Make your battery car faster, only $1,200 a year!
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It's a huge difference. ECU tunes are mostly an aftermarket thing, with the dealer almost never involved (and the tune typically voids at least part of your warranty).
Tunes make power through a variety of means, but generally involve the tuner putting the car on a dyno and/or track to figure out how far the car can be pushed with different combinations of bolt-on parts, while leaving a conservative margin for variation between cars that will use the tune off-the-shelf.
What makes this different is that it's an electric car, and that the seller of the tune is Mercedes themselves. They designed in the extra power from the start, then locked it behind a paywall. This completely inverts the situation: instead of an aftermarket tune cleverly capturing extra power, Mercedes is charging you extra to use power your car had from the factory.
BMW's particular tuning arrangement is more of a support agreement with Dinan.
Dinan develops the modification as an aftermarket "accessory," and BMW agrees to support their parameters, allowing people to undergo the modification while maintaining full warranty coverage.
I agree on this aspect of it. If you look at it as a warranty issue, it's not that offensive. However, if they are locking you out of doing your own modifications while selling this it starts to get evil.
They haven't?