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Looking Beyond Detroit For Engine Innovation
waderoush writes "Opposed-piston engines (with two pistons in the same cylinder) have been around since the 1920s, but have been used mainly in submarines and airplanes. Now, several startups are working to make these high-efficiency engines practical for cars, trucks, and light vehicles — but they're under no illusions that Detroit will adopt the idea. Silicon Valley startup Pinnacle Engines, which is backed by the world's largest venture fund, is looking to a scooter manufacturer in India as its first partner. 'This ought to be music to Detroit's ears, but to them I'm just some whacko in California,' says Monty Cleeves, Pinnacle's founder and CTO. 'This is Silicon Valley, and what does Silicon Valley know about making engines? Folks in Asia have almost zero "not-invented-here" issues, whereas it's pretty prevalent all over the U.S.'"
Detroit will be interested in it, if it works better.
Hint: Detroit has worked on this idea before, and didn't get it to work.
I'm not saying it can't work, only that it's been tried. Maybe this guy can actually scale up to a practice car with this that's reasonably more efficient.
At that point, Detroit will be interested.
However, the auto industry is full of things that worked on small scale, but turned out to be impracticable, or not marketable.
In the US, a culture is built around items, and that culture build upon itself.
In Asia, they are happy to take anyones ideas, and sell them illegally.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Opposed-piston engines (with two pistons in the same cylinder)
Are those the same as so called boxer engines? which are found in Porsches and BMW motorcycles? What's the difference if any?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If you think Detroit is going to commit a production run to an engine that has maybe 10 prototype copies, you've got to be kidding. Think of the cost of recalls. Get a few thousand built, demonstrate the efficiency, get some patents to protect the IP and Detroit as well as Japan, Korea, Germany, etc. will have a look.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Now, several startups are working to make these high-efficiency engines practical for cars, trucks, and light vehicles — but they're under no illusions that Detroit will adopt the idea...'This is Silicon Valley, and what does Silicon Valley know about making engines? Folks in Asia have almost zero "not-invented-here" issues, whereas it's pretty prevalent all over the U.S.'
'Detroit' as he refers to are now multi-nationals with divisons on every continent on the planet. NIH doesn't really apply since common models are sold across the globe with only minor variations (due to local laws). The reason 'Detroit' haven't done anything with the startups is because they have their own R&D factories. Why partner when they can do it themselves better and cheaper?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Opposed-piston_engine for ignorant feckers like myself who have never seen or heard of this engine design before?
“There are 50 opposed piston engine companies out there, and they all haven’t gotten to the point where they’ve figured out what their Achilles’ heel is,” says Byron Shaw, general manager at GM’s Advanced Technology division in Palo Alto. “It’s unlikely that [the engine startups] have discovered something that isn’t known,” he continues. “Let’s say they really improve the ability to run air flow ratios super lean, but then they haven’t solved the NOx problem [nitrogen oxides, a by-product of combustion and the source of smog and acid rain]. There is always a ‘but,’ and most of these companies haven’t gotten to the ‘but’ yet. In India and China they don’t have any idea what the ‘but’ is. They are a pure growth trajectory. But as those markets mature, so will their expectations.”
and the best part:
As if to illustrate Cleeves’ point, Shaw tells a story from his days as a young, just-out-of-college engineer at GM in 1988. “I came up with this change to an internal part of the air conditioning compressor,” he says. It was part of a project to switch over to a new, environmentally safer coolant. “It passed every test. I was rocking and rolling. I was going to change the world. My boss said, ‘Okay, why don’t you get on the plane and go down to the plant and tell them all about it.’ So I go down there and I start to give my spiel. And the plant manager says, ‘Let me give you a tour of the factory.’ “He shows me where the blank aluminum comes in and where it’s machined and processed. And then he takes me down this line of machines. There are 320 steps and each machine does one step and it’s really fast and precise. And at the end of the line this part rolls off. And he says ‘The part you want to change is machined on step number two. And on every machine after step number two, that’s where they grab the part and hold it to do all the subsequent machine steps. So we’d have to retool 320 machines. Is your change that good? How much more are people willing to pay for their cars based on the improved performance from your little part change, versus what it’s going to cost the company?’ That was a really interesting lesson for me.”
Hmm, could this explain how Asia was able to move so quickly in the past decades? Yes, it means that you steal (either figuratively or literaly) ideas more often, but it also means that you'll always try to use what it's best, without being hang-up on the current solution.
Anyway, I thought about the relation/contrast between being "liberal" with other peoples ideas and having a NIH syndrome, and I find this interesting.
This sounds like more "I'm from Silicon Valley. I know more than a century of tireless, talented engineers" talk. We engineers hear it all the time. Mostly from blustering, pick the low hanging fruit, Silicon Valley types.
Opposed Piston engines carry a lot of extra complexity to keep them synchronous. And keeping the system mechanically synchronous is easier, and hence a better engineering approach, than trying the same thing synchronous with a kludge of electro-mechanical components, especially outside the lab (i.e. "in the real world").
Complexity=Weight (usually).
The machining and assembly is harder.
The only real advantage is that you can create a higher compression ratio because it'll be crated for a lot less time (the relation is non-linear). You still have the same safety concerns though.
Mostly Silicon Valley types have seen themselves as the standard bearers for change and innovation, even if reality doesn't quite agree.
This the same Detroit that cried like babies over federal fuel efficiency requirements? Didn't they say that 30mpg was impossible and would put them out of business, despite foreign car makers doing it for years?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
I keep waiting to hear about progress on this design, but nothing ever turns up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiturbine
its after 2 PST, and STILL no Ada Lovelace story.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It has nothing to do with NIH.
