Under a Gibbous Moon

When I was out and about this weekend I saw all this kids driving around in their pimped out cars. They driving recklessly on the roads and hanging around in parking lots talking like they actually knew about cars.

Just a hint for you fellers, when you are in high school and you’re driving around a $20,000+ car with $10,000+ worth of modifications to it, we all know that your mommies and your daddies bought them for you.

Do you know what that means? That no matter how cool it looks and no matter how fast it goes, it will never be cool.

…I have the opportunity of changing the fuel pump on my car. Upon examination of the situation, I have concluded that this is another design that you all need to be punched in the dick for.

For those that do not know, cars that have been manufactured in at least the last 20 years have an electric fuel pump. This means it can be put anywhere that you can run wires to. For sheer awesomeness, the far majority of these are mounted inside your fuel tank. Why? Because they utilize the fuel to keep them cool. So then why is it mounted on the fucking top of the tank and not the bottom where it’s easy to reach? What? there is a greater chance it will leak? Better put it on top then. Good thing since there is no space and it’s right against the floor pan that we put an access panel to get to it. What? There is no fucking access panel? What am I supposed to do now? Oh, just remove the entire fucking fuel tank. That shouldn’t be too bad…Well that’s odd, there seems to be a lot of other shit in the way. What’s that? I have to cut out the welded exhaust, remove the panard bar, sway bar, torque bars and then the whole fucking rear axle so that I can now reach the fuel tank to remove that bastard too? So you’re saying you didn’t put a little door in my trunk to reach it from the top…
PUNCHED. IN. THE. DICK.

Chrysler is oddly proud of their new redesign of the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee. Apparently they’ve spent something like 700 million on it. For their efforts, they have turned a vehicle like this:

Into this:

Apparently, they decided to let their Town & Country minivan have sex with the Grand Cherokee to produce this bastard offspring. Enough is enough. Chrysler apparently needs to get out of the car business. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this to a vehicle. The poor Dodge Durango wen from this:

To this:

Apparently, Chrysler has made it their mission to turn all of their SUVs into minivans. No wonder they’re sales have been tanking.

GM is developing its next generation heads up display system. Unlike previous systems, this will use a system of specially treated glass and small lasers to utilize the entire screen as a display.

In addition to the gauges, this system will enable the driver access to enhanced night vision capabilities. Cameras mounted on the car will locate road features (signs, lane striping, etc) and “highlight” them on your windshield.

I imagine this type of technology will enable integration with GPS systems so that way the directions will be drawn directly on the windshield, notification of other vehicles in the car’s blind spots, and the ability to send nasty messages to the windshield of the guy who just cut you off.

Technology like this is very exciting, even if it is probably a decade or more away for cars that regular people can afford. Of course, with such advances, it must be said, where the hell are my flying cars?

A new article from Wired showcases the 2011 Ford Mustang which comes standard with a 305 horsepower V6 and has an EPA rated highway mileage of 31.

One of the first comments struck me as interesting.

Posted by: fletc3her | 03/4/10 | 4:50 pm |

I think it’s great that the auto industry is starting to improve mileage even in sports cars and muscle cars. But, I do wonder what the actual day to day mileage of one these cars will be. If you push the car to get the advertised 0-60 speed then you are not going to get the advertised mileage. Less powerful cars force the driver to drive efficiently simply by virtue of not having enough horsepower to waste a lot of gas.

He says that less powerful cars force the driver to be more efficient because it simply does not have the power. Apparently he believes that an increase in horsepower necessitates a drop in fuel economy. It is true that they tend to be highly correlated but vehicle performance is more complicated than that.

For a brief primer, horsepower is a measurement  of work with work being force expended over a distance. The next big engine measurement is torque. Torque is a measure of instantaneous force and typically refers to a twisting action, in the case of an internal combustion engine, the crankshaft acting upon the input shaft of the transmission.

Torque is then multiplied through the gears in the transmission (or divided in the case of an overdriven gear). It is then multiplied one last time in the rear differential before being divided by the wheels (think of them as really big gears).

The power output of the engine varies with engine speed, torque reaching its peak before horsepower. When these peaks are reached varies from engine to engine but it is the gear multiplication that picks up the slack at low engine speeds.

The reason that this is important is that the engine is most efficient when it is producing the most power. This is why mileage in the “city” is always worse than “highway”, you are constantly running the vehicle through the lower and less efficient RPMs. An excellent example is watching the black smoke on a diesel from a stop. Diesels are very inefficient at low RPMs and the momentary black smoke is cause by a lot of unburnt fuel. Physics also comes into play, with regards friction and momentum (it takes a lot of energy to move a vehicle from a stop than it is to just keep going).

This brings me back to my earlier point about “forcing efficiency”. Smaller displacement engines (four cylinder and even smaller six cylinder) have very high power peaks four, five, and even six thousand RPMs. The little power that the engine does produce does not actually come into play for a long time. As stated earlier, this is overcome through the use of aggressive gearing. This has the dual purpose of multiplying torque and spinning up the engine faster.

The interesting thing about this, is that the smaller engine (in a similar weight and shaped vehicle) is working harder than a larger engine would. It uses less fuel simply by virtue of having a smaller displacement.

This comes back the Mustang mentioned in the beginning of this post. It (and the new Camero) are part of a new breed of small displacement, high power engines. While this is not a new trend (think of when the Mustang dropped the 5.0 for the 4.7). it has been accelerating due to rising fuel costs.

This extra power, gives you the ability to motivate the vehicle with less effort (fuel) which is why you are now seeing amazing performance in vehicles with mileage ratings once associated with compact cars.