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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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’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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I’ve always been a little scornful of those parents who proudly proclaim their children’s knowledge and interests, knowledge and interest that are only a reflection of their parents’ particular knowledge and interests.

You know: “Benjamin can name all the players in the Adelaide Football Club”, proudly says the football fan – and stuff like that.

But now in having a child of my own, I can see that it happens rather naturally – the child is interested in what the parents are interested in, and that knowledge is transferred without effort.

So the fact that my four year old, Alexander, when looking over my shoulder at a book on cars that I am reading, can identify the old Citroens, Jaguar E-Types and Porsches, is perhaps not much of a surprise.

But this familial socialisation becomes interesting when you consider change, and the future.

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I am starting to wonder if the problems that Ford and Holden are facing in this country with their large cars – the Falcon and the Commodore – are going to be possible to remedy.

Holden is now talking a whole range of environmental and fuel-efficiency measures – from E85 compatibility to reducing weight – and Ford, despite having just released a brand new model, has already made public the next engine option, a diesel.

As I have written previously, both companies have only themselves to blame for their current woes – they were happy completely ignoring the changing marketplace and blindly heading down an ever-increasingly irrelevant path. It’s obvious they expected the market to change to suit them, rather than build cars that suited the buying public. That applies especially to Ford, a company that with the FG Falcon, had years more time to prepare for the changing times than Holden had with the VE Commodore.

But what makes me think that they may have lost it big-time is what I am seeing more and more: Holden and Ford are rapidly losing their loyal long-term potential car-buyers.

Now, self-evidently, they have lost some of these already; otherwise Ford wouldn’t be sacking production workers and releasing a market-special FG seemingly only minutes after the new Falcon was released; and Holden Commodores wouldn’t be being outsold (let’s talk private buyers) by a helluva lot more than just a couple of other car models.

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Perception of any crisis in world affairs has always followed much the same pattern.

Those who say it isn’t happening and never will happen; those cautious but observant who say it might happen; those early adopters who say it is happening well before a majority agree; and those who like to see it unambiguously demonstrated before acknowledging it is actually happening.

Or – and this is really important – not happening.

Trouble is, at the ‘it might happen’ stage it’s difficult to decide on the right course of action. Do nothing and any action might be too late.

Or, conversely, do nothing and in fact the action might later prove to have been correct.

Think CFCs in aerosols and the ozone layer for the first; think Y2000 bug in computer software for the second.

And the eminence of the ‘early adopters’ counts for little: remember the 1970s predictions of a world overpopulation crisis, and how widespread famine would result in a catastrophic reduction in the population by the year 2000? Despite some very highly credentialed experts arguing vehemently – and with apparent logic – that we were doomed, it didn’t happen.

And now to global warming. 

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Whenever talk turns to intercooler colour, two schools of thought emerge. There are those who suggest intercoolers should be painted black to aid heat dissipation. Then there are those who suggest the insulating properties of paint would outweigh any better thermal emissivity the intercooler would gain with its colour change.

I have always thought – and continue to think – that the insulating properties of a very thin layer of paint would be effectively nil. After all, you don’t have much faith in that ‘insulation’ when you’re reluctant to put your hand on a painted exhaust manifold or exhaust pipe!

But what about paints that are designed to insulate? Clearly you wouldn’t put them on an intercooler – but what about the pipe coming back from the intercooler to the inlet manifold? As I wrote in Insulating the Return, measurable gains can be made if engine bay heat is prevented from warming the returning air.

At least two different approaches are taken to insulating paints. The first is where the special paint is bought and simply applied. The other approach is where you mix an additive in an existing paint.

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