So it’s now being suggested that those who illegally street race should have their cars confiscated and crushed. Yes, you read that right: cars destroyed. This is, apparently, what happens in California and those police are now advising their Australian counterparts that this is a good approach to take.

“This is what makes them stop – when you destroy their cars,” Corporal Heiss [of the Rialto police department] told The Daily Telegraph.

“They spend up to $US30,000 making modifications on their vehicles and that loss is overwhelming for them – they are not going to do it again.

“These young kids are scraping their money together to put into their main asset and some of them break down when they see their car being crushed.”

That such a monstrous behaviour is even being discussed shows the utter demonisation of those who lack political power in our society.

There are three fundamental shortcomings of such an approach.

The first is that it is grossly inequitable. In effect, the fine for street racing could be $2000 – or $200,000. The person racing in cruddy old Commodore scores the two grand fine, while the Porsche pedaller pays one hundred times as much. In no other area of law breaking is the penalty set on the basis of the value of the user’s possessions.

Secondly, since when in our society have we destroyed assets when those assets have been involved in illegal behaviour? No not confiscated the assets but destroyed them. So the white collar criminal who has defrauded a bank via a computer in their family home is then forced to watch as their house is bulldozed? The fact that he might have a wife and kids living there is ignored – in just the same way that the street racer’s other uses of his car are ignored?

Thirdly, the intrinsic value of the vehicle is apparently seen as zero. What if someone driving a rare and valuable old muscle car gives it a big squirt away from a set of traffic lights? The car is taken and crushed, irrespective of its significance? Again, let’s apply the idea to some other items of historic importance. The paintings by old masters are destroyed if they’re found to have been involved in some form of fraudulent behaviour?

You need only apply the idea of crushing street racers’ cars to any other area of lawbreaking in our society to realise how utterly inappropriate such a sanction is.

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Arguably the biggest driver of car engine technology over the last 40 years has been exhaust emissions legislation.

The original Californian Clean Air legislation introduced in 1967 hastened the advent of electronic fuel injection (the pictured Bosch D-type system has just celebrated its 40th anniversary – and only 5 years after introduction, it was being used by 18 car manufacturers) and the march of clean emissions progress has barely slowed since.

These days, of course, the shift in focus has been from oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide to CO2 outputs.

But what actually are the standards causing so many engineers to pull out their hair? The laws rumoured to have lead to the foreshadowed demise of Ford’s Australian engine factory (more on Australian car manufacturing in an upcoming blog post) and which are making it so difficult to sell diesels in the US over the next few years? You’d think that getting a handle on all the laws would be damn’ near impossible – but that’s not so.

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Over the years I have often seen requests for tests on oils. Which is the best oil? Or, are there in fact any significant differences in oils?

In my opinion the best way of answering that question with a specific engine (eg the engine in your car!) is to have the oil that you are using analysed on a regular basis. That proves clearly whether or not the oil is in fact of sufficient quality for the job it is meant to be doing. (Oil analysis laboratories are as close as the Yellow Pages.) 

An allied subject is the efficacy of greases. In most – but not all – applications, grease quality isn’t as critical. However, there are still massive variations in price – and presumably, quality – of greases.  

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One of the weird things about cars is that they depreciate so incredibly fast. We’ve all heard how you lose 10 per cent (or more!) of the value of the new car the moment you drive out of the dealership. That’s bizarre enough, but the fact that sometimes the most expensive cars in the world are nearly worthless 20 years later is also quite amazing.  

I can remember the 1988 BMW 750iL being released; to me it represented a pinnacle of automotive excellence: a dream car of enormous expense. My priorities have changed, but even with my love of efficient hybrid cars, I’d still have a 750iL in my garage, if only just for cruising. But of course the sting in the tail is that, these days, pretty anyone can afford to buy the big BMW. (You’ll need about AUD$8000, probably nearer half that at wholesale auctions.)  

So in my memory of cars, I’ve seen cars drop 90 per cent or more in value: it’s what happens with nearly all cars. And it happens even more so with those cars fundamentally over-priced when they’re released. In Australia, that means the mid-sized and large Europeans. 

Time has a way of stripping away the bullshit and leaving just what is worthy; when a top of the line V6 Camry (Aurion today I guess, but I haven’t driven one) goes as well, stops as well and has similar equipment level to some expensive prestige Euros, well….. time will catch up with the value of the latter.  

But hey, look on the bright side. If you have your heart set on a car, you almost certainly will one day be able to afford it – except for those exotics made in very small numbers, that sentiment applies to any car.

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As I write I’m getting over a cold. I am well enough to be mobile but not well enough to work. Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway.  

As many of you will know, I am becoming more and more interested in lightweight vehicles. One of my cars is a Honda Insight – amongst the lightest of all production cars on the road – and I find the downsides of its design usually quite minor. (If I need to carry more than two people, I take Frank the Falcon.)  

