Content Wrapper

[abrax894]

So I did this mod about 1.5 weeks ago. Worked great....... or so I thought. Last Friday I was merging onto the interstate on my way home from work. Before merging was probably doing upwards of 60 mph, when merging I popped the car into neutral and let the RPM's drom while breaking. At this point, when my RPM's reached normal idle, well they didn't, and just kept dropping and my car stalled almost immeidiately, merging onto the interstate, at roughly 40mph...... yeah, not so great, but ok, restarted and everything was fine after that, cept I was monitoring my RPM's coming down to idle. The entire afternoon the RPM's would drop to around 3-400 before slowly going back up to normal idle, this was in city driving conditions so stop and go. I thought this was odd so the next day, when taking the car to my Kia dealership for an oil change, I had them take a look. They returned and said that I had a faulty throttle position sensor that needed to be replaced. I asked them to explain the throttle position sensor to me and this is what the tech told me.

The TPS, the block we adjusted to reduce our throttle response time, is actually a set of 4 sensors. These sensors talk to the computer to tell the computer the position of the throttle. The factory pre programmed position of these sensors is in the computer and when those sensors are not where they are supposed to be, i.e. our adjustment, the computer has trouble, thus my stall when merging on the interstate. (Yes I'm aware, that that explanation was a bit weak, but I'm going to give more details here shortly as I know the guy at the dealership). Anyway, I was asking him a few questions concerning the TPS, such as the little bit of play that everyone complains about, is there a way to get rid of it and such. He said that the TPS was locked down at the factory due to the fact that the Forte's are ULE, or Ultra Low Emission vehicles. These sensors are actually part of the Emission Control System and if they, at the dealership, were to mess with it, it would change the Emission profile of the vehicle, and each instance of this could actually result in a $100,000 fine from the gov. This fine did not affect automotive shops as they didn't build the car, but Kia could not make the adjustment. He also said that since this all was with programing in the computer, the only true way to fix the throttle play was to actually reprogram the computer to begin accelerating as soon as the thottle was pushed instead of allowing play. Basically adjusting the position the sensors would trigger a throttle response. Adjusting the default position of the sensors, as we have done with this mod, is actually only a band aid and while it doesn't necesarilly damage anything, or at least, nothing that we know of yet, it has seemed to cause a few issues which I'm not entirely comfortable with. Also, since you are tinkering, it will void the warranty on that part, luckily I didn't mention that I had done this so no issues yet, but I am going back in to see if I can correct the issue on my own. This is basically a "be forwarned" to anyone out there that has not done this mod yet. I'm not saying don't do it, I just want everyone aware as to what exactly they are doing. I'll keep you all updated as to what happense.