So far I must have worked on it for 100 hours. After all, the welder’s bill
has already reached 11 hours (at AUD$50 an hour) and I’ve spent easily ten times
as much time on it as he has. In fact, having previously plonked a turbo late
model engine into an early model chassis, I’d say this project isn’t far away in
time and complexity.

And I thought it was going to be so easy…

The project is forced aspiration on my ’99 Toyota Prius. The Prius is a
hybrid petrol/electric car – but that unique driveline has absolutely nothing to
do with the time that I have so far spent. In fact, doing the same job on a
Toyota Echo would involve all of the same steps. (The Echo has an engine whose
bottom half is pretty well identical to the Prius.)

For forced induction I’d initially thought ‘turbo’, and in fact had found
exactly the right turbo going on eBay. A ball-bearing Garret GT12, it was new
but the private seller was quitting it after changing projects. Unfortunately,
he is also apparently one of those people who puts up eBay items with a low
starting price, then withdraws the auction at the last moment when the price
hasn’t risen high enough. And so wastes a lot of people’s time.

My thoughts then turned to supercharging. In the case of the Prius,
supercharging has distinct possible advantages – but then so too does
turbocharging! Given that no one in the world has forced aspirated a Prius, the
approach which would work best is problematic. But if I could pick up a small,
cheap blower, well…

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I am sure that this will be news to many of you. But I am equally sure others will simply nod and smile: they’ve known it for years.

The point is simply this: you don’t need an enormous amount of power to have fun in a car.

A good handling car with a sweet spread of torque is fantastic on a winding road; as is the comfort in driving a car hard while knowing that the chances of being inadvertently waaay over the speed limit are much lower.

These ideas don’t sit well with an expectation that more power is better, and so a car with less than 300kW at the treads is just for wimps. But as I’ve covered in another column (see Driving Emotion, November 2004), a lot of the time the extra power is just being used to drag around extra weight – and so the immensely powerful car doesn’t have the performance you might expect after hearing the peak power figure.

In modification, aiming for an all-round fun package without concentrating on just power also gives you a huge advantage – you can make use of the bits and pieces that everyone else thinks are valueless.

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Car modification fashions, like all fashions, appear especially odd to those people who aren’t fashionable. I am very old-fashioned, out-of-fashion, fashion illiterate, unfashionable – call it what you will. That’s especially the case with car modification fashions to be found in Sydney.

Take the car I saw today in traffic. It epitomised all that is wrong with the city’s modification fashion. A Kia Rio, it featured dual polished cannon mufflers hanging low at the back, ho-hum alloy wheels, and a huge dual-plane aluminium wing complete with endplates. So, a pedestrian car with ineffective mods.

But that wasn’t all – nope, with just those changes, the owner wouldn’t have been quite at the fashion cutting edge.

It was also imperative that they position their rear ‘P’ plate three-quarters behind the numberplate – and of course that numberplate had to bear a series of purpose-picked letters and numbers showing something fundamentally meaningless. I forget what the actual plate was – something like ‘2EZ4ME’. Don’t get it? I assume it means “too easy for me”. What’s the significance of that? God knows. Of course, within his peer group, this plate probably makes him a hero.

Sydney is Australia’s largest city and perhaps as a result, has a distinctively different car culture to the rest of the continent. For example, in addition to odd cars like ‘2EZ4ME’, the most elaborate show cars in Australia can be found in Sydney. The desire for peer approbation also appears huge. Put those things together and you can end up with what I can only call very strange cars.

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Many trends in car design are often obvious: the move to EFI and then engine management; the increasing relevance of aerodynamics; and the use of lower and lower tyre profiles. But there are other long-term changes which are more subtle, more insidious. Often it takes the comments of an informed outsider to highlight them.

Recently I was reading a two year old interview with Alex Moulton, a British industrial engineer and designer who was responsible for – amongst other things – the liquid Hydrolastic suspension fitted to many Austin and Morris cars, and the rubber suspension used in the Mini. He worked closely with Sir Alec Issigonis, the famed designer of the Morris Minor, the Mini, the Morris 1100 and Austin 1800.

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Well, they’re finally been released! Yes, the cutting edge electronic kits which I seem to have been writing about for ever are now on the shelves, ready and raring to go.

