Prodigy JL Turbo Kit experience

[Squibbles]

Yes. I am that person but I openly admit that I was completely at fault in that situation. I put a boost controller on my engine to attempt to achieve their stated accomplishments. Being a novice I made the mistake of turning the boost wide open instead of off. As a result the boost spiked to over 30 psi and I blew the engine.

Even so I absolutely do NOT hold Prodigy responsible for that failure! My quest is still to find out if anyone achieved their stated and boasted results. All I am suggesting* is that they should not claim what they can not achieve. Towards this end future potential buyers may want to seriously consider that Prodigy’s claims are enough exaggerated that they would be better served by considering another alternative.

30 fucking psi? That’s a lot to demand of a stock engine, I’m at 23psi on a 7.5:1 engine

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[ShawnC]

For those few of us who have opted for a Prodigy Performance JL Turbo Kit I would like to ask about your experience. As you can clearly see advertised on their web site they claim (with disclaimers) that their kit will increase you rear wheel horsepower by 150 to about 400. I have had my Jeep Dyno tested on the rear axel direct type Dyno and just made 350 RWHP. Although this is a considerable improvement over stock it is WAY short of what they advertise. End result is that I paid $100 per horsepower upgrade. I don’t know your results but I must express my disappointment.

if most of you have had a similar experience then I will take the lead and attempt to force Prodigy to modify their claims. If you disagree then I will remain silent and live with my disgruntled attitude.

In closing I feel compelled to say that at this point I wish I had not purchased this kit and would haven chosen a HEMI swap instead!

Jim Love

@jimlove9771

Jim,

I was waiting for Prodigy to say their turbo was ready for the JLU when I bought my current Jeep (2019 JLU). I even spoke with a (now former) Prodigy employee that used to post on the site. Once I found the Jeep I wanted, and was ready to have the turbo kit installed, I saw your updates (the boost controller mishap, etc) as well as others having severe tuning issues with the kit.

There was another forum member then that was having success with his Prodigy kit. He used his own tuner and they went through a lot of trial and error, but in the end he was really happy with the kit. @FlyByU , he has some videos up on this site of his Jeep in action. I talked with him multiple times about his install (super nice guy), and I even called his installer to setup a purchase/appointment. When I called the shop that did his install, they basically told me not to buy the kit. They said they had performed two installs... One was @FlyByU, who they said used his own tuner and seemed happy. The second person was so unhappy with the kit that he parked his Jeep at the shop and asked them to sell and remove the kit. They gave the guy my contact info but he never called. I reached out to @FlyByU via DM about a month and a half ago, but I have not heard back. He has not posted in a while. He also mentioned that he had a supercharger installed first, but was not happy with the performance so he went turbo (Anyone know him IRL?).

I reached out to Prodigy again to get their assurance they had the tune straightened out. They said they never had any issues with the tune, and that it was probably the installers fault. They gave me the name of a former Prodigy employee that 'loved the kit so much that he opened his own install shop". This had me feeling a little better, but then I asked about all the reports of tune issues, what changes have they made to the tune since the initial release, etc.. that's when he made they made it pretty clear they didn't want to talk about it any more. I looked up the site of the installer they recommended (South Florida), but it really didn't mention anything about the JL installation. It looked like a basic 4WD SHOP. I KINDA lost my trust at that point, especially as I could not find any "happy" JL owners with the kit online anywhere. Lot's of JK's who were happy (including the install shop @FlyByU used), but I couldn't find any JL owner reviews.

I was about to go ProCharger after reading @Torero's experience with them, but now that there are multiple vendors releasing JL superchargers (RIPP, ProCharger, Magnuson, Edelbrock) I need to read up on those before making a decision...

Fyi.. I also noticed that many specifics have been removed from the Prodigy site... their kit was on sale for $1000-2000 off last week though...

Hope that helps...

 

[jimlove9771]

@jimlove9771

Jim,

I was waiting for Prodigy to say their turbo was ready for the JLU when I bought my current Jeep (2019 JLU). I even spoke with a (now former) Prodigy employee that used to post on the site. Once I found the Jeep I wanted, and was ready to have the turbo kit installed. That's when I saw your updates (the boost controller mishap, etc) as well as others having severe tuning issues with the kit.

There was another forum member then that was having success with his Prodigy kit. He used his own tuner and they went through a lot of trial and error, but in the end he was really happy with the kit. @FlyByU , he has some videos up on this site of his Jeep in action. I talked with him multiple times about his install (super nice guy), and I even called his installer to setup a purchase/appointment. When I called the shop that did his install, they basically told me not to buy the kit. They said they had done two installs... One was @FlyByU, who they said used his own tuner and seemed happy. The second was person was so unhappy with the kit that he parked his Jeep at the shop and asked them to sell and remove the kit. They gave the guy my contact info but he never called. I reached out to @FlyByU via DM about a month and a half ago, but I have not heard back. He has not posted in a while. He also mentioned that he had a supercharger installed but was not happy with the performance so he went turbo (Anyone know him IRL?).

