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The Bugatti Veyron
An anonymous reader writes "OK, most /.ers cannot afford the Veyron, but reading this article at HowStuffWorks is still fascinating. How do you fit 1,000 horsepower into a compact engine? How do you keep a passenger car on the road at 250+ MPH? The article links to a set of videos on the Veyron engine that are also very good. Are there any cars out there better than this?" There's also a story by Popular Science.
Apparently the acceleratory (is that a word?) force of this car is so immense, that at full bore you are pulling the same kinds of G-Forces as you do on the vertical drops of a roller coaster ride.
;)
Does 186MPH in 14 seconds.. must be a terrifying experience for both the driver, and for his wallet when he comes to fill it up!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
The Veyron is an interesting ride. It has one of the few W16 engines out there, not to mention quad turbos. One of the most amusing facts about the Veyron is the amount of effort that went into the sound system. Apparently, Bugatti demanded audio perfection, even when screaming along at 252 mph. I don't know if I speak for anyone else, but I think I 'd have larger concerns than the quality of my audio, if I was cruising at 252...
60 years ago when internal combustion propellor planes were the standard, I'm guessing that the prop plane defined the hi-tech, high powered, low weight internal combustion engine. Anyone know if that's still true?
The question from the orginal conversation was "has anyone used a wenkel rotary (it has a low weight to power ratio) in a plane?" Why/Whynot . . .
Then buy one!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Carmack's Testarossa had 1198 bhp and they had trouble getting it dialed in and over 170. Pretty tractable though the wheels DID spin in 3rd gear when the turbos came up to speed at 85 mph.
Not sure if the Bugatti really does have "the most horsepower." Maybe most for a production car.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Check out these babies . They can do 0-60 in a mere 2.9 seconds, that's actually 0.1 quicker than the bugatti!
They're powered by two bike engines working together to give a power to weight ratio of 600BHP per tonne, and the amazing part is they only cost around 16,000 although some assembly is required. Top speed isn't close to 250+mph, but do you know anywhere where you could get to that speed (UK driver speaking here!)? These certainly win the 'bang-for-buck' award here, and are available to joe avaerage...
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
But wouldn't it have been easier to just add 398 lbs. of extra metal? Serious question. Is downforce from the spoiler(wing) that much better than extra metal?
Downforce has weight but not mass, so you don't need to expend horsepower accelerating it.
If I were to win the lottery, I'd never buy this car. You'd see a Porsche Carrera GT or Ferrari Enzo in my driveway, not this Volkswagen piece of shit.
The car is heavier than a Mercedes-Benz sedan, and uglier than Courtney Love. The 250 mph top speed is only a pipe dream: VW has had so many aerodynamic and mechanical problems with this car that they've had to delay its release for three years, and it still hasn't reached anything over 230 mph on a test track. 200 pounds of downforce at the rear (and less in the front) is practically nothing. The car handles so badly that the factory test driver who took it for a parade lap at some event for antique Bugattis event managed to spin out exiting a corner and almost wrecked it against the outside wall.
No... The point is that you want those small-dicked meatheads to kill themselves, just so long as they don't kill us geeks in the process.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you're clearly insane (which you'd have to be to go 250mph on the street, in a car that's hugely different aerodynamically from an F1 car), then why not build a motorcycle with better performance for a lower price? Really, this is either 1) like putting linux on a toaster, you do it just because nobody else has, or 2) it's just a way to prove you can blow huge amounts of money.
If you're referring to General Aviation propellor aircraft, the answer is definately no.
Chances are that the Lycoming or Continental engine in your average Cessna has changed very very little over the past 50 years. Even though intercooling and turbocharging are more common options today, they are still air-cooled, still cruise at 2500-3000rpm, and still magneto-fired. If you took a time machine, kidnapped an A&P from 1950 and put him here, he would probably die from the shock of everything being exactly the same. If not, he would begin a spree to kill all of the lawyers responsible.
By comparison, your car's engine is about 25% more fuel-efficient, can produce 50-100% more power per unit of displacement thanks to its higher speed, is liquid-cooled, is often variably-timed, will run on unleaded low-octane fuel, and is probably much quieter than an aircraft engine.
Many automotive engines, from Honda Goldwing engines to Chevy 350 cu. in. V8's and on up, are converted to air use in Experimental Aviation. They usually must be geared down to swing a decent-sized prop at a reasonable mach number (supersonic prop tips are bad). Some pilots do this because of the costs of a certified engine ($20k+, plus regular maintenance by an A&P), some do it because 100LL avgas is so expensive, some do it because they believe the end result will be more trustworthy.
As for rotaries, yes, they'll save you a bunch on weight (and size, if needed), and some people put them in experimental aircraft. They have very few moving parts which increases reliability. Unfortunately the combustion chamber in a rotary has so much more surface area (per unit of displacement) than the equivalent reciprocal engine that rotaries will probably continue to lag 15-20% behind reciprocal engines on fuel efficiency.
They have definitely produced one. It's sitting in the Bugatti showroom on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Quite amusing actually. Normally happy families are torn apart as the wives and daughters run off to gaze in the haute couture windows, while the guys stand there with their faces plastered to the glass.
