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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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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The other day when I had Frank the EF Falcon on the ChipTorque dyno, I did something pretty interesting. But first, some background.

I’ve installed in the Falcon the trip computer that’s normally fitted to higher trim models. It displays all the usual trip computer stuff – average fuel economy, average speed, and so on. It also displays instantaneous fuel consumption.

From watching this display a lot, I know that at an indicated 110 km/h on a level freeway (actually 105 km/h when a speedo correction is applied), the instantaneous fuel consumption figure fluctuates between 7 and 8 litres/100 km. (Unfortunately, the instantaneous display doesn’t have any decimal places.) Over a long distance in these conditions, the average is 7.5 litres/100 – so that instantaneous number makes sense.

On the dyno it was easy to dial up an indicated 110 km/h and then increase the load until the instantaneous consumption figure was fluctuating between 7-8 kilometres/100. Then it was just a case of reading off the dyno screen how much power was being absorbed at the wheels. The answer was 13kW.

So, in the Falcon, it takes 13kW to propel the car along level ground at an actual speed of 105 km/h.

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