Lesson 3: What Does Turbo Mean?

We’ve all heard the phrases – a car that comes with a “turbocharged V6 engine” or a “V8 Turbo”. We probably all know that it tends to be associated with cars that go fast, but beyond that many people will know little else. A nod and a knowing look may suffice, but what does Turbo mean really?

What is a Turbo?

A Turbo Engine

Well, it is a centrifugal compressor powered by a high speed turbine (it was originally called a turbosupercharger because it supercharges a turbine engine) that is driven by an engine’s exhaust gases. The compressor increases the mass of air entering the engine, thereby resulting in greater performance. And yes, that can mean performance in terms of either power or efficiency. It’s all a bit sciency, but essentially it just squeezes more air into the cylinders. It does this by using the exhaust flow from the engine to spin a turbine, which in turn spins an air pump. Which doesn’t matter to us really.

And what does having a Turbo mean for your car?

More air in the cylinders means that you can add more fuel, and essentially that means a bigger explosion. Which, aside from being great for pyromaniacs, of course equals more power. This power, with a Turbo, doesn’t come at the prize of having a huge (and heavy) engine. Big engines are of course another way to up your car’s power, but that increases drag and weight – a Turbo just ups horsepower, without having a big effect on weight. Therefore the power-to-weight ratio for the engine is improved, but we won’t go into that too much!

In essence, a turbocharged engine means your turbo engine will do better than an equivalent engine without turbo – it will be faster and more powerful as long as everything else is the same. And now you know why!

A quick note on superchargers. Superchargers are forced induction systems just like turbo chargers - they do the same squidging air, more fuel, bigger explosions thing. The real difference is how the thing is powered – a supercharger doesn’t use the exhaust stream, but instead a belt that connects to the engine. Superchargers are therefore easier to install, but costly to buy – and you could argue a Turbo is more efficient because it uses wasted energy  – but a supercharger doesn’t cause any back pressure in the exhaust system. That’s the difference!

[Image: Source]

For literally years I have been saying that car brands ought to produce a car that “folds” when parked. One that you feel comfortable driving (we have no time for tiny cars that make you feel cramped or awkward when you drive them), but which space saves when you need to fit into a notoriously miniature city parking space.

So, I was pleased when I first read about the Hiriko. This little Spanish electric car has now been launched to the eager city market, and it does exactly hat I’ve always hoped for – it shrinks from being an already small car (clocking in at just 100 inches), to a TINY car (of just 60 inches. That’s an impressive size!

Welcome the Hiriko

And in the boot...

Sci-fi looks

Of course, if you drive the Hiriko you will, of course, stand out from the crowd. The little motor looks borderline insane, like something that just fell out of the future and into the unsuspecting Spanish streets. And, I would worry about a gang of opportunists literally carrying my little electric motor away. That said, if you can park in spaces that tiny then you will probably be willing to put up with all the ridicule in the world – after all, you won’t have to spend half an hour driving round in circle just to nab the only space that becomes available!

The Hiriko will be leased to city dwellers by the Spanish government, or retailed for $16,350.

So, what does the fall of Petroplus mean for you, as a motorist?

Well, Petroplus supply 10% of the country’s current fuel, and as of today all fuel sales have been halted with immediate effect. So, we can understand why scaremongering newspapers (we’re looking at you, Daily Mail) are jumping up and down screeching about fuel shortages, strikes, and (if the rhetoric is anything to go by) the impending doom of the human race.

Still, sinister hyperbole aside, is this something to be worried about? Are drivers suddenly going to see a hike a cost and a fall in fuel availability.

According to The Department of Energy and Climate Change, this isn’t the case. Their spokesman is on record saying:

“The refinery remains operational. We understand that a process is underway to put in place the necessary commercial arrangements to deliver product into the market. Companies have already made alternative arrangements to ensure adequate supply of products are available while these commercial arrangements are being put in place.”

In addition BP have confirmed that there are no immediate supply issues across their retail network, which should ensure that the current fuel market remains stable for the timebeing. Alternativbe funding for the refinary or suppliers will need to be found, but right now motorists shouldn’t be worrying.

