Never have I had such fun when playing with a car! So what am I excited about?

Tuning programmable management on the road.

Regular readers will be aware of our Honda Insight series. As you’d expect, the publication of the articles in that series lags well behind where I am actually up to with the car. (I don’t want to run into a problem and have a big gap in the middle of the series, so it’s best from a publishing perspective that I take this approach.)

So I am around three months ahead of the series in what I am actually doing – so explaining my recent tuning of the MoTeC M400.

In the last month I’ve been tuning crank and start, fuel, ignition, idle speed control, turbo boost, exhaust gas recirculation, acceleration enrichment, wide-band closed loop feedback and lots of others.

All has been done in my shed, driveway or on the road.

It has been an immense learning curve – I’ve never before tuned a programmable management system – with some problems to overcome along the way.

But what I have found so rewarding is the degree of control that you can have over how the car drives. Tuning an interceptor (that I have previously done) or making minor tweaks to factory ECU inputs and outputs allows you to do lots of things, but tuning programmable management allows you to do so much more. (The same would also apply to factory ECUs where the software has been cracked – not the case with the Insight.)

Having so much control means that you can stuff things up absolutely mightily. I am not talking about blowing the engine (though that of course isn’t difficult with wrong timing or fuel figures) but how the car can be made to drive so badly, so easily.

Or, more positively, you can tweak and tweak and tweak until you achieve things that appear initially impossible.

The Insight is running without its hybrid electric assist at this stage, so the bottom-end torque normally provided by the electric motor is missing. With just a 1 litre engine, very high gearing (especially in first and second) and 4800 rpm peak torque, getting the car tractable around town has been no mean feat.

That’s especially the case when no ‘start-up’ map exists for this car – the MoTeC has had to be programmed literally from scratch.

The excitement of activating and then mapping exhaust gas recirc that boosted part-throttle low-rpm torque to a major degree was sensational; getting acceleration fuel enrichment sorted so the turbo boosts much more quickly after a throttle movement was fun; mapping the control of the water/air intercooler pump so that the pump works only when needed was intriguing; and designing the boost table in three dimensions to give exactly the boost behaviour I want was exciting.

I can now see better why a friend of mine years ago talked about driving to work each day, laptop on the passenger seat and making tuning tweaks at every set of traffic lights! With literally thousands of data points able to changed, and often interacting with each other in the driving, getting the perfect tune could be a lifetime pursuit.

But in the mean time, it’s a helluva lot of fun.

• » Comments (2)

I feel like one of the first pilots of jet-powered aircraft. They immediately knew that they were flying the future: there could be no going back to pistons and propellers.

Today I drove the car that, for me, spells the end of the piston engine for performance cars.

The car was the all-electric Tesla, and its performance – and the way it achieved that performance – was just so extraordinary that I am almost lost for words. That a start-up car company has created such a vehicle is simply unprecedented in the last century of automotive development.

For the Tesla is not just a sports car with incredible performance (0-100 km/h in the fours) but also a car that redefines driveability. Simply, it has the best throttle control of any car I have ever driven.

Trickle around a carpark at 1000 (electric) revs and the car drives like it has a maximum of just a few kilowatts available. It’s the pussy cat to end all pussy cats: Grandma could drive it with nary a concern in the world. Put your foot down a little and the car seamlessly accelerates: heavy urban traffic, just perfect.

But select an empty stretch of bitumen and mash your foot to the floor and expletives just stream from your mouth as the car launches forward with an unbelievable, seamless and simply immensely strong thrust.

There are no slipping clutches, no flaring torque converters, no revving engines, no gear-changes – just a swishing vacuum-cleaner-on-steroids noise that sweeps you towards the horizon. The acceleration off the line and up to 100 km/h or so is just mind-boggling – especially as it’s accompanied by such undemonstrative effort. The car will do it again and again and again, all with the same phenomenal ease that makes this the winner of any traffic lights grand prix you’re ever likely to meet.

And it’s not just off the line. Want to quickly swap lanes? Just think about it and it’s accomplished. 

In fact drive the car hard and you start assuming that this is the only mode – outright performance. But then enter that carpark, or keep station with other traffic, and you’re back to driving an utterly tractable car – in fact, one for whom the word ‘tractable’ is irrelevant. Combustion engines are tractable or intractable; this car’s electric motor controller just apportions its electron flow as required, in an endlessly seamless and subtle variation from zero to full power.

It’s not just the acceleration that is revolutionary. The braking – achieved primarily through regen – has the same brilliant throttle mapping, an approach that immediately allows even a newcomer to progressively brake to a near-standstill at exactly the chosen point.

