Hey guys, thought I'd weigh in on this. There's some great info here overall, so I'm happy to see this type of comparison. I don't have any direct experience with Littco turbos, but they seem to make a quality product.
The first aspect I'd like to touch on is spool. I think our Vortex turbo is a closer comparison to the L500 in overall power capability, but based on the few dyno charts I've seen, I believe our turbo spools quite a bit faster and likely much closer to the L450. Spool has a lot to do with good matching of the compressor and turbine wheels as well as the turbine housing size. Although we use the larger TD06Sl2 turbine, we really tried to optimize the turbine housing size to provide the best response while still keeping the turbo efficient at higher boost and power levels. We ended up giving up only about 300-400RPM of spool when compared to an IS38.
Here's a chart showing spool in a DSG Golf R in 4th gear on flat road:
And here's a recent dyno chart from a GTI on 91 Octane. This one is comparing to the Tomioka offering, but the main take-away is the excellent spool:
Compared to an IS38, we basically give up torque bellow 3500RPM and then leave it in the dust the rest of the way. And although there is definitely some extra lag down there, the turbo still builds partial boost easily bellow 2000RPM making it very drivable and keeping the cars peppy in every day conditions. The smoother onset of power also help with traction in FWD vehicles, although 1st and 2nd gears do require quite a bit of traction control to put power down
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As far as overall power capabilities, its very tough to compare different dynos. All I can say is that on our dyno, the turbo makes around 440whp on 91 Octane and over 500whp on E30. We will be tuning a couple on full E85 soon, so we should see where it really caps out. For a point of reference of how our dyno reads, my personal Golf R does about 430whp on full E85 on the stock IS38 and traps 121mph. A GTI with the same power should trap a couple mph higher. Now that I'm done with the IS38, I'll finally be installing one of our turbos on my R so I can push it to its limits and show what it can do on the track and drag strip.
Our turbo is also fully VSR balanced in a state of the art facility that builds turbos for companies like Garret. As many are aware, we did have one failure to date. We replaced the turbo immediately and upon inspection of the failed unit, we found the issue to be a manufacturing defect. Although it was a completely isolated failure, we worked with the manufacturer to take extra steps to ensure better quality control that will help us avoid any other issues. Other than that isolated issue, we have many new customers running these turbos with zero issues.
Finally, we're trying to offer an excellent price point, but we also strive to offer the best possible customer service and experience. We will be offering package deals with other parts and tuning solutions. And we are always here and very happy to help with any questions or issues, technical or otherwise. I believe this is a big factor when deciding what company to work with.
I hope this helps to clear up some more details and I'm thrilled to be part of this community and the development of this amazing platform. There are a lot of turbo options out there with new ones popping up almost daily. This can definitely be hard to navigate for a customer, so please feel free to ask us any other questions and we'll do our best to answer accurately.
Thanks
-- Ed