The temptation is always to stock up, to queue up and panic buy in advance of the fuel apocalypse. But here at THE Blog About Cars we think it is sensible to sit back and see how the situation develops – as right now it looks like we’ll be OK.

Today it's known as "retro"

In 1914, Henry Ford began mass producing the car as we know it today, and the focus then turned to lightening the weight of our cars to save fuel and make them travel faster, and to improve the safety to reduce the number of road deaths. We have seen the advent of the seatbelt (designed by Volvo and now a legal requirement), airbags and sensors for parking to minimise the risk of accidents on the roads, and the international use of signs, traffic lights and road markings to further protect us as we travel about our daily lives.

As technology has developed around us, other problems have been seen such as accidents due to distracted driving, and therefore the use of mobile phones for talking and texting is now illegal in many countries in an attempt to protect us further against injury and death on the roads. Industry standards and legalities on the roads change from country to country but in the UK it is a crime to not wear your seatbelt and to use a mobile phone when operating a vehicle. Due to the amount of accidents on the roads it is also a legal requirement to have a valid car insurance policy, as well as road tax and an MOT certificate to prove that your car is roadworthy and not endangering you or other road users.

Turn it off..

Recently we have seen a more widespread use of the ‘green’ car, a car designed to run from electricity that can be produced from wind and solar power, rather than further draining fossil fuels by using petrol and diesel to power our vehicles.

It is thought that the driverless car will be retailed to the consumer market by the year 2020, meaning that we are free to work from the car on the way to the office, and increasing productivity. There has only been one accident so far with Google’s driverless cars, when a human operated vehicle rear ended it, and so thoughts across the automotive industry are that it could further improve road safety, as car manufacturers have been striving for over the last fifty years.

How could the car as we know it develop over the next ten years?

[Source: image]

Who's driving?

Sounding like something out of iRobot, the patent lays out a variety of self-drive options for a potential future car, including details on when the car will go in autonomous mode, how the technology could work (GPS, QR codes and sensors are all in the mix), and what sort of artificial intelligence could be involved. It’s the sort of thing that car geeks and technophobes/files love to talk about, and this week’s publishing on the details of the patent application has set fire to the discussion once again.

Whilst the ins and outs of the tech are obviously worth discussion, but the main thing for us here at THE Blog About Cars is the basic concept. No matter how it does it, would you trust a car that drives itself?

Issue 1: Infallibility

Now obviously the Google Driverless car isn’t actually currently intended to be a fully road-going beast. It isn’t talking about, at the moment at least, all cars being interlinked self-driving creatures that do everything for you. But if this is the way they are going to go, then the cars need to be pretty much infallible.They won’t, hopefully, be vulnerable to human failures such as tiredness and mistakes, but they still need to be able to respond to any eventuality. Weather, road conditions, other drivers, other drivers’ mistakes – all have to be added in, interpreted and responded to accordingly. I have trouble seeing this as tech that is achievable the way the world stands at the moment.

Issues 2: Artificial Intelligence

What if the Google car develops a mind of it’s own? Before we know it we are trapped in a car hurtling along the roads at a million miles an hour, scrabbling at the retracted locks and trying to break through the accident-resistant glass. Meanwhile the car pumps its own noxious gases into the car’s interior, rendering us slightly high and largely unconscious, slumped down until, without ceremony, we are thrown out of the car at a local factory. Disorientated and woozy we lie on the ground, until it becomes painfully apparent that the cars now control the internet, banking, and most worryingly the factory machines that gave them life. We are collected by 10 foot high pincers, given a quick coat of metallic red paint, and stored in a factory where we are farmed for energy. Just sayin’.

Issue 3: Lack of Control

If the car does make mistakes or go feral, what do we do? Human beings have a habit of craving control, and being totally at the mercy of a lump of tech only occasionally seems acceptable. We won’t complain about relying on a lift (an elevator, for those across the pond), but then we couldn’t really do the job ourselves. With driving, however, we are used to being in charge of what the car does and where it goes – and not controlling this would be terrifying. In much the same vein, it would be interesting to see how much control we can wrestle back – would the car come with a built in red “override” button, for instance?!

