass state inspection. I just checked his instagram and it was in June of 2017 that I had it tuned. 😱😱😱

[Discreet_335i]

Crazy. Thanks for sharing.

[BPMSport]

Cloning the DME will not stop emissions testing from being successful as long as it's performed correctly.

It clearly wasn't done properly. It is all in the handling of a situation like this that shows true colors...

Sorry to hear about your troubles!

[nisilvia]

Thanks!!!🙏🙏🙏