AUTO MANIA

by Dr. Iain Corness
 

Viper ups its horsepower ratings

Dodge Viper

The Detroit Motor Show saw the 2008 Dodge Viper make its debut. If you were tired of the ‘old’ 500 horsepower Viper, then does Dodge have a treat for you! Yes, 600 horsepower for the new Viper!
Up till now, the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 had held the horsepower crown with 505 hp, but no longer. The Viper’s output comes from an aluminum V-10 engine. Chrysler group engineers worked with specialists from McLaren Performance Technologies and Ricardo Inc. to increase the horsepower by upping displacement, adding electronically adjusted variable valve timing, and raising the rpm limit.
Dodge claims the Viper will go from 0 to 60 mph (almost 100 clicks) in less than four seconds and 0 to 100 mph and back to 0 in about 12 seconds.
The Viper gets a new bonnet with a functional air scoop, and a series of vents in the top to better manage heat generated by the big motor.
Chrysler group engineering chief Frank Klegon said the automaker will make 2,500 to 2,600 Vipers a year at the company’s Conner Avenue factory in Detroit, about the same volume Chrysler made of the last generation Viper.
Having driven a Viper on a race track a few years ago, this will certainly be some muscular beast. A good stab on the go pedal would have the Viper sideways any time! And that was the old “underpowered” one!


Toyota climbs on top again

Toyota has been the top seller in almost all categories in Thailand, other than the one-tonne pick-ups, which had been Isuzu territory for many years. However, that has changed, with Toyota’s Vigo outselling the Isuzu by 5,000 units during 2006, racking up 166,358 one-tonners.
In the total market, Toyota moved 289,108 vehicles out the door in the 12 months of 2006, with Isuzu second with 179,079 and then Honda at 66,633 units.


Autotrivia Quiz
Quiz driver

Last week I asked what did the Taiwanese YLN and the Nissan Gloria have in common? This was simple. They were the same car, a 2.2 litre diesel, used as the Hong Kong taxis for many years. What happened to YLN? Sorry I don’t know, but am happy to be brought up to date!
So to this week. Look at the picture. What is the name of the driver holding the trophy? Hint - it was 1957. Another hint, the person on the far right is the manufacturer of the car. Final hint - he was initially denied a racing license because he failed the medical.
For the Automania FREE beer this week, be the first correct answer to email [email protected]
Good luck!


Fancy a Jaguar for B. 399?

Well, one of the chaps who comes to the ‘Classic Car Club’ meetings at Jameson’s Pub on the second Monday of each month did. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a car, but it was a wonderful glossy publication he picked up on a sale table!
Published in the UK, its price there was supposed to be 35 pounds Sterling, which is close enough to B. 2,450, so at B. 399 it was a real bargain.
Having had it for a few weeks, it has more information on the racing Jaguars over the years than any other Jaguar book I have seen. I was very interested to see a photograph of Aussie Bob Jane’s lightweight E-Type racing in the UK in 1964. I actually raced against that car in Australia in 1965.
Prince Bira also gets a few mentions, having been picked by the Jaguar Team Manager Lofty England to race for them, and in the XK120’s first race, led the three car Jaguar team until a puncture stopped his runaway win and the chequered flag was then taken by the second driver in the team, Leslie Johnson. First time out and Jaguar winning all the way. Thank goodness there are people out there who keep all this information, and it manages to get into print.
The book is called Jaguar The Sporting Heritage (ISBN 1-8522-7889-7), but I’m sure it will cost you more than B. 399!


GM shows Chevy plug-in concept
The Detroit Motor Show saw the American press heaping praise on GM’s Rick Wagoner following the revealing of the electric Chevrolet Volt Concept car. With little else as a bright light at the show, the Volt was hailed as the beacon, with GM’s fortunes about to turn around, and even show the Japanese hybrids the way to the future.

Chev Volt

Well, that’s what the American press would like us to think. The real numbers are somewhat different, with Toyota poised to take over the world. (They may as well take over the American presidency. They couldn’t do a worse job.)
It seems that the future is now and living in Detroit, at least if you read the publicity blurb coming out of the American automotive capital. “GM shows Chevy plug-in concept. Volt runs on electricity, uses gas engine as back-up generator. The Chevrolet Volt, which is driven by electricity alone, uses a small three-cylinder gasoline engine only to recharge its batteries. The batteries can also be charged by plugging into an ordinary electrical outlet.”
So GM has reverted to the electric car concept, something they touted as the future some 15 years ago, with their EV1. This was the car that the ‘green’ forces believe was killed off in a clandestine fashion, in conjunction with the oil industry. A recent documentary film, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” focused on GM’s role in ending California’s experiment in the 1990s with promoting all-electric cars. It is claimed that GM and other companies, including Toyota (so there could be a skeleton in the cupboard), produced electric cars that were sold in California at that time. All of them dropped plans to make and market the vehicles once California changed rules requiring them.
Be that as it may, GM’s new electric vehicle has an electric motor powering the front wheels, while the on-board gasoline engine only turns the generator to recharge the battery, making it quite different from the hybrids as seen in Toyota’s Prius, for example, in which the electric motor and the gasoline engine both power the vehicle. In the Toyota model, the two forms of propulsion assisting each other.

