Archive for October, 2006

According to several sources Audi are developing the Steppenwolf model into a production vehicle.It was currently rumored that it would use the Audi A3’s chassis, but they have opted for the Audi A4 chassis and use a modified Quattro all-wheel-drive. They are also leaning towards petrol engines over diesel but both will probably be brought out.

A lot of the car is to do with show including stylish bumpers and sexy chrome doors the vehicle does have some pure performance car parts including powerful a car engine and greater towing capacity.

So when can we expect to see these beauties, well 2007 in the year for it. This car will look the part and be a performer so keep your money saved up for this one.

image and some information from [auto express]

Can there be a more famous car driver than James Bond? There’s Batman and his bat-mobile of course, but that’s not really a car that a normal person can imagine driving. The bond cars have always got their gimmicks but since the legendary Aston Martin DBS that Sean Connery drove all Bond cars have tried to be the almost accessible dream car. They are the cars that boys like to imagine they are driving when they hit the motorway.

The secret service hero has driven many cars over the years. The Toyota 2000 GT, the Mustang Mach 1 the Lotus Esprit and the BMWs Z3 and Z8 all have been Bond cars.

The latest Bond film starring Daniel Craig as Bond will feature an Aston Martin DBS but there will also be a Ford Mondeo in the film – if the pre-film hype is to be believed.

When they say car crash TV what they mean is something so awful that you can’t stop watching. It’s not quite how it felt to watch England’s awful game against Croatia though, it wasn’t compulsive viewing – just painful – if of course you are an England supporter.

If only finding players for the England side was as easy as replacing tired and worn out car parts on your car. If only you could specify guaranteed goal scorer or infallible keeper in an internet search and have those car parts delivered to the pitch before kick-off.

When you want a replacement for any part on any car you can search to find it but you just can’t do that with footballers. You would think that the massive choice available of any English player would turn up more quality but it seems not as much as an internet search of a network of UK scrap yards.

The other point I suppose is that it doesn’t matter how good the parts you can find are you still have to have someone who can put them together in a successful way. I don’t think McClaren is much of an international mechanic – but that’s just my opinion.

One of the major weaknesses of the X factor TV programme that I can see is that although they put everyone through their paces in terms of singing there is no test of driving skills. Viewers may see that the contestants can warble their lungs out and grin while they are doing it but we never see their skill at high speed driving to get away from the paparazzi. We don’t see them being tested on parking outside night clubs.

There is nothing on basic mechanics either. There’s no point winning the chance to have a number one single before plunging back into obscurity if you don’t know how to deal with a leaking radiator. Do any of these hopefuls know how to change a car tyre?

Instead of getting them to yell out the latest power ballad Simon Cowell would do well to ask a few of them to get under the bonnet and see how they get on changing the oil on a Mondeo, then you could end up with a truly multi-talented winner and one who can do their own repairs using good used parts from the internet when it goes wrong and they can’t afford to send their Ferrari to the garage anymore.

It is common knowledge that petrol and CI engines require fuel and that this fuel needs to be stored for a period of time and also needs to be introduced into the combustion chamber in the correct form for the engine to run properly. For the most efficient burn four main requirements need to be met; pressure, flow, timing of injection and period of injection. Please note that as the vast majority of vehicles today use fuel injection of one type or another, carburettor systems will be ignored.

In the average petrol engine car fuel from the tank is fed under pressure through a fuel filter by the fuel pump, this pump can be mounted externally onto the body or internally within the tank. The pump unit itself is controlled by the fuel/engine management ECU providing a current supply via an electrical relay, fuel then passes up to the engine bay inside high pressure solid and/or flexible pipes where it joins the pressure regulator, this unit governs the fuel pressure available to the injector(s). The regulator usually has three connections; 1) supply from tank, 2) feed to injector(s) and a vacuum line from the inlet manifold which allows changes in fuel pressure depending on engine load. Under full load conditions the regulated fuel pressure can reach 40psi (pounds per square inch) or 2.7bar. The supply now reaches the injectors which are small electro-magnetically operated valves mounted close to the back of the inlet valves which, when energised, allow the pressurised petrol to flow through a nozzle producing a mist (atomisation) which is directed into the inlet air stream. For those interested, the injector valve moves approximately 0.15mm and this occurs over a time period of between 1.5 and 10 milliseconds completely governed by the ECU. This time variation allows for a very high degree of fuel/air mixture control depending on engine operational requirements.

As the quantity of fuel delivered by the pump is far in excess of that required by the engine a return line is provided to allow this excess to return to the tank. This aspect of the system ensures that there is a constant supply of continually filtered fuel at a constant supply pressure.

The next factor to be decided is the amount of fuel delivered via adjustment of injection duration; simply, longer injector open time equals more fuel injected. The fuel/engine management ECU takes information from the various sensors around the engine notably, engine speed, coolant temperature, inlet air temperature, engine load, etc and calculates the fuel requirement. For example, a morning cold start will involve a longer injection period than when starting from warm and the main sensor input will be from the engine temperature sensor as the engine load will be very low as will the engine speed until the vehicle is driven off. As the engine temperature increases the requirement for cold start enrichment decreases with the shortening of the period of injection, the injection duration only then increases with the increase in engine load.

