N55 Cobb Accessport Review

Before I start I would like to apologize for taking so long to write this review. I have been trying to resolve a few oil pressure issues with my BMW and as a result I have been putting off the review.

Now to get to the review. The Cobb Accessport V3 is the latest incarnation of what is probably the world leading flash tuning tool, and for good reason. Ranging from subarus, Mazdas, fords, Nissans, and bmws; Cobb makes tuners for a wide variety of different vehicles. My particular car is a 2011 BMW 135i M-Package with 140,000km. With the exception of a custom muffler delete, my 135i is completely stock. I ended up paying $880 CAD for the Accessport.

The first thing you need to do once you begin to use the Accessport is locate the OBD2 port to plug the Accessport in. Once this is done the tuner will detect the type of vehicle that it’s in and then will save the factory ecu data. Next it will install one of the preset tunes that you have selected. The tunes are as follows :
-stage 1 sport
-stage 1 aggressive
-stage 1 aggressive +
-stage 2 sport
-stage 2 aggressive
-valet mode

I may be mixing up some of the names of the tunes but you can find all of the correct information on the Cobb website if you are interested. The first two tunes are for a relatively stock car with/without the exception of the exhaust and intake. These are the ones that I will focus on since my car does not have the required modifications for the other tunes.

I went with the stage 1 aggressive tune to start since it provides the most power and more power is always better..right? Well the tune took about 5-10 minutes to install and after that I went for a small drive. The first thing I noticed was the sound of the turbo whistling when I get off the throttle. The next was the vast increase in power starting around 2000rpm. With the increase in power came the sudden realization that the baby BMW has a hell of a lot of potential to be a major threat against cars that cost twice as much. The real test came later that night when I took it on the highway. The best way to describe it is to compare it to when the melenium falcon went into hyperspeed. The car pulled like a freight train in any gear that I was in and I swear I started seeing plad (a reference to space balls if you were wondering) This is about the time that I noticed that the car hit 18 PSI of boost….something was wrong. The car should be boosting around 15 PSI with 1 PSI of overshoot (for the record, the stock tune is somewhere between 9-11 PSI ). Well I ended up getting a few engine codes all relating to low oil pressure. My solution? … clear the codes and see if it happens again. It did, and this lead me to believe that it was somehow connected to overboosting.

Flash forward a couple weeks and I ended up changing tunes to the more tame stage 1 sport. I used this tune for one day without getting any engine codes but at the expense of being slow. So I did the only logical thing; switched back to stage 1 aggressive. I ended up using this for a few more weeks and I noticed that I wasn’t overboosting as much (only around 17 PSI when I get near redline) and the engine codes would only rarely come up. This lead me to believe that somehow the tune screwed up when I installed it the first time. For those who are wondering about the horsepower (and I assume most of you are) Cobb reported their 135i with 310whp with the stage 1 aggressive tune. That is compared to the roughly 270-280whp of a stock 135i.

I would definitely recommend the Accessport to anyone in the market for a quick way to tune their car. I will also like to add that the Accessport is able to datalog over 20 different parameters of your vehicle and can also act a gauge for up to 6 parameters.

As for me, I will continue to use my 135i as it is for this summer with the possible exception of a cold air intake. I plan on upgrading to a larger intercooler and catless downpipe over the winter so I could move up to a stage 2 tune. I will keep you updated in another review if this one is well received.

If you liked this review, I would very much appreciate it if you follow my instagram page “understatementgarage” that I co-run with a good friend of mine. Then again I’m not your mom so do what you want.

Thanks for reading!