Livernois Tune on higher mileage SHO's

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TKSJOHN

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Hey everyone,

Tomorrow I am picking up my 1-owner 2010 Taurus SHO and trading in my 2015 Focus ST. I've been thinking about the idea of doing the Livenois tune, but I wanted to here from people who have had the tune, their experience long term with it. From everything I've read, it's a great mod to get and a good value for what it is. I just haven't been able to find any recent fourms discussing the long term results of the tune. The SHO I am getting has a very good maintenance history and has 83k miles. It's going to come with a 3,000 3 month powertrain warranty at no additional cost. I would plan on getting the tune done in about 3 months when the roads here in Michigan should be better and be able to enjoy more HP in 3 months. Would love to hear from those who have 80k+ SHO's with the Livernois tune, or if anyone has had their tune on for multiple years. Thanks everyone, and I'm excited to join the SHO community!
 

StealBlueSho

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I wouldn’t have ANY concerns with an LMS tune as long as the car is technically sound. Obviously when you drop a tune on any car you want to make sure that are no leaks, issues, and all the fluids are fresh such as the PTU, Trans, RDU, Engine Oil, Coolant, etc.

I would also recommend popping in the recommend spark plugs as well Sp-534.

The LMS tunes runs lower boost and timing than most other tuners so the stress on the motor is minimal. And they keep a lot of the torque management in place to save the drive train.

I have run their tune off and on for a couple years. Lots of guys on here with higher mileage running tunes.

Welcome to the forum!


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bpd1151

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My 2010's been tuned since about 300 miles on the odometer.

Started out with an SCT device and used a private tuner who had a long standing, established involvement in the SHO platform for many years.

Then around 3k miles, I switched over to LMS and made use of the their (no longer available) touchscreen My Calibrator device that has the ability to datalog, among many other fun, user friendly options that their new devices no longer offer.

Throughout the 3k to 60k timeframe, I had various LMS custom tunes, as well as LMS dyno sessions respectively.

In 2014, after much discussion regarding my own personal goals, coupled with the stock SHO internals, longevity etc. I chose to invest even further into my SHO, and was one of the 1st to have installed/run LMS's SHO long block, race motor upgrade/conversion.

My SHO set platform records for BOTH Speed and for Power as a result. Goal achieved.

I now am just shy of 79k on the clock (nearly 20k on the "new" LMS motor) & haven't looked back.

I have enjoyed beating the snot out of my SHO over the years. From being daily driven it's 1st 5yrs, to several track events (both drag and autocross) it's been an absolute blast to own/drive.

Like others have posted, adopting a stringent maintenance schedule is tantamount to your own individual experiences, and it is widely known how religious I am with my own maintenance routines.

LMS does an absolute stellar job with their tuning options, and they are THE VENDOR who has ALWAYS led all others in not only investing in the entire Ecoboost platform, but has consistently done so for many, many years. And that investment doesn't just include tuning mind you..... But an entire myriad of performance upgrades from simple bolt ons, to fully built motors, and everything therein inbetween. They really are quite versed in the platform.

I see no reason why you wouldn't enjoy embracing them yourself. Particularly since you're practically in their own backyard so to speak. A tour of their facility is a must!

Good luck and enjoy your SHO!

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Livernois Motorsports

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Hey everyone,

Tomorrow I am picking up my 1-owner 2010 Taurus SHO and trading in my 2015 Focus ST. I've been thinking about the idea of doing the Livenois tune, but I wanted to here from people who have had the tune, their experience long term with it. From everything I've read, it's a great mod to get and a good value for what it is. I just haven't been able to find any recent fourms discussing the long term results of the tune. The SHO I am getting has a very good maintenance history and has 83k miles. It's going to come with a 3,000 3 month powertrain warranty at no additional cost. I would plan on getting the tune done in about 3 months when the roads here in Michigan should be better and be able to enjoy more HP in 3 months. Would love to hear from those who have 80k+ SHO's with the Livernois tune, or if anyone has had their tune on for multiple years. Thanks everyone, and I'm excited to join the SHO community!
Hey welcome to the forum! We have many customers with high mileage vehicles still running our tunes, they are very reliable and safe tunes that still can make a huge night and day difference on your SHO! There are many different mods we can do that arent major or too costly that will still make a world of difference on your vehicle, give us a call if youhave any questions! 313-561-5500 extension 104, my name is Cody and ill be glad to answer any questions you have
 

steelgiant5

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Some people have trouble with 20k some people have none with 150k personally I have about 30k on my tune car has 82k.