A seamless, elastic and fluid power delivery that no conventional car can come remotely close to matching; a symphony on wheels to be played solely with the right foot; an utterly smooth and progressive performance than can be explosive or docile, urgent or somnambulant – literally, a driveline that completely redefines sports cars.

There’s no going back – my driving life is now changed forever.

Footnote: the Tesla drive was courtesy of Simon Hackett of the ISP, Internode.

• » Comments (21)

Today’s AutoSpeed article on electric vehicles is, as the box in the article states, based on a seminar given by Dr Andrew Simpson.

Dr Simpson produced the paper that we used as the foundation for the Assessing the Alternatives article we ran about a year ago – it’s amongst the very best of articles you’ll find in deciding which fuels vehicles should be using.

Andrew Simpson has just returned to Australia from four years in the US, where he worked at the US Government National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, and then was a Senior R&D engineer at Tesla Motors.

I found his seminar quite riveting: it changed my views on a host of subjects relating to electric cars.

• » Continue reading or Comments (46)

Over the years I have built plenty of simple structures that I’ve wanted to be both light and strong.

Those structures vary from little brackets that might be holding something in the engine bay, to complete human-powered vehicles that I trust my life to.

In all cases, the starting point for the design is to consider the forces involved. How does the force of gravity act on the structure? What direction do braking loads act in, or short-term transient loads like suspension forces? Will this tube be placed in bending (not so good) or is it being subjected to compression (good) or extension (better)?

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

Back in this blog I mused about how little power is actually needed in a car. My benchmark was not acceleration or top speed. Instead, it was the ability of a car to climb hills at the open-road speed limit (here in Australia, 110 km/h).

Based on dyno tests and the hill-climbing performance of my diesel Peugeot 405, I decided an at-the-flywheel figure of 35 kW/tonne was about the right minimum.

I applied that idea to electric cars, where for reasons of lightness, battery power consumption and cost, an electric motor that errs on the side of smallness makes sense.

A number of comments were then made that this was completely wrong, that electric motors don’t work in that way (apparently, an electric kilowatt is different to a petrol motor kilowatt!) and so on. However, I saw no evidence that suggested a power/weight ratio of about 35kW a tonne was not the minimum for a car to be competent on the open road. (And a reasonably aerodynamically slippery car, at that.)

Recently, I’ve driven three cars that have a instantaneous power output display on the dashboard. These are all Lexus hybrids – the LS600hL, the GS450h and the RX400h. The latter’s display is shown above.

With this gauge I was able to see exactly how much power was being transmitted to the wheels, irrespective of torque curves, throttle position or anything else.

The actual power going to the wheels.

The RX400h weighs-in at 2040kg – say with my body mass, 2130kg.

Typically, I used in normal driving – even sporty urban driving – an indicated 50kW or less. That’s just a little under 24kW/tonne.

Getting into it more strongly, 75kW showed on the dial – but I stress, this was now going harder than most people would drive most of the time. That’s a power/weight ratio of 35kW/tonne.

To get 100kW (or higher) showing on the gauge, you had to be clearly pushing the car hard.

And 200kW? Full throttle and with lots of revs – completely unlike 99 per cent of daily driving.

I already know from the Peugeot that, if the car is being driven well, 35 kW/tonne is enough for open road driving – and now I know that it’s also sufficient for even quite sporty urban driving.

• » Comments (19)

People who have been into modified cars here in Australia have for decades known of the incredible bargains that can be had from Japanese-importing wreckers.

Because of the speed with which Japanese drivers discard near-new cars, the drivelines – or even complete front halves of cars – can be bought amazingly cheaply. Engines and gearboxes boasting late model technology, for less than the cost of having an old clunker rebuilt. It’s simple – buy a locally-delivered car and then install a new Japanese-import driveline having much greater performance. Over the years I’ve done this twice – and both times got a tremendous car for the money.

And now there’s a whole new and exciting Japanese-import field opening up.

Because Japanese manufacturers have led the world in the creation of hybrid petrol/electric cars – the first was built over 10 years ago – and because many were sold locally in Japan, hybrid car parts can now be sourced out of Japan at the same ridiculously low prices.

• » Continue reading or Comments (16)

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/should-tesla-motors-sell-out-1084.html

An interesting opinion article, especially in the context of the global financial crash that has occurred since this piece was first published.

• » Comments (3)

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.

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

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.

• » Continue reading or Comments (7)