Look, I am sorry to say so, but I just don’t think the Lancer Evo X lives up to its hype.

In fact, as a driver’s car, I don’t think it even lives up to the (immense) promise that drives of previous Evos would lead you to expect.

There are four separate problems.

Firstly, the engine drives like an old-fashioned turbo. That is, despite the hoopla about variable valve timing, super lightweight turbo assembly and all the rest, the engine is slow to come on boost.

In fact, the engine really only gets going at just under 3000 rpm – say, 2800. Redline is 7000 rpm so that gives you just over 4000 rpm of powerband. Not terrible, but certainly nothing special.

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Whenever I have nearly finished writing a new car test, I have a quick look at what other testers have had to say about the car.

Sometimes I find points that I have overlooked – and I am not too proud to re-examine the car and see if I agree with that other perspective. Other times, I find comments that I completely disagree with – and I never change the test to match what a majority might be saying.

I always wait until my test is near-complete before looking at other tests; it’s the same logic that means I usually drive a car and decide what I think it is worth before looking up its exact price.

So when I’d just about finished writing the test on the Toyota Aurion AT-X, I did a quick web browse.

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In this time of very large companies investing tens of millions – sometimes billions – of dollars in research and development, it seems almost inconceivable that a relatively tiny company could make a groundbreaking invention. Especially in a field with well over 100 years of constant innovation.

But the other day I was able to witness what can only be described as an engineering breakthrough.

The engineering field is nothing to do with cars: instead we’re talking bulk handling. Bulk handling is where materials like grains, pellets and sand need to be moved in large quantities. Typical equipment includes bucket elevators, pneumatic systems and screw elevators.

The breakthrough innovation is the development of a type of screw elevator that, rather than rotating the screw, rotates the casing that surrounds the screw.

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It never rains but it pours.

After not testing any new cars for a while, this week is the fourth in a row in which I have had new Honda vehicles. The Hondas – Accord, Jazz and two Accord Euros of different specs – have all been interesting cars.

They’ve been interesting because each of the designs has had some major positives – and some major negatives.

The 3.5 litre V6 in the Accord is simply a magic engine – powerful, free-revving, fuel-efficient with its cylinder shut-down technology, and with a glorious sound as it heads for high revs.

But the steering of the car is amongst the worse I have ever experienced in a new car, and the dry road grip is simply terrible.

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I am writing this sitting in the Maryborough (Queensland) caravan park’s camp kitchen. My wife, Georgina, and our little boy and I are camping here, having driven up from the Gold Coast, a distance of about 350 kilometres.

I have stayed on and off in caravan parks since about the age of 16; camping in tents or staying in cabins or on-site vans.

Over that time, the biggest change has been in the nature of typical caravan park guests. Once, the people staying in caravan parks comprised almost entirely families with young children. But now, especially in non-holiday periods, caravan parks are dominated by ‘grey nomads’, older, retired people who have hit the road.

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As we covered in Analysing Road Car Drag, most aerodynamic drag of current vehicles is created by separation pressure drag. Put simply, this is reflected in the size of the wake – the cross-sectional area of the disturbed air dragged along behind the car.

The most slippery vehicles in the world – the solar race cars – have reduced separation pressure drag to the extent that the other types of drag (eg viscous drag, induced drag and interference drag) become more important.

But in all conventional cars, it’s separation drag that remains the big one.

Now this gives rise to a rather interesting idea. Imagine you’re standing alongside an empty road. The day is a still one – there’s not much wind blowing. A car is rocketing towards you along the road, travelling at perhaps 100 km/h. It will pass close by to you. It grows in size and then roars past.

Now – what do you feel?

Clearly, you will be able to feel the wake – the eddies and turbulent air indicative of the aerodynamic disturbance of the car. This disturbance will take into account the separation pressure drag and the frontal area of the car – the two when multiplied form the vast majority of the actual aero drag that’s experienced by the car.

And, equally clearly, the smaller the air disturbance that you can feel, the greater the slipperiness of the vehicle.

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I’ll let you into a secret.

I think it quite bizarre, but some people actually believe that the greater the driver skill needed to operate a car, the better the car must be.

The corollary of this is that is if a modification makes it easier to get more out of a car, the modification must be bad.

Now put this way you can see why I called the notion bizarre. But in the time I’ve been writing about car modifications, I’ve come across it quite a few times.

Here are just two examples.

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This week we have the first in a two-part series, one that I am very pleased with.

The series is on how to use cheap and simple electronic kits to monitor the output of the oxygen sensor.

The first story I did on this, way back in the mid 1990s, resulted in the development of the ‘Mixture Meter’ kit – thousands have since been sold.

Now we both re-introduce the narrow band sensor display, updating the story to additionally discuss what many people want from such a display (and that’s improving fuel economy) and also, in Part 2, look at how a similarly cheap and easy-to-build display can be used with wideband sensors.

The latter is especially significant: while there are plenty of aftermarket air/fuel ratio meters that use wideband sensors, we’ve never seen a description of how to tap into the standard wideband sensor fitted to many of today’s cars.

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Here in Queensland the State Government has issued a discussion paper entitled Improving Sustainable Housing in Queensland.

The paper canvases a range of requirements the government is considering implementing for the construction of new houses and units.

I think it astonishing how little government regulation has been applied to the energy efficiency of housing. Especially in the context of the media attention given to fuel-efficient cars, there seems to have been a deathly silence on what is surely the far more important area of housing.

After all, a typical house is going to be consuming energy for something in the order of five to ten times as long as a car, and will be doing so most hours of the day and night.

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