So for the 1^st article proper, we’ll start with the car type that, probably more than any other, needs to be the perfect combination of objective dynamic ability and subjective feel. In other words, a car that a racing driver might be able to drive around a track doesn’t always equate to being the car that us mere mortals might enjoy the most during a country lane thrash. It’s also quite timely as for the first time in a long while, it looks like car manufacturers might be waking up to this area again.

We should start with what a proper sports car is for, what is its reason for existence. For myself, and (arguably) any self respecting petrolhead, it’s that it must be fun in real life. It’s not just about being fast on a track (though by default it won’t be slow), it’s for being quick in the real world, and fun at real world speeds. This is the reason many feel real sports cars no longer exist – modern vehicle dynamics are so good that at legal speeds you get nowhere near the limit, and don’t have much fun on the public road. Most people with a licence could make a stock Ford Focus keep up with a damn good driver in a 1967 Triumph Spitfire – but I know who’d be having the most fun.

The ultimate sports car

It’s not about outright speed, it’s about the feeling of speed.

There are a few other things to consider. Sports cars are designed for unmarried people who have little responsibility in life (so they’re likely to be young but not rich), and as such need to be cheap as well. They’ll probably be used to get to work (few can afford the perfect car for each of life’s driving related tasks) so it needs to be reliable, and fairly cheap to run. But really they only need a smattering of practicality – so 2 seats, room for a weekend bag, and a few creature comforts so you can cope with being in the car for an hour or so.

Basically it’s a toy to make driving fun, something to make you arrive at the office with a smile or to make the weekend trip to a country pub/B&B wonderful just for the excuse to drive.

In the 60’s sports cars happened to be the fastest cars out there, but then came the GT cars (designed for high speed cruising over long distances), followed by Supercars (go as fast as you can, but still just about usable on a normal road) and finally, Hypercars (go faster than you should, and forget your back is falling to bits while you do).

So considering all of the above, you need something small, reliable, cheap, quick (but not really that fast), slightly practical/comfortable, good looking, and above all, fun. How you achieve this is surprisingly easy, and the ingredients look something like this:

Family saloon/hatchback engine (allowing 150-200bhp per ton, so probably 4 cylinder)

This gives you reliability and low cost as the engine can be mass produced.

Running gear/suspension from saloon/hatchback

Where possible carry-over parts are used to again keep costs low.

Front engine + Rear Wheel Drive + Short wheelbase

To give you simple and pure driving dynamics

Light weight (800-900Kg max)

Because this is the only way to make a car properly good fun.

2 Seats (in good looking, well trimmed, but basic interior)

To give comfort, but just enough. Keeping it simple also helps keep the price down

Small size and limited luggage space out the back

Helping with low weight, it also means the design can be kept small and pert for looks and aerodynamics

Coupe & Soft top options

As some people really want to show off themselves as much as the car, and some are happy to hide a bit more and enjoy the car themselves.

Great looks

To make the customer want it, and then everybody that sees it want one too.

Mix these together well, get some handling experts to season with a little suspension tuning, and Powertrain engineers to spice things up with a more aggressive engine calibration, and you’ll end up with something wonderful.

Sporty little S2000

If you can’t quite visualise the result, here are a few cars that tick all these boxes:

MG Midget/Austin Healey Sprite, Triumph Spitfire, Alfa Romeo Spider, Lotus Elan, Sunbeam Alpine, Mazda MX5, Honda S2000, BMW Z1/Z3/Z4, Renault Spider, Morgan Plus 4, Westfield/Caterham and many more.

Apart from the engine position you might also include the MR2, Lotus Elise/Europa, MGF, Porsche Boxster etc. Personally I think sports cars are more fun due to the limitation caused by having the engine out front, but all of these are still real sports cars.

And we also have some new ones to look forward to – Tobaru GT86/BRZ, the new Alfa small sports car, the next Mazda MX5 (it’s meant to be going back to its roots and getting lighter) and who knows what else. I certainly hope these cars are a success and we see a resurgence of the proper sports car.

