Whether you’re bouncing off your rev limiter while powersliding down a dirt fire road or being the coolest dad in the school drop-off, you love your Subaru. It does all the things you want it to while asking for little in return. You have one problem, though: your throttle pedal.
Sure, you press it and you go faster, but it just doesn’t feel right. It’s like there’s something in between you and your engine and you’re right in assuming so. While drive-by-wire throttles aren’t inherently a bad thing, they often lack the kind of relationship between pedal and throttle that we want. If only there was an affordable, easy to install and safe way to change that…
Cheer up, bud, because there is. It’s called the Banks PedalMonster and it will change the way you interact with your car! A PedalMonster is a throttle controller that offers 150 different possible throttle curve combinations and does so with safety features that nobody else on the market can match. We know that, because we patented them.
The PedalMonster has three levels of ten settings each: City, Sport and Track. This lets you pick the kind of experience you want on the fly. For example, if you want to cruise your kids to school and don’t need them bouncing all around the back seat, you might want to choose City 5, but maybe on the way home, you feel like absolutely destroying a freeway on-ramp, so you bump to Track 10 and let that flat four grumble its way to break-neck speeds.
We said there’s 150 possible combinations of throttle, but so far we’ve only accounted for 30. Where are the rest coming from? Why, Banks’ Tip-In Control, of course. Tip-In Control lets you select a separate throttle profile from your main one for speeds up to 10 mph. This is especially handy for quick manual transmission equipped vehicles – we’re looking at you WRX guys!
When it comes to safety, PedalMonster has no equal. Our two biggest safety features are Active Safety and Reverse Safety. The former allows PedalMonster to be safely bypassed should it experience a failure. With other throttle controllers, a failure will almost always result in a non-functioning pedal and in traffic, that can be a good recipe for a rear-end collision.
Reverse Safety automatically bypasses PedalMonster when you shift into reverse. Why would you want to do this? Because if you have a super sensitive throttle and you try to back up, you can find yourself unintentionally accelerating into your garage door or even another vehicle in a parking lot. Not a worry with Banks.
PedalMonster is able to do these things because unlike any other controller, it receives its power from your Subaru’s OBDII port. This is not only a clean source of 12 volt power which prevents check engine lights that are often associated with other throttle controllers, but it allows PedalMonster to know what vehicle it's in, what kind of transmission you have and what gear you’ve selected. It’s just smart like that.
PedalMonster can be controlled via the free Banks Power app on iPhone or Android, or through Banks’ iDash Pro digital gauge unit which also allows you to monitor critical vehicle functions in real time, up to eight at a time.
