COBB Accessport V3 Focus ST 2013-2018/ Fiesta ST 2014-2019

Performance wise so far we've installed a COBB cold air intake and a Borla exhaust system on our Focus ST. Right now we're using SCT's 93 octane base file for tuning and have seen some pretty good gains out of it. The only drawback to the base file is it's actually designed for a Dyno tune so you want to put the car on the Dyno and then modify the tune for maximum performance. If you're changing as many parts as we're planning on changing this doesn't make much sense. Today we're looking at another way of tuning, which is the Accessport from COBB.

The beauty of the COBB Accessport is the ease of use and the database that comes along with it. When you get your Accessport it gives you a link to their website where you can go on and download any map that you want. There are hundreds of maps to choose from covering pretty much any modification you want to do to your Focus ST. You plug in your computer and download the maps directly to your Accessport and plug in your OBD2 sensor to your Focus ST and install the tune. As usual, COBB gives you everything necessary including the tuner itself, multiple face plates, a cable for your computer, the OBD2 cable, a nice carrying case, as well as a mounting bracket for your dash.

Before we begin the installation of the Accessport you want to make sure if you're using another tuner you want to flash the vehicle back to stock first and that will unlock the other tuner and allow us to install the Accessport.

You're going to start the installation by taking the supplied OBD2 cable that comes with the Accessport, pull this cover down here and plug it in. Now take the other end of the plug, fish it up your dash, and plug it into your Accessport. It'll turn on automatically.

The first thing you notice about the Accessport, it's a nice high definition full color display. It's real easy to read, four buttons here at the bottom will run you through all the operations. The install is the main one but we'll click down to the check in one here. Here's your trouble shooting section. Click into that. You can read your codes, you can reset the computer, you can also kill the keep alive memory, which is nice if you're trying to delete a code you just can't get rid of. We're not worried about that now so we'll cancel this and go back to tuning stream.

Install tune is what we're looking to do so we're going to click on that. The next screen is going to come up and ask you what vehicle you're using. You want to make sure whatever you're programming with your Accessport is what comes up on the screen. In our case US 2014 Focus ST. We hit continue.

Basically here what you want to do is pick the file that best suits the performance mods you have done to your car. In our case we run 93 octane, we go to the stage I tune here. They do recommend putting a battery charger on it. It draws a decent amount of current when you're tuning with a tuner like this. If you have a battery charger use it. You definitely don't have to, but while you're tuning make sure your lights are off, radio is off, don't have anything else running at the same time.

At this point our Accessport is connecting to our computer to verify everything is correct before it starts the tune. Now it's saving the factory data from the computer. We're going to speed up all these processes. Each one is going to take usually a couple of minutes to go through, especially for your first tune. We don't want to make this a 25 minute video so we'll speed up this process here.

Now the Accessport is preparing the computer for the new tune. It's going to download. Now it's actually flashing our computer with the new file. This will be the longest part of the procedure, definitely going to take a few minutes for this to go through. The first time you program the car you want to give yourself, figure it's going to take 20 to 25 minutes to put the tune in.

When the flash is over the car is going to turn back on. Turn the ignition off and then we'll turn it on again. Okay to continue and there we go, our installation is successful. The check mark means everything is good to go. Tap the ignition button one more time to turn it off and our installation is finished with the tuner.

Now we start on our Ford Focus to make sure the tune went, everything runs like it's supposed to. Go back to your Accessport now and you'll notice you have different options. Before we just had tune and the check engine. Now you've got gauges, performance, there's an extra tune section there, as well as user tools. Take a closer look at gauges. Pretty much anything that runs off of the OBD2 port you can actually monitor now inside of your Accessport.

We set it up earlier for actual air fuel ratio, as well as boost. Those are the two most people are going to look at. We'll show you how to configure some others. You go onto the screen and hit the arrow at the top. Here you can change the layout and you can choose how many different things you want to monitor. We had it for six, we'll make it three to make it a lot easier to see. Now you can see we have our actual air/fuel ration our boost, and now we'll set up the bottom one here. Click down to it and hit the select button. You want to change the monitor and then go into all this stuff here and choose exactly what you want to see. We're going to make it actually do the charge air temp. Click on that. Now you can see we have our air/fuel ratio at the top, our boost in the middle, and the air temperature at the bottom. Again you've got tons of options here as far as you want to log and it's real time so you can use it on the car you're driving or you can actually log these for a Dyno tuning session if you wanted to, a very cool feature of the Accessport.

One more cool feature in here, we'll go back again to the arrow at the top for set up. Click into that and there's a shift light built in so we're going to set that up next. We're actually going to leave it at 4500 that way we can hit it without having to run the car red line, but normally you want to set your shift light up pretty much where you want to shift the car. To have a little more fun we'll set it at 5000. If you watch these lights here, once we hit 5,000 they will actually light up telling us to shift the car. Again, pretty cool feature.

Going back down to the main menu you see the stopwatch below the gauge. It actually has performance timers built into it. You have a 0 to 60 timer, as well as a quarter mile. If you want to try these out make sure you do it not on a public road. Find a big parking lot, abandoned air strip, somewhere else. It's a pretty cool feature that's built into the tuner.

Going back to the main menu again there's all your troubleshooting. This allows you to tune the vehicle and make adjustments and load different maps. Down the road you add an intercooler to make a different modification, get the new map for it, load it up to this, plug it into your tuner and download it to your Focus.

The last section down here is user tools where it says you can save and back up data. There is additional software available. If you did want to tune your car yourself you can buy the software through COBB through CJ Pony Parts and you can tune it yourself, again with a qualified user on a Dyno. You can see it's going to be tough to really tell the difference from one tuner to the other. You've got to get on the Dyno where you'll really be able to tell. I can say that so far it feels pretty good. The throttle response is really, really good. I almost swear the turbo sounds a little bit louder where it shouldn't, but there's a possibility the way the tune's being done we're making a little more boost as well.

We'll run up the gears a little bit and test out some of the gauges that come with the Accessport. That's cool, you can see the air/fuel when we get in the boost like it's supposed to, watch the boost jump like it's supposed to as well. The gauges are very cool. If you're trying to really keep an eye on what they're doing you want to log instead of actually watching them because they are kind of small. Putting the tuner where we have it makes it so you can look at it quickly while you're driving.

Judging off what we've seen on the Dyno when we're under full boost the air/fuel looks about right. So far so good. The Accessport is a great little tool to have for your Focus ST. Not only do you have access to hundreds of different performance maps, the gauge allows you to monitor any engine parameters that you want to, as well as data log them. You can also remove and troubleshoot any kind of engine codes and there's a few fun performance timers as well. If you're serious about performance for your Focus ST make sure you check out the Accessport from COBB.