Now I’m off to go and dream up a plan for my own interpretation of this recipe – think of a Ginetta G4 style of car, running a Toyota Aygo engine – if you don’t understand why, it fits all the rules above.

[Image: Source]

It looks like smart met a MINI, and had babies...

The for-us concept, however, shows that size doesn’t have to limit the possibilities. In fact, smart have released the sketch of their forus concept, a pick-up, and you can see how a pick-up and a smart car have been melded to produce a kind of mini version. A pick-up with attitude. And less room than normal pick-ups – alkthough the 35.4-inch cargo tray isn’t as small as one could have assumed! In fact, at 139.7 inches in length, 59.3 inches in width and 66.0 inches in height it is quite a lot bigger than we are used to in the fortwo, and this explains how the brand expect it to function outside of just “being small”.

Taking a trip to the beach...

The smart car pick-up will be shown off at the Detroit Motorshow, where it will attempt to hold it’s own amongst the crazy concepts and the supercars. Aside from the clearly distinctive looks and interesting marketing positioning, it will also run off a state-of-the-art modern electric drive, which features a 55 kW magneto-electric motor, generating 95lb-ft of torque and a maximum speed that will be approximately 75MPH. Not super fast, granted, but the smart is essentially the type of car (and the type of driver) that electric engines were built for, and the figures look to make it relatively nippy and useful within a limited urban environment.

Look at that storage!

It’s quite likely that the pick-up forus concept is just a way to build more fanfare for the upcoming second generation smart fortwo, making people more aware of the potential of a small car like this – and showing that being small doesn’t mean you have to be boring. Personally I think, for all its flaws and ridiculousness, the fortwo has never been boring! Unpopular, yes, but boring no! If it makes it to production though this could be an interesting addition to a strange and hypnotic collection of odd little automotive playthings… and I’d quite like to see it! For now, we have to wait until Detroit, when the real-life concept will be proudly on show.

Getting arty...

So, what better topic than Jeremy Clarkson. He is, undoubtedly, a bit of a pr*t. Some people would replace “a bit of” with “a lot of” or “a complete”, but we on THE Blog About Cars like to tread a safe middle ground! But, at the same time, there is something fascinating about how someone can repeatedly say all these things without his brain ever once vetoing them as something he should keep inside his head. Some of his best worst quotes (and the ensuing complaints) are below…

From: carbuzz.co.uk – New car reviews

The glowing orange A1 Sportback itself

Let me introduce the newest Sportback. The Audi A1 Sportback. Just like the 3 door Audi A1, but with more doors and, um, Sportback slapped onto the end.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the A1. I tend to like hatchbacks, I think that Audi’s simple design is one of the neatest and yet beefiest on the market, and it is good to know the optiuon of a 4-door coupe is there for those who want it. I even, god forbid, like the rusty orange colour the A1 was presented in at Tokyo. I just don’t really see how a bigger car, a less (or at the least, equally) sporty car, gets the Sportback moniker, just because. It also annoys me that the brand are putting so much emphasis on the “discovery” of a (clearly monumental) extra 6mm in both height and width, which they say improves rear-seat room. 6mm. 6MM! Extra space is extra space, granted, but as a selling point in size it seems to me something of a damp squib. Just say you bunged two more doors on the old one, call it Sportback for no apparent reason, and be done with it. Please!

This is the start of a new short series on this writer’s view of how to make the best Sports/Saloon/City/Hot Hatch/Green/GT Car. They are recipes, open to personalisation to suit different tastes – but without these basic elements the end result will be like watery packet gravy, looking about right from a distance and utterly disappointing when you eat it!

In this first piece I’ll delve into what goes on behind the scenes at an automotive manufacturer in order to engineer any car, and more importantly to try to pin down the best mindset to develop something with “soul”.

First off, of course, what exactly is “soul”? Despite what many people may think, any car can have a little soul, and those with it will be far more than instruments of personal travel, getting people simply from A to B. If you think that alone is what a car is for, then I hope can open your mind up to a few other possibilities.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines soul as: Emotional or intellectual energy or intensity. I think that describes what you find in the best cars as well. It’s not generally something you can put your finger on, just a combination of factors that make driving it feel a little special, which turn driving into an enjoyable experience, or even a hobby.