Now the Honda might be light, but it still has four wheels when surely three would be enough. Using a tadpole configuration (two front wheels and one rear) would also allow the car to be nicely streamlined, something that would be helped by a front mount engine and front wheel drive. That way, the classic teardrop shape for low aero drag would be much easier to implement.  

The starting point for such a car would be a FWD half-cut, say a Mira or Suzuki 660cc 3 cylinder turbo. Use the complete driveline, subframe, steering and front suspension and brakes, add on a tube frame chassis and then run the single rear wheel and suspension from a motorbike.  

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I’d no sooner finished writing A Disappearing Suspension Technology than I came across something that goes a long way to explaining the reason that swing-arm suspension was used by such hugely respected engineers like Porsche and by companies like Mercedes.

The magazine article is on a very interesting car produced by one of the all-time greats in suspension theory. The designer of the car was Bill Milliken and the premise was that by using narrow tyres running a huge amount of negative camber, very good cornering grip would be able to be obtained.

Now there’s a lot more to his car than just that (by clicking on the magnifying glass you can enlarge the article scans enough to print/read them) but the narrow tyres/huge neg camber is a very short summary.

The tyres being used by Auto Union and Mercedes pre-WWII race cars were similar in width to current big motorcycle tyres and so would have been far less susceptible to loss of grip through lifting of the flat tread of the tyre that would otherwise occur through negative camber. In fact, the lateral thrust from the camber achieved by the swing-arms would, as the Milliken car shows, have made a major contribution to cornering grip.

It makes me think that a lightweight car running low pivot point swing-arm (or semi-trailing or leading) suspension and motorcycle tyres could develop a lot of grip while maintaining an ultra lightweight suspension, in turn giving a very low unsprung weight and low total vehicle mass. And the narrow wheels and tyres would also give far lower rotating inertia, improving acceleration and braking still further…

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The other month I found myself commuting 160 kilometres each day, most of that on two, three and four lane freeways. When everyone’s travelling at basically the same speed, it’s an ideal opportunity to look at the suspension behaviour of other cars. For several kilometres of bumps, you can literally eyeball from close quarters the front or rear wheels of a car travelling at 100 km/h.

One of the interesting things is watching the front dynamic camber variations. Theory says that you want a neg camber increase in bump, primarily to keep the outside, loaded tyre closer to vertical as the car rolls. But theory also says that this dynamic camber increase is pretty well impossible to achieve with MacPherson strut suspension, unless the steering axis inclination is radical (which in turn brings other problems).

And can’t you just see it in action when you watch adjoining cars!

On my local roads, the (pre VE) Commodores and nearly all Japanese and European small cars have front wheels that just move up and down. But watch a Falcon, or any of the European cars with double wishbones, and you can see clear dynamic camber variations.

And the same thing applies at the back, except this time the wheels just moving up and down are those connecting to torsion beam rear axles (FWD cars) or solid rear axles (RWD cars). On cars with multi-link or wishbone suspensions, the camber change is quite obvious to the eye. Of course I’m not talking about much variation – perhaps a few degrees. But you can still see it.

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Over the last two or three decades we’ve seen just about every driver road safety campaign possible.

From overt blood and guts to more subtle psychology.

From a big stick to a plaintive plea.

From massive enforcement of laws never originally designed to be policed with such technology (technology that’s so superior to that of cars that manufacturers deliberately build in conservative speedos lest they be caught out), to changes in social norms that are quite radical to experience in just half a generation.

But one of the primary causes that I see of accidents is relatively little mentioned: the concept of driving to the conditions.

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Now forgive me if this seems pretty esoteric: it probably is. In fact, I’d never really even thought about it until a year or so ago; I’d never actually experienced it until today.

Most of you would be familiar with the idea of ‘toe’. Toe-in is where the wheels point inwards – when viewed from above, they’re constantly steering towards the centreline of the car. Toe-out, as you’d soon guess, is where the wheels are constantly steering outwards from the centreline. Zero toe means the wheels are parallel to the centre line.

Most cars these days run zero toe or just a very small amount of toe-in. Toe, usually measured in millimetres (although degrees would make far more sense), is at most only 1 or 2mm: the amount the wheels steer inwards or outwards is very small indeed.

OK – so that’s static toe. But what about when the suspension moves up and down?

If, during suspension travel, the wheels stay steering exactly in the directions they were originally steering in, the suspension is said to have zero bump steer. If the wheels steer inwards on bump, they’re said to have toe-in on bump. Toe-out on bump is defined as you’d expect it to be. (Note that in all these quoted cases, the steering wheel is held still – it’s the suspension itself that’s doing [or not doing] the steering.)

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