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TKSJOHN

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June will be 3 years since I put my LMS tune on. Car was around 108K miles at the time, now it is a little over 165K miles. Same motor, same transmission, same turbos.
Did you put any other performance upgrades besides the tune? That's impressive and encouraging to hear that you're at 165k miles and have the last 60k be on a tune!
 

steelgiant5

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I don’t think a tune with a 2-1/2 psi increase is going to shorten the life of your motor much, I don’t have lms but I only run 14psi and it’s awesome.


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Livernois Motorsports

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I don’t think a tune with a 2-1/2 psi increase is going to shorten the life of your motor much, I don’t have lms but I only run 14psi and it’s awesome.


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We are best known for how reliable our tunes are and we see great gains and have alot of experience with these cars!
 

ridered74

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Did you put any other performance upgrades besides the tune? That's impressive and encouraging to hear that you're at 165k miles and have the last 60k be on a tune!


At first I just did the tune, thermostat and plugs. About six months later I added the 3 Bar, then last February I added catted downpipes.

This summer I bought an SCT device and tunes from Unleashed just to see the difference. The one good thing I will say for going that route is I discovered that my O2 sensors were flatlining at full throttle, so he was not able to make any revisions until I got them replaced. Once that tune was done, I did 10-20 datalogs with each tune, and the LMS tune was consistently .1-.2 seconds quicker 0-60 mph, while the Unleashed tune was about .2 seconds quicker 0-100 consistently.

The Unleashed tune also made a lot more whoosh whoosh cool turbo noises while driving normally, and the boost levels were higher with that tune.

I don't care too much about a tenth or two going 0-100, I care much more about making my turbos last as long as possible, so I stick with the LMS tune and lower boost levels.

I also had some major issues with the SCT device. Their instructions did not work with my car, and Torrie from Unleashed could only point me to calling SCT for support. Their support was incredibly lacking and they had no idea how to fix my issue. They said my battery was weak, so I wasted money on a new battery and still couldn't get their device to work. After several phone calls to them and multiple hours on the phone, I ended up figuring out the issue on my own. When the device says to hold the engine start button, what I actually had to do was NOT press the start button and just sit there for 8 seconds pressing nothing, and then it worked. Before that point and addition to all the wasted time, stress of spending a ton of money on something that wouldn't work, it also at one point appeared to stop completely in the middle of the process, and made me think my car was bricked. It was like that for a good 10 minutes, pressing the start button on my car did absolutely nothing. After 10 minutes it magically started working again.

I called SCT and told them what the fix was and that their directions on the screen were backwards for my car. They said they would note that in their database in case anyone else ever ran into that. I know of at least one person after that either from this forum or from a facebook group that ran into the exact same issue. They called SCT and were not given the fix either. He was run thru the same troubleshooting steps that they ran me thru. He didn't get his working until I told him what my fix was. I forget the numerical error code now, but I did some extensive google searching and there was nothing helpful anywhere.

If you had any trouble with the LMS device, you call them and deal with them and nobody else. I'm a big fan of the buck stops here type of purchases, so regardless of someone else being a tenth or two faster, any car for the rest of my life that I get tuned would be from them.
 

StealBlueSho

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At first I just did the tune, thermostat and plugs. About six months later I added the 3 Bar, then last February I added catted downpipes.

This summer I bought an SCT device and tunes from Unleashed just to see the difference. The one good thing I will say for going that route is I discovered that my O2 sensors were flatlining at full throttle, so he was not able to make any revisions until I got them replaced. Once that tune was done, I did 10-20 datalogs with each tune, and the LMS tune was consistently .1-.2 seconds quicker 0-60 mph, while the Unleashed tune was about .2 seconds quicker 0-100 consistently.

The Unleashed tune also made a lot more whoosh whoosh cool turbo noises while driving normally, and the boost levels were higher with that tune.

I don't care too much about a tenth or two going 0-100, I care much more about making my turbos last as long as possible, so I stick with the LMS tune and lower boost levels.

I also had some major issues with the SCT device. Their instructions did not work with my car, and Torrie from Unleashed could only point me to calling SCT for support. Their support was incredibly lacking and they had no idea how to fix my issue. They said my battery was weak, so I wasted money on a new battery and still couldn't get their device to work. After several phone calls to them and multiple hours on the phone, I ended up figuring out the issue on my own. When the device says to hold the engine start button, what I actually had to do was NOT press the start button and just sit there for 8 seconds pressing nothing, and then it worked. Before that point and addition to all the wasted time, stress of spending a ton of money on something that wouldn't work, it also at one point appeared to stop completely in the middle of the process, and made me think my car was bricked. It was like that for a good 10 minutes, pressing the start button on my car did absolutely nothing. After 10 minutes it magically started working again.