For many years this feeling was built into cars via subjective development – all based on an engineer’s intuition and years of experience. Cars such as the Jaguar E-Type we taken on weekend jaunts to North Wales, and changes were made based on the driving experience. Once they were implemented, back out the car went – engineering sounds like it was much more fun back in the swinging 60s! After all, the soul of a “perfect” car is all about the human perception of all sorts of factors relating to the input of the random environment that is the natural world. It’s a logical way to do it, yet it is very labour, cost and time intensive for the modern Auto industry. Of course, this is possibly why so many 60s cars are considered to have soul – although I speculate that perhaps this is due to quirks and flaws which arguably are not equivalent to the concept of “soul” itself. After all, character endears you to something/someone; soul makes you fall in love.

In the 21^st century, of course, we have these wonderful things called computers. Sadly many people, especially non-hands-on engineers, frequently believe computers are a replacement for the old and outdated, ways. Everything that goes on in a car can be explained by physics and thus can be replicated by maths, lots and lots of maths – exactly what computers are for. That’s the theory (and I agree that it’s a sound theory), however what seems to be generally forgotten by those developing a car in the virtual world, is that we cannot yet (and I seriously hope never will be able to) fully explain human perception and reaction to the result of these calculations. The key point is this – perfect, isn’t actually perfect. Perfect does exist, but it can’t be fully defined, and it cannot be calculated as there are more variables than terms in the equations. Perfect certainly isn’t found by having the highest set of spec numbers on a piece of paper – life is not Top Trumps.

Imagination is the eye of the soul...

So how, in the modern world with its need to develop new cars as quickly and cheaply as possible, do you develop a car with soul? Well it’s not an easy one.

To get the soul wanted, you need a real vehicle to drive and assess, to make changes to and see if it feels better. But prototype cars cost money, a lot of money, and so the fewer you have, the more money you have as profit to make shareholders happy (yes I am cynical, it goes with being an engineer!). So you start with something you know, a current model that’s similar to your new one, a mule. You make changes to it, and make a lot of objective AND subjective measurements to start to understand how measured changes relate to feel – the holy grail is to find some measured quantity that changes proportionally to how the car feels. Once you’ve defined all these things, how they change and affect feel, you use the computer as a tool to combine all of these things together – this is CAE, Computer Aided Engineering – with Aided being the most important part. You make some changes in the CAE, and when you think you find something that gives a big change, one you’ll feel in the car, you replicate it on the mule. If it works, great, you have a correlated model that stands a chance of calculating what the car will do.

Emotions are the colors of the soul...

Now with this model you try and virtually build a new car that has a lot of the stuff that made the mule car feel good, and as little of the bad stuff as possible. It is a compromise, as all engineering is. For example, stiffer suspension to improve dynamic response generally increases the amount of road energy getting into the body, thus making the car louder. It’s all about happy mediums, the balance of not having any one variable perfect, but just enough of them all in perfect harmony. Then, when your CAE model has given you the perfect car, you build it. Which is when lots of people like me start running around like headless chickens whinging about CAE because the car isn’t ever what you hoped it’d be! But you understand the trends from the mule testing and CAE, so you tweak this, and you tweak that, and at the end (if you get it right) you give it soul.

Now for a reality check. This is near impossible. We now understand pretty much everything a car does, how it reacts, how to make it safe/secure/reliable/economic – there are too many known variables and if you consider them all, you get watery packet gravy. So what you do is this: forget everything that gets in the way of soul. Sadly this means you’ll end up with a car that most people won’t want, it’ll use too much fuel etc. But they never think about the value of what can’t be easily measured – smiles per mile, how good driving it makes you feel. Put them in a car with soul, and they’ll get it instantly, and if they have any passion in them, they’ll rebalance the scales in favour of having a car that makes them feel good. Then you’ll sell them by the bucket load, even though they’re not the sensible choice. The new MINI, Fiat 500 (especially the Abarth) and Land Rover Evoque are perfect examples of this.

Driving a car that makes you smile is worth more than can be measured.