Interview: FSR Technology – The Maker of Malaysian Very Own FCU for Yamaha FZ150i

F = Farhan

S = Suffian

R = Research or Racing, depending on who we’re talking to 🙂

We are a year old startup focused on developing automotive & consumer electronics. FSR Technology was officially founded on Feb 16, 2011. The founders are myself and Suffian. We were both primarily from a microchip design background before we started this. I (Farhan Mohamed Ali) am 27, have bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (USA). Worked for a couple years in a chip design firm where Suffian was my colleague. Mohd Suffian Zamali is 31, has bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota (USA). After a lot of thought and discussion, we decided we were ready to do own thing. So we somehow put together about RM250,000 and started this company to build great products. We realized early that automotive electronics would be an interesting market and saw a gap in the market which our FCU product addresses, namely tuning for entry level fuel injection bikes.

Yes, currently the FCU is our only product. We have experimented on other bikes, but the FZ still remains the most popular fuel injection model in Malaysia, so it is still our primary focus.

We keep our product line simple. There is only one current model of this product, which we call the FCU-150z PnP (Plug and Play). This is an improvement over the first model of our product which required some fairly complicated wiring. Now all the user has to do is plug in our product, which can be done in 1 minute. It comes preloaded with tuned settings for a standard FZ-150i so most of our customers can immediately benefit without having to do any tuning. 80% of our customers are using standard bikes.

You can check out the product description/images here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.361729343848415.83718.240257402662277&type=1

and here http://fsrtech.com/fcu

We claim 10% improved power and 10% improved fuel economy at full throttle for a 100% standard FZ-150i. We know it doesn’t sound as “grand” as a lot of so called performance products like to claim, but we pride ourselves in being engineers, not salesmen. Our claims are based on measurable data via our extensive dyno testing (400+ bikes!) and corroborated by user feedback. A very detailed user testimonial can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/fsrtech/posts/366001383421211

For bikes which are modified (e.g. aftermarket exhaust, bore up kits, etc), our FCU is pretty much a necessity to get the best performance. Any such mods mess up the fueling on the bike and the performance potential is not realized. In cases such as bore up kits, performance increases up to 30% are not impossible with our FCU. It also helps to prevent engine damage due to overly lean fueling from installing bore up kits. Basically, our FCU is the enabler for all sorts of engine mods which were previously impossible to do reliably on the FZ.

You can see some dyno results here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.248477661840251.63746.240257402662277&type=3

A bike we sponsored/tuned also won the ARC race at the Elite track recently https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.374260715928611.86256.240257402662277&type=1

The immediate plan is to improve our distribution channels so that we can focus on engineering great new products. As for the future, we’re always experimenting with new ideas (which are not always automotive related), so we’ll let you know when we come up with the next interesting product.

Some of the interesting things we discovered:

a) These guys spend a lot of money on performance accessories for their bikes! More than we anticipated. Unfortunately a lot of so called “performance accessories” make incredible claims which simply cannot be substantiated. It is really sad to see people getting sucked into buying such products.

b) From a technological standpoint, underbone bikes in Malaysia are behind the curve because of our primitive emissions regulations. We are still using carburetors because we are only required to be Euro 2 compliant, while even entry level bikes in Thailand have been using Fuel Injection for some time now because they must be Euro 4 compliant. I believe we will be stepping up to Euro 3 only in 2014.

UPDATE (additional information from Farhan):

Follow FSR Technology via our website http://www.fsrtech.com or on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/fsrtech

Note: We are very thankful for the nice and prompt reply from FSR Technology. We are hoping all the best for them and keep tuning more bikes!!!