Performance Chips Help Freeway Driving

I recently moved to California from the east coast.  Although I love the climate change and abundance of beautiful beach babes, I’m not too thrilled about California’s unique freeway system.  I can still remember my first experience like it was yesterday; actually it was last week.  I had just gotten to California and was headed to the beach to go surfing.  So I’m cruising on the 8, about to get onto the 15. I look down at my map to check what exit I want to get off at. I glance back up to see red; the brake lights of cars stopped in front of me.  Thank god for ABS.  I slammed my brakes and stopped just in time to avoid crashing into a Ford F150.  “Great, now I’m going to sit in traffic all day,” I thought.  As the line of cars slowly crept forward I could see a light in the distance.  Is that a police car? Maybe, it’s an ambulance? When I got closer I could see that the light was actually a traffic light.  This was the first time I have ever seen a traffic light on a freeway entrance.  I finally reached the light, which turned green for two seconds, and hit the gas.  I was giving my Corolla full throttle, but it wasn’t speeding up quick enough.  Looking in my rear view mirror, I could see the driver of the BMW behind me mouthing curses.  The lane started to approach the highway and I wasn’t going nearly as fast as the flow of traffic.  Apparently, California drivers have lead-foot syndrome.  My lane was merging and truck in the lane next to me that was going at least 30mphs faster than me had to slam on his brakes.  The driver thought it wouldn’t be enough to just curse, so I had a great view of his middle finger when he switched lanes and blew past me.  Now I’m not a slow driver, but let’s face it, a Corolla isn’t a race car.  I ended up making it to the beach in one piece, but I needed to find a solution if I was going to be taking the freeway to work everyday.

I talked to my brother-in-law, who is a mechanic, about my problem.  Basically, he gave me two options.  I could either buy a new car or make my car faster.  I definitely was not ready to buy a new car, especially with all my moving bills.  And the last thing I wanted was to be driving around a “rice rocket” or anything that looked like it came from the Fast and the Furious. He suggested adding a performance chip.  He had installed a few recently and said that they fine-tune your engine to increase performance.  The result is a boost in horsepower, which means some lickety-split acceleration for me.