I called SCT and told them what the fix was and that their directions on the screen were backwards for my car. They said they would note that in their database in case anyone else ever ran into that. I know of at least one person after that either from this forum or from a facebook group that ran into the exact same issue. They called SCT and were not given the fix either. He was run thru the same troubleshooting steps that they ran me thru. He didn't get his working until I told him what my fix was. I forget the numerical error code now, but I did some extensive google searching and there was nothing helpful anywhere.

If you had any trouble with the LMS device, you call them and deal with them and nobody else. I'm a big fan of the buck stops here type of purchases, so regardless of someone else being a tenth or two faster, any car for the rest of my life that I get tuned would be from them.

Everything this man says is accurate. I also have the SCT platform and to date after 3 SCT based tuners do not have a tune that runs as smooth as LMS. I have some that faster by a small margin but are quirky daily driving it. SCT support is iffy...

Never had a problem with the LMS device, as a matter of fact, when the SCT device bricked my ECU from a borked tune, the LMS device was able to load the stock tune again and saved my bacon..


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Spyke

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Coming from a slightly different perspective let me throw in my vouch for LMS tune as well. Got my 17 SHO just last year brand new. After seeing all the buzz about the LMS tune I gave them a shot around 800 miles and used the 93 perf tune. Could not ever go back to stock. I've been using her as a daily since and it's all been smooth sailing. Did end up switching to the "soft shifting" 93 tune around winter time just to try it out and I think that's what I'll be using until the snow stops falling. Couldn't say anything about the other options as I haven't tried them, but I'm nearing 5k miles now with zero issues other than some close speeding tickets.
 

Livernois Motorsports

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At first I just did the tune, thermostat and plugs. About six months later I added the 3 Bar, then last February I added catted downpipes.

This summer I bought an SCT device and tunes from Unleashed just to see the difference. The one good thing I will say for going that route is I discovered that my O2 sensors were flatlining at full throttle, so he was not able to make any revisions until I got them replaced. Once that tune was done, I did 10-20 datalogs with each tune, and the LMS tune was consistently .1-.2 seconds quicker 0-60 mph, while the Unleashed tune was about .2 seconds quicker 0-100 consistently.

The Unleashed tune also made a lot more whoosh whoosh cool turbo noises while driving normally, and the boost levels were higher with that tune.

I don't care too much about a tenth or two going 0-100, I care much more about making my turbos last as long as possible, so I stick with the LMS tune and lower boost levels.

I also had some major issues with the SCT device. Their instructions did not work with my car, and Torrie from Unleashed could only point me to calling SCT for support. Their support was incredibly lacking and they had no idea how to fix my issue. They said my battery was weak, so I wasted money on a new battery and still couldn't get their device to work. After several phone calls to them and multiple hours on the phone, I ended up figuring out the issue on my own. When the device says to hold the engine start button, what I actually had to do was NOT press the start button and just sit there for 8 seconds pressing nothing, and then it worked. Before that point and addition to all the wasted time, stress of spending a ton of money on something that wouldn't work, it also at one point appeared to stop completely in the middle of the process, and made me think my car was bricked. It was like that for a good 10 minutes, pressing the start button on my car did absolutely nothing. After 10 minutes it magically started working again.

I called SCT and told them what the fix was and that their directions on the screen were backwards for my car. They said they would note that in their database in case anyone else ever ran into that. I know of at least one person after that either from this forum or from a facebook group that ran into the exact same issue. They called SCT and were not given the fix either. He was run thru the same troubleshooting steps that they ran me thru. He didn't get his working until I told him what my fix was. I forget the numerical error code now, but I did some extensive google searching and there was nothing helpful anywhere.

If you had any trouble with the LMS device, you call them and deal with them and nobody else. I'm a big fan of the buck stops here type of purchases, so regardless of someone else being a tenth or two faster, any car for the rest of my life that I get tuned would be from them.
Sorry to hear about your experience with sct and unleashed but were glad we could help you out with any issues or concerns you have and we highly appreciate the kind words and support and its always great to hear that our customers are enjoying our tunes!
 

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