With the CI engine, many similarities with the petrol engine exist in so much as the fuel must reach the combustion chamber in the same form. From the fuel tank fuel is drawn by a primer pump through a filter and delivered to the injection pump. In the modern motor vehicle two main types of injection 1) rotary pump, and 2) common rail; in the first an engine driven pump produces pulses of high pressure fuel delivered to the injectors through thick walled steel pipes and in 2) an engine driven pump supplies a fuel rail in turn connected to every injector, hence the term common rail. This is slightly different to the rotary system in that the pressure at the injectors is not pulsed it is kept constant. It is this pulsed supply which builds up behind each injector until the pressure is sufficient to lift a needle arrangement clear of its seal against spring pressure, fuel then flows through the injector nozzles producing a fine mist. As the pressure at the injectors is constant in the common rail system the injectors are opened electrically under the control of the engine/fuel ECU. The overriding advantage with the common rail system is that as the injection process is under computer control far more accurate fuelling is available throughout the engine speed range.

To summarize, fuel control exists to provide the engine with the correct amount of fuel at the correct time taking into account all engine operating conditions.

One of the problems I have found of having my Mitsubishi is that the indicators and windscreen controls are on the opposite sides to normal. The indicator and lights control is on the right and the windscreen wipers are on the left of the steering wheel.

Driving along in a daze I’m always getting mixed up and one of the consequences is that when I want to flash my lights at someone, perhaps to say ‘thanks’ for letting me out into traffic, or to say ‘idiot’ to someone who cuts me up, what I actually do is spray my wind screen and give it a wipe. By the time I get my lights sorted out it’s too late. You only have a split second to do that kind of thing.

The first car that I remember doing this in was a Hyundai that I took for a test drive and every time I tried to indicate I hit the wrong control arm. The salesman who was in the passenger seat and desperate to get a sale was trying to tell me that I’d soon get used to it, but I never have and I never will.

A recent survey showed that the biggest bug-bear for drivers who get into the car after their partner has been driving it is the irritation of having to change several car parts including the seat position back to where it should be and then change the mirror and then re-set the radio station and then fill up with petrol. This was a very accurate survey based on a sample size of 1 person. Me.

A similar survey of my wife’s opinion of me driving her car included all of the above car parts plus chocolate wrappers in the ash-tray and an unknown lingering smell.

I’m not sure if these surveys stand up to scientific scrutiny but I would like to bet that these minor irritations of car parts are shared by couples across the land. Mystery dents and scratches that no one can remember happening probably rate quite highly too. It’s probably the reason that there are so many two car families, just to avoid the arguments.

This year’s hottest film James Bond Casino Royal brings us our next vehicle worthy of the car parts store.

The model driven by bond is the Aston martin v8 vantage roadster and the DBS. These of course being in bond look sexy as hell, have a bundle of features and will give any man the pulling power of the legend himself.

Of course for the average person several features have been taken out such as missile launchers, gun compartments etc which would of course be illegal but still a impressive car parts store entry

Want to see some images? Well click here
So is it worthy of our car parts store. I think so and so doe’s bond.

I have read on several blogs and articles about studies on technologies and car parts such as abs and air bags. Some studies claim these car parts actually increase the accident rate.

This makes me sick, these people study over several years and claim conditions are set and then record stats. However how do we know the stats would not be the same is the car parts were not installed, and its just that more people are driving thus more accidents.

These car parts such as ABS and airbags have been tested in labs, outdoors, in crash simulations and have proven to be increase safety.

I was talking to my mother in law who told me a story of why she does not use seatbelts and she says its because one woman told her she had a crash and the doctor told her she would of died if she wore the seatbelt.

Firstly that sounds like crap. Secondly yes there maybe a odd occasion that a seatbelt worn would wrap around someone’s neck and strangle them. But for 99 percent of the time it will save you flying out the window and smashing your head open on something at a fast speed.Personally i love the safety car parts including my ABS, power steering and my airbags they make me feel safe.

What do you guys think?

In the last article, “Body Electrics�, I mentioned the term electronics alongside electrical, this was done as the two areas are inseparable in so much as electronic systems tend to control electrical systems in the modern motor vehicle. Good examples of this are the electronic timer for intermittent wiper operation and the memory function found on quite a few electrically adjustable seats.

The advance in vehicle electronics has been almost meteoric with high end vehicles fairly bristling with as many as fifty or more micro-processors controlling everything from suspension settings to cabin temperature.

So why have all this electronic wizardry? In most instances the greater the number of systems installed by manufacturers which have a range of adjustment the greater the scope for high end electronic control, this leads to the reason for the subject of this article; because of the number of computer systems fitted their efforts affect the vehicle has a whole rather than just one particular area. Take for example a car being driven along a road which twists and turns, it starts to rain so the wipers operate by themselves regulating their own start/stop cycle, the driver presses on with his journey increasing speed, a road speed signal is fed to the suspension computer along with information from other sensors indicating vehicle pitch and yaw, this then alters the stiffness of the suspension enabling better handling, the processors involved with steering reduce the degree of power assistance which increases the “feel� available to the driver. All along, the engine and gearbox ECU’s are communicating to give the best response in relation to driver input selecting the best gear option for the engine speed; the driver accelerates ignoring the deteriorating road conditions and starts to “attack� the on-coming bends, inevitably the driver starts to lose control and in a split second the engine power has been greatly reduced, the correct gear has been selected, suspension adjusted selectively and the brake computer has started to organise brake control as appropriate to bring the vehicle back into a stable condition. Without the driver making a move away from the steering wheel, a whole raft of operations have been carried out within a very short period of time, non of this would have been remotely possible without the intervention of microprocessors communicating with each other at a phenomenal rate. 

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as future developments go. We have all witnessed the meteoric advances in home computing technology over the past few years and exactly the same thing is happening with automotive electronics, multiple systems collaborating to give control over the whole unit whether that be a 44 tonne truck, a family saloon car or a multi user home PC. It is almost impossible to predict what the impact will be over the next twenty years of these advances but many venture to say that the driver will become more and more a passenger leaving the negotiation of point A to point B to a small bundle of silicon chips!