I reached out to Prodigy again to get their assurance they had the tune straightened out. They said they never had any issues with the tune and that it was probably the fault. They gave me the name of a former Prodigy employee that 'loved the kit so much that he opened his own install shop". This had me feeling a little better, but then I asked about all the reports of tune issues, what changes have they made to the tune since the initial release, etc.. that's when he made they made it pretty clear they didn't want to talk about it any more. I pretty much lost my trust at that point, especially as I could not find any "happy" JL owners with the kit online anywhere. Lot's of JK's who were happy, but I couldn't find any JL owners.

I was about to go ProCharger after reading @Torero's experience with them, but now that there are multiple vendors releasing JL superchargers (RIPP, ProCharger, Magneson, Edelbrock) I need to read up on those before making a decision...

Fyi.. I also noticed that many specifics have been removed from the Prodigy site... their kit was $1000-2000 off last week I believe...

Hope that helps...

Thank you for your response. For what it’s worth, I recently sprang for Prodigy to give me their very best effort at not only tuning the turbo but also the 8 speed auto tranny. This cost me an additional $400 for the remote tuning work and $200 for 4 more HP Tuners credits.

Tomorrow I am having my Jeep Dyno tested again to see exactly where I stand after replacing the engine and utilizing Prodigy’s very latest personalized tune. I predict that it will still fall significantly short of their originally advertised RWHP gain of 150 with a boost of 8.0 psi. My first Dyno test showed only a 100 RWHP gain and a maximum boost of 7.0 psi. Some may dismiss this as just normal variation in any one particular engine but come on be realistic. There is no way that results could consistently vary by that much. I could accept +/- 5-10% but not 50%!!

Please follow me at least until I post these results which will probably be tomorrow. My goal is to prove that they are guilty of false advertising and ultimately force them to retract such exaggerated claims.

Just consider if they had been truthful and stated from the start that buyers could only expect 100 HP gain for an installed cost of about $10,000. That’s $100 per HP as opposed to $67 if it did produce the 150 HP. How many sales would they have made? I can guarantee you I would not have purchased their kit.

 

[ShawnC]

Absolutely.

Good to hear about the 8 Spd Auto... that's why I waited until 2019 to get my JLU. My first automatic vehicle in 30 years. It's a solid transmission and the i figured the extra gears would help keep the RPM's up for the FI kit until I was up to normal speed. Did Prodigy's tune make any changes to your transmission? I noticed some of the JL supercharger kits explicitly say "no transmission tuning included"... i also noticed today that RIPP added a statement on their JL page saying that their tune "is only a base tune", and to have your Jeep dyno'd and re-tuned for best performance (no, I'm not stalking them, I use an app to monitor changes on sites I'm following ).

Oh, the tuner that @FlyByU used for his Prodigy was a former FCA guy out of the Seattle area.. supposedly he remapped almost everything, even added "tables" that should have been used but were not. I know nothing about tuning so hopefully that made sense. I can find the name he gave me if you are interested in speaking with them.

Thank you for your response. For what it’s worth, I recently sprang for Prodigy to give me their very best effort at not only tuning the turbo but also the 8 speed auto tranny. This cost me an additional $400 for the remote tuning work and $200 for 4 more HP Tuners credits.

Tomorrow I am having my Jeep Dyno tested again to see exactly where I stand after replacing the engine and utilizing Prodigy’s very latest personalized tune. I predict that it will still fall significantly short of their originally advertised RWHP gain of 150 with a boost of 8.0 psi. My first Dyno test showed only a 100 RWHP gain and a maximum boost of 7.0 psi. Some may dismiss this as just normal variation in any one particular engine but come on be realistic. There is no way that results could consistently vary by that much. I could accept +/- 5-10% but not 50%!!

Please follow me at least until I post these results which will probably be tomorrow. My goal is to prove that they are guilty of false advertising and ultimately force them to retract such exaggerated claims.

Just consider if they had been truthful and stated from the start that buyers could only expect 100 HP gain for an installed cost of about $10,000. That’s $100 per HP as opposed to $67 if it did produce the 150 HP. How many sales would they have made? I can guarantee you I would not have purchased their kit.

 

[jimlove9771]

Absolutely.