For those of you who haven’t been following events, the electronic projects have been developed by Silicon Chip publications, the company that produces Silicon Chip magazine. (Web Publications, the publisher of AutoSpeed, puts up the on-line version of Silicon Chip.) I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for Silicon Chip for many years, and it was in that role that I helped develop the electronic car projects. The final prototypes were finished about a year ago and I was running working examples in my cars in the year before that – so as you can see, for me they’ve been around for a very long time! (Which is probably why I started writing about them in AutoSpeed too early!)

The reason for the delay in their release is nothing to do with a need to re-work prototypes or anything like that. The wait has a much simpler reason: it’s taken Silicon Chip Publications this long to produce the book which contains all the projects. But now the book is out – it’s called High Performance Electronics for Cars – and all the projects are available as kits from Jaycar Electronics or through the AutoSpeed Shop. (If there is the demand, the kits will also be available fully built and tested through the AutoSpeed shop.)

So has the wait has been worth it? I sure think so! And I don’t say that because I co-authored the book with brilliant electronics engineer John Clarke, but because I genuinely believe that the projects allow people to achieve a range of car modifications which were previously impossible to do simply and cheaply. In addition to the 16 projects, the book also contains really good background chapters on how engine management and other electronic car systems work. The latter are included because with these projects it’s easy to modify auto trans control, power steering weight control – even active four wheel drive control!

The simplest of the kits are those that are generic building blocks. For example, there’s the Frequency Switch (AUD$35.95). I’ve given up counting how many times I’ve seen plaintive requests on discussion groups from people who want to operate a shift-light, or change the switching revs of an active intake manifold. Well, now it’s easy – you can pick up a frequency signal from the injectors, crank-angle sensor, the ECU tacho output or even road speed sensor. And when the right speed is reached, over clicks a 5-amp relay – so you can directly switch lights, buzzers, solenoids….you name it.

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One of the difficulties in assessing cars – whether new, secondhand or modified – is that no matter how extensive the spec sheet, you can never tell how well the cars drive until you do just that… drive them.

As I write this I’m in Sydney, here for the week with Michael Knowling to collect lots of stories. A few days ago we were at MRT Performance, the Subaru specialist tuners and modifiers. The company uses the ECU-Tek software package to modify the factory ECU, an approach which works very well. In addition, they often fit upgrade turbos, exhausts and intake systems. Anyway, one of the cars on which we were doing a story was a current model XT Forester. Factory turbocharged, this particular one came with an auto trans.

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Now that new cars (at least here in Australia) are cheaper in real dollars
than at any time in my lifetime, and secondhand cars are so low in cost I am
often disbelieving of the prices being asked, it’s no longer inconceivable that
an enthusiast should own multiple cars.

In fact, if I go to the window of my home office and look out at the car
park, er, I mean side yard, I will see five cars sitting there, all
resident in this household of two adults and one baby boy. There’s my 1998 Lexus
LS400, of which I have written much in the past; the recently acquired ’99
hybrid Prius, again of which much has been – and is to be – written; the V6
turbo Nissan Maxima (is it 1988?) which runs lots of mods; and a largely
untouched Toyota Crown Supercharger, which is an ’88 model.

(While that seems like rather a lot of Toyotas, that was never the buying
intention. The Lexus came after the experience with my partner’s ’91 model,
which so amazed me that I followed in her footsteps; the current Prius is one of
the world’s most impressive cars – and the 1999 Japanese import model the
closest I can afford; and the Crown came into the stable when I wanted a
supercharged six.)

And the fifth car? I’ll come to that in a moment.

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It seems to be a recurring
theme in my life. I get besotted with a product – normally one much more
expensive than I can afford at the time – and I hanker after it year after year.

And, eventually, I often
end up buying it.

Many, many years ago it was
a Canon Typestar 5 mini word processor – I saw one being used by a lecturer when
I was a student teacher and I decided on the spot that I just had to have one.
The fact that I ended up buying the Brother equivalent was of no consequence.

A similar situation
happened with a Bose Wave Radio – I saw one at a hi-fi show demo and decided
that one day I would own one. It took about ten years but in the end I did buy
it – and, like the other products that have entered this subconscious hedonistic
buyers’ paradise, it has been a purchase made without longstanding regret. After
all, I’ve had just the same thoughts about other consumer goods that have often
ended up (finally) entering my life.

Of course, being realistic,
the Cessna Citation hasn’t yet appeared on my (imaginary) personal runway, and
the Zodiac inflatable with the 4-stroke Honda outboard is still resident in the
shop and not my garage.

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