GM Volt

Plug-in hybrids (as these are being called) are seen as a more viable alternative to all-electric vehicles because they do not need to stop and recharge when their batteries run out. They can still run on purely electric power, but at relatively low speeds and for relatively short distances. However, charging a battery takes 6.5 hours, not the few minutes it takes to fill a car with gasoline.
The generator gasoline engine in the Volt, says GM, could also run on “renewable” fuels like ethanol or biodiesel, or even compressed natural gas (CNG).
According to GM sources, Volt can go 1,000 km or more before needing refueling or recharging, and the batteries should last for about 65 km before needing recharging. To reduce fuel consumption, owners can plug the Volt into a standard 110-volt (US voltage) electrical outlet to recharge the batteries.
So the simple concept is that GM’s Volt is an electric car that can go up to 65 kays before the batteries need a charge, but you can charge while on the run, by using the on-board gasoline engine powering a generator, so you can go much further. Even 1,000 km says GM.
Interestingly, GM’s Wagoner said this about electric vehicles, just two months ago (before the Detroit Auto show) when asked where did he see the industry heading. Was it electric? “The feasibility is going to be driven by battery technology. It sort of depends on what standards you want to put around it. But if you’re not requiring a very long range of battery-only operation, then it could work. But if you really want to get a battery-powered vehicle, you’re going to have to have significant progress in lithium ion batteries.” Wagoner knows how to keep his cards close to his chest, that is for sure!
Though the new car uses a different technology, the batteries in the Volt perform nearly identically to those in the EV1, which GM developed in the 1990s. Today’s lithium-ion batteries can store about the same amount of power (16 kilowatt-hours) and provide nearly the same vehicle range (60 km or more) as the EV1’s lead-acid batteries. However, the lithium-ion batteries, located under the Volt’s chassis are about a third the size of the EV1’s, and should last the vehicle’s lifetime, but this is still not good enough for all applications.
Building an affordable plug-in hybrid will certainly require more advances in battery technology. Batteries powerful enough to allow the kind of highway speed drivers are accustomed to also tend to produce a lot of excess heat. Battery companies are researching ways to produce batteries that last longer and do not run as hot, while still being able to store and release ample power.
Returning to the technical side, there are however, many good reasons to go electric. Electric motors offer more torque - the pulling power a car uses to accelerate - relative to their kilowatt (or horsepower) output than gasoline engines do. Motor racers know that horsepower figures look good in press releases, but it is torque that wins races.
The Volt’s electric motor can produce up to 121 kilowatts, the equivalent of about 161 horsepower. It can produce 320 Newton-meters, or about 236 foot-pounds, of torque. In a sedan car, those are stunning numbers.
At 4.3 metres long, the Volt is slightly smaller than a Toyota Prius and goes from 0 to 100 kmh in less than 8.5 seconds, and whilst the vehicle on display at the auto show was a concept car, GM is intent on developing a production version, said Tony Posawatz, GM’s vehicle line director; however, he declined to give a date the car would be in production.

Lohner-Porsche electric AWD

So far, so good. But has GM stolen a march on the others? Unfortunately for GM, the answer is no, but it requires someone with a long memory. The first hybrid, according to my research, was built in 1902 by the son of an Austrian tinsmith. His name was Ferdinand Porsche - yes the same Porsche who designed vehicles for Daimler, Auto Union, made the Beetle and finally gave birth to the line-up of some of the greatest sportscars ever seen.
Porsche designed the Lohner-Porsche electric car in 1900 but then looked at the weight problem with the lead-acid batteries and worked out that what he needed was a lightweight generator to provide the electric current, rather than batteries, so in 1902 he harnessed Daimler’s and Panhard’s internal combustion engines to power the generators for the electric motors in a new technology that he called ‘System Mixt.’ The system might have been ‘mixed’ but the results were not. More speed records were won by his hybrid race car, European acclaim followed, and in 1905 Porsche won the Poetting Prize as Austria’s most outstanding automotive designer.
So GM might appear to be in front, but they are actually 103 years behind! Sorry about that, Rick Wagoner!