Toyota Land Cruiser 300 HEV – Hybrid Electric Vehicle

We had the unique opportunity to tune a brand-new, out-of-the-box Toyota Land Cruiser 300 HEV, recently released in South Africa and quite possibly one of the first LC300 HEVs in SA to be tuned.

This project presented some interesting challenges from the very beginning.

Challenge #1 – ECU Access

The initial pinout diagram supplied for the tuning tool did not work on this vehicle. With some clever thinking from our dealer, combined with the vehicle’s wiring diagrams, additional ECU pins were identified and traced, allowing us to successfully gain access to the ECU.

Challenge #2 – No Existing Maps

With no previous tuning data available and no existing mappack for this ECU, we had to start completely from scratch.

We built our own custom mappack from the ground up, consisting of nearly 330 individually defined and tunable maps.

From there, we developed our Stage 1 calibration with the speed limiter removed — and the results were nothing short of impressive.

The difference is night and day.

For a vehicle weighing around 2.5 tons, the performance of this LC300 HEV after tuning is genuinely unbelievable. The response and acceleration have transformed it into a seriously fast SUV, fast enough to make some performance cars look slow.

This is exactly what custom tuning is about: when there is no map to work from, we build one.

Race Remaps — Power, Refined