Good to hear about the 8 Spd Auto... that's why I waited until 2019 to get my JLU. My first automatic vehicle in 30 years. It's a solid transmission and the i figured the extra gears would help keep the RPM's up for the FI kit until I was up to normal speed. Did Prodigy's tune make any changes to your transmission? I noticed some of the JL supercharger kits explicitly say "no transmission tuning included"... i also noticed today that RIPP added a statement on their JL page saying that their tune "is only a base tune", and to have your Jeep dyno'd and re-tuned for best performance (no, I'm not stalking them, I use an app to monitor changes on sites I'm following ).

Oh, the tuner that @FlyByU used for his Prodigy was a former FCA guy out of the Seattle area.. supposedly he remapped almost everything, even added "tables" that should have been used but were not. I know nothing about tuning so hopefully that made sense. I can find the name he gave me if you are interested in speaking with them.

yes. Prodigy did make adjustments to the transmission. Being fair the transmission does shift noticeably improved smoothly. But that doesn’t excuse their claims of the HP gains. After all what are we all looking for? Why are we trying to get more HP?

 

[CoolTech]

There is basically two large challenges when developing an aftermarket turbo kit. First is the mechanical components - the turbo, wastegate, intercooler, blow-off valve, tubing, and connectors. The turbo needs to be sized correctly for the application and the wastegate and internal physical spring needs to be set correctly based on the target boost for the application. Finally, some physical way of controlling the maximum boost (wastegate activation) must be employed - which can be strictly mechanical or electronically controlled. From an arm's length of everything I have read on Prodigy's kit, they got all of this more or less correct right out of the box. Not an easy task, and hat's off to them for all of this engineering work.

The second part of a turbo kit is the engine management component - often overlooked as it certainly isn't as visible but as or more important that the physical components and fitment.

Again, from an arm's length perspective, it just doesn't appear that the aftermarket tuners have the granularity of control over the ECU as compared to the ECU in a Ford or Chevy - where control right down to the gnats ass is possible. Simply stated, when you add forced induction onto an engine with an already high compression ratio - you DO need control down to the gnat's ass. What I witnessed reading of the trials and tribulations of the Prodigy owners was that tuner after tuner had failed to get a reasonable, OEM-like tune for the JL. In my opinion, this really isn't a bad reflection on the tuners but an inherent problem when the underlying reverse engineering of the ECU isn't as mature as that of other platforms.

 

[jimlove9771]

Here are the results of my Dyno tune with Prodigy’s tune. Judge for yourselves. Would you pay$10,000 for this?

 

[CoolTech]

OP - thanks for sharing - and thanks for including both A/F and boost tables as it it impossible to make a judgement without those. The good news compared to previous posts from other users is that it appears that boost pressures are now completely under control. That boost curve looks very nice and flat and almost at 6psi at 3800rpm is reasonable. All of that very good. (It is much tougher to start dialing in a/f's when boost is not stabilized.)

Your AFR's while safe (better than the alternative!) are too rich. Ideally, you ever want to be richer than 11:1. The ideal A/F graph would be a flat line at 12:1. You'd probably pick up quite a bit of power.... but recognize that you are playing with fire. I think this is a further illustration of what I was mentioning in the previous post. Because the tuner doesn't have detailed control, they have resorted in providing something quite conservative (rich) and probably overly so. As a tuner, you would ideally like the slope to be trending toward rich, not trending toward lean (although you are no where near lean!)

I've drawn what I believe would be an ideal (conservative) curve in the pic below. Your tuner knows this... no doubt. Knowing what they want and getting there is two different things.

 

[jimlove9771]

Now I understand why my gas mileage has dropped so dramatically. I am currently only getting 14.5 mpg. I don’t know if you saw my previous Dyno but I have included it below. I am considering writing the ECM portion of this tune while keeping the TCM portion of the tune. What do you think? This Dyno was done under the exact same conditions as the current one. However you may notice somewhat of a shift in the rpms. This is due to the differential ratio having been changed from stock 3.45 to 5.13.

 

[CoolTech]

Under most "normal" driving scenarios - say roughly less that 50% throttle, your ECU is in "closed loop" state. It is pulsing the injectors, and checking the O2 sensors and keeping AF's right at 14.7:1. It is doing this several times per second. 14.7:1 is ideal for best (most environmentally "clean" burn.) So, turbo or no turbo if you are driving very conservatively or at a steady state cruise - you remain in closed-loop and your tuner has no way to change that. Your mpg for all of this driving should remain unaffected. (Note that if at any time the ECU cannot attain 14.7:1, it will immediately throw a Check Engine Light.)

When you place more demand on the engine, it is important (for engine longevity) that the a/f becomes richer. Historically, traditional narrow-band O2 sensors can only report on under or over 14.7:1... so closed-loop mode will not work for higher demand loads. As such, the OEMs have pre-programmed tables (developed by static bench testing of the engines) and this mode is called open-loop. It is only these open-loop tables that a tuner can change.