*blinking cursor*
As far as the driving like assholes, that only happens with idiot rockstars and the like who just got a million dollar paycheck. The vast majority of the people driving this car will be doctors, investment bankers and the like. These guys drive carefully.
You mean like Bill Gates was doing when he got arrested for reckless driving?
Hmmmm, where do I begin. The people who are in the market to buy this automobile are not going to drive it every day. In fact, they will probably transport it in its own trailer if they take it to any concours, etc.
Yes, but a car says something about your taste as well. It's like the guy who chooses the most expensive wine in the restraurant vs. the guy who chooses the best. The Veyron has a lot of power, but power isn't free.
Excerpt from an earlier post of mine:
This actually has the interesting implication that if you know the fastest you ever want to go and can sustain 1G acceleration up to that point, any additional horsepower is a waste of weight which will detract from the vehicle's braking and cornering performance. (Tire frictional force is nonlinear WRT weight.)
For me, it's about taste. I'd rather have a less powerful car with much better handling than 1000 "look how big my penis is" horsepower. For a true automotive enthusiast, there are other factors that must be considered besides straight line performance.
A good car is a real balancing act. One has to weigh horsepower, aerodynamics, weight balance, moment of intertia, suspension geometry, unsprung mass, etc.
I like to joke, that with enough money you could make a picnic table run a 10 sec. quarter mile, but in the end you've just got a really fast picnic table.
Personally, I'd rather have Bill Gate's Porsche 959 than this monstrosity. It's like the difference between wearing huge gawdy gold chains around your neck vs. wearing a classic and valuable wristwatch.
Life is too short to proofread.
Does it really get >1K HP except at top speed? I'd expect that on a dyno, or off the line, the performance is nowhere near that because you can't funnel air into the engine fast enough. For cars with lower horsepower ratings, the aerodynamics and speed of the car make less of a difference, right?
complete with the same sick fetish for the SUV scourge.
I agree that SUV's are a plague on our roads, but you can't blame car makers for making what people want to buy. They are in business to make money, after all.
Exactly why so many people want SUVs is a mystery to me. But then, I don't have any kids.
Five years ago this would be the first place they would advertise. Oh my how times change.
Actually, the beetle (and the porche) got their unique shape, not from the insects, but from hail stones. Porche noted that all hail stones were smooth and aerodynamic, so he got a big block of ice and stuck it in a wind tunnel. The shape he ended up is the shape you would get if you cut two VW beeltes in half and joined the back halves together. The shape was then modified to accomodate the windscreen.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Despite lacking the 'amazing' performance specs, for my money the Toyota Prius is by far the most advanced car on the road. It's power distribution and energy recovery seems like a much bigger innovation.
Let's see, the Veyron is cool and fast, but everything in the car is pretty common and didn't require any special innovation to achieve. The engine? Just two corporate VW DOHC V8s bolted together. And turbos are not exactly new technology, and putting 4 of them in one place doesn't get you any farther. Wow - 4 valves per cyclinder, did NASA design this monster!?! Ohhhh, dry sump lubication, fairly rare due to cost on production vehicles, but in use for plenty long. Continuously variable cam timing, I believe Honda was putting this on Civics about 20 years ago. And obviously seven gears are seven times more advanced than four gears. Dual clutch systems were invented decades ago, just never worked so well due to reliability. F1 style paddle shifting - Ferrari had it first. All wheeel drive - Jeep perhaps? Many high end cars have unique tires, all that means is they're expensive, not innovative, and have dimensions too ridiculous for the manufacturers to build in volume. Carbon fiber chasis also common on several high enders.
The Veyron is just a really expensive combination of all the top technologies available in the market at the moment, I see nothing new here. Of course, that could just be the envy talking.
You could think of it as two of the Passat's W8 engines mounted end to end.
The W8 is the reason they never made a VR8. I think they can get a smaller overall package out of a W8 (two VR4 engines side by side) than a VR8 (longer and narrower).
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Don't know about Indy cars but F1 cars only need to be doing ~100mph to stick to the ceiling.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
There's a Bugatti Museum just over the field from my house (Gloucestershire, UK [Map]). The site is also home to the impressive Prescott Speed Hillclimb which is open to the public- you can even enter the time trial in your own car, although I find it more fun to watch the vintage cars, including old Bugattis, race up the hill.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Indy cars don't need anything even remotely approaching 400 MPH to generate that kind of downforce. The Ferrari 360 Modena (barely even an exotic) makes sufficient downforce to support it's own weight at about 150 MPH due to its elaborately engineered undertray. However, the all-time downforce winner is the Toyota Eagle MKIII GTP car from the late 80's (or maybe early 90's, I forget) which had configurations that generated downforce in excess of 11,000 pounds at 200 MPH (which it could attain in places like the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans).
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Actually the French made the most impressive tank ever (the Leclerc).
A swift, powerful, costly masterpiece of technology. The most reliable defence against what was then regarded as the main threat for France and Western Europe: a Soviet invasion.
Unfortunately the production began two years after the Berlin Wall fell.
Now the few Leclerc tanks that have actually been produced and sold gather dust in French territories or in the Arab emirates.
Typical French: "Toujours en retard d'une guerre" (always one war backwards).
Thomas Miconi