 

[ShawnC]

Ok, here's where I wish we had user FlyByU back in the discussion...

He mentioned that his tuner had found many unused tables in the FCA tune that he was able to write/re-write to make the Prodigy kit more stable/efficient... please excuse me if I am butchering the proper technical lingo here, just mentioning that this sounds exactly like what he was telling me his tuner modified... I think his tuner was the same guy that Kevin from LiteBrite found and liked before his setup borked...

Am I reading Jim's current dyno graph correctly and he's not even getting 300HP at the wheels? I really wish Prodigy would give us their side of the story here...

Under most "normal" driving scenarios - say roughly less that 50% throttle, your ECU is in "closed loop" state. It is pulsing the injectors, and checking the O2 sensors and keeping AF's right at 14.7:1. It is doing this several times per second. 14.7:1 is ideal for best (most environmentally "clean" burn.) So, turbo or no turbo if you are driving very conservatively or at a steady state cruise - you remain in closed-loop and your tuner has no way to change that. Your mpg for all of this driving should remain unaffected. (Note that if at any time the ECU cannot attain 14.7:1, it will immediately throw a Check Engine Light.)

When you place more demand on the engine, it is important (for engine longevity) that the a/f becomes richer. Historically, traditional narrow-band O2 sensors can only report on under or over 14.7:1... so closed-loop mode will not work for higher demand loads. As such, the OEMs have pre-programmed tables (developed by static bench testing of the engines) and this mode is called open-loop. It is only these open-loop tables that a tuner can change.

 

[jimlove9771]

Ok, here's where I wish we had user FlyByU back in the discussion...

He mentioned that his tuner had found many unused tables in the FCA tune that he was able to write/re-write to make the Prodigy kit more stable/efficient... please excuse me if I am butchering the proper technical lingo here, just mentioning that this sounds exactly like what he was telling me his tuner modified... I think his tuner was the same guy that Kevin from LiteBrite found and liked before his setup borked...

Am I reading Jim's current dyno graph correctly and he's not even getting 300HP at the wheels? I really wish Prodigy would give us their side of the story here...

You are reading right. In fact I am only getting abut 275 RWHP. I was getting 350 from an independent tuner. But it was recommended to me that I should let Prodigy take over the tune completely because they designed the kit and they offered auto trans tuning as well. So I went for it. This cost me an additional $600 for which I lost power and gas mileage. I confronted them quite angrily and they responded also angrily. We now hate each other but I am stuck with a $10,000 turbo system which essentially adds somewhere between 30 and 50 RWHP. They vehemently argue that their turbo adds 20 RWHP per psi boost. They also advertise ~8 psi boost ut as you can see I only get 6. As measured every claim they make is at the least exaggerated and at most pure and simple false advertising.

 

[CoolTech]

Jim, having read most if not all of the threads relating to the Prodigy kit - it's my opinion that the tuning SOFTWARE (not the tuner's themselves) just doesn't have the level of control that is needed (or that is available for other major OEM ECUs). The architecture of the ECU - both hardware and software is reverse engineered... it's not like these guys publish how everything works. Yes, many if not all of the "tables" have been found and the tuning software allows an interface to change these table values. But exactly how the ECU will use or prioritize these values compared to others and/or to the degree or not the global values (like temperature and air pressure) are factored in.... all come from experimentation.

In short, I guess what I'm saying is that there may not be a satisfactory solution available. It's not a matter of finding a better tuning person.... I'm not sure there's a tuner anywhere that would have any (big) disagreement with the ideal A/F curve I illustrated on top of yours. Virtually everyone would agree that's whats wanted... but getting there is a different story. And to add further complication (and anxiety!) you may get a tuner to get you close to there on a given day at a given altitude, at a given temperature.... but what happens when those environmental variables change?

Instead, after all of these months, what we see is a very, very safe tune - the results of which you captured and published. I rest my case on the following: If there really was a GOOD tune out there, it would be in everyone's best interest to distribute it. Sadly, I simply don't think it exists. My recommendation (reluctantly offered) would be to remove the system, thank your lucky stars that you still have a good motor (others have been less fortunate) and see if you can recover some of your investment by selling the kit or components. I just don't see an ending that's any happier.

 

[jimlove9771]

Wow! That’s a very sad conclusion indeed. I simply can’t do that. I have over $12,000 directly invested in this fiasco (not counting my error which cost an additional $6000 to replace the engine I blew). At this point even a few hp is better than nothing. The few dollars I would get from selling the used kit probably wouldn’t even offset the cost of its removal. Just not practical.

The best I can do is to urge potential buyers not to purchase Prodigy’s Kit. It’s just not worth it. I beg you. DO NOT BUY THIS STSTEM!

 

[digitalbliss]

Yuck, what a waste

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