Most Americans, as opposed to California, has a "fix it if it's broken" mentality. It's not a closed box. Opposed piston designs, like boxer engines, are not well suited for this. Neither are EVs. They have parts that wear out and are either too cost prohibitive to replace, or too difficult (in terms of accessing them to take them out).
Meanwhile, something like a Detroit engine, as we're calling it now, can have the engine pulled and replaced with relatively little effort still, in many vehicles. Plug, wire, etc. maintenance is still easy (except in designs that crowd the engine bay). It's a design that's known to work fairly reliably, and when it doesn't, it can be fixed. Try replacing the engine in something like a Subaru sometime... or even getting at the plugs.
On the other hand, I'd love to see more inline engines. They have a lot of the same benefits.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How do these things stack up to MIT's Massive Yet Tiny Engine? Cause they are, by far, the best ICE engine design I have seen so far.
Still wondering why no major manufacturer tends to even look twice at it, at least, not since the last time I checked.
Some recent white papers on the topic: http://www.achatespower.com/whitepapers.php
More prominent than Pinnacle is the first company mentioned in TFA, Ecomotors. In the past 6 months they have begun test builds on on-highway trucks for one of America's largest truck manufacturers, Navistar. (https://www.ccjdigital.com/navistar-announces-opoc-engine-technology-agreement/) Considering America's position as #1 fuel consumer, hacking into the amount of fuel used by the most fuel-intensive industry is much more significant than increasing efficiency on mopeds in India.
From TFA:
"“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get somebody in the U.S. excited” about fundamental improvements to the venerable internal combustion engine, Cleeves [CEO of Pinnacle] says"
Are you kidding me??!
Trucks here are doing everything they can to improve fuel efficiency, from installing flaps underneath their trailers to controlling and monitoring the speed of trucks. If the OPOC engine does prove to be a large increase in efficiency on these large, constantly running trucks, while at the same time eliminating components, you better believe the trucking industry will hop on board with a second.
Come on, practice a little vetting for once, or maybe try googling for more than one source on an article here!
Glad I could help.
In fact I can not think of a single successful aircraft engine that used that design except for one German diesle engine that saw limited service on a few low production number aircraft in WWII . Maybe they where used on airships.
The real popular use for them was submarines and trains.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There are still these open source cars around; a cheap efficient (but close-sourced) engine and a transmission built around it, actually made in California, very affordable, compliant with its emission standards, I'm sure would do great in the market for people who don't want to gamble on car batteries lasting (cycles, not charge) long enough.
Turn a boxer inside out. Instead of having one crankshaft in the middle, have two crankshafts at the ends, instead of piston heads pointing out, they point in. Then for two piston heads that come at each other, put them in the same cylinder tube so the ignition happens between them.
Actually Japan is noted for some industries having a corporate culture where "not invented here" takes hold.
http://www.economist.com/node/10169932
http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2010/01/pay-attention-when-sony-and-japan.html
"Akira Takeishi of the Institute of Innovation Research at Hitotsubashi University has investigated why Japanese firms are highly competitive in some industries (carmaking, electronics, imaging products, video games) and less so in others (personal computers, software). He concluded that Japanese firms did best in manufacturing industries with closed product designs that do not require collaboration with the rest of the industry, and worst in fields based on open standards and modular architectures. So if the nature of innovation has changed, and it now depends on collaboration with other firms around the world, Japan could be in trouble. Japanese patents with foreign co-inventors accounted for less than 3% of the total, compared with 12% in America."
TFA displays some page contents on my FF, then immediately refreshes to http://m.xconomy.com/ which formats a bunch of category links on IBM green and white printer paper, but contains no useful text.
I'm able to read a copy obtained by wget with no problems.
In Ye Olde Days the retooling issue was probably a very significant deal, however I would suspect that a large part of the cost would now be avoided as most of the retooling would simply be reprogramming the various CNC machines to do the job.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The russians are already using opposed piston diesel engines in some of their tanks: http://www.morozov.com.ua/eng/body/addmotor.php. That's a very good power to weight ratio compared to diesel engines in western tanks. Ok, I admit that it is a bit overkill for the average commuter...
Walmart, owners of one of the largest trucking fleets, has been pushing to increase truck efficiency. They are experimenting with aeromods, hybrids, and sorts of stuff. If Walmart wants it, the manufacturers will build it.
Now, several startups are working to make these high-efficiency engines practical for cars, trucks, and light vehicles — but they're under no illusions that Detroit will adopt the idea.
That's because the primary technology for future auto transport is almost certainly based around electric motors with internal combustion engines moving to a supporting role. There may very well be a market for this sort of internal combustion engine but it is unlikely to become more than a niche product. Internal combustion engines will likely always be around but they really aren't going to get a whole lot more efficient than they already are. I very much doubt that this particular permutation on engine design will be radically better. The engineers in Detroit are not idiots even if the management and union leadership might be.
There are a lot of engine designs out there with unique advantages. The Wankel rotary engine is smooth, simple, and light and has a name that is fun to say. Unfortunately it also has seal problems and consumes fuel somewhat more briskly compared to a V8 with similar power and thus it is only produced by one mainstream manufacturer (Mazda). There are tradeoffs. We use the type of engines we use because the balance of their engineering tradeoffs makes/made sense. For a small weed whacker a two stroke air cooled engine makes a lot of sense. For a sports car, not so much.
I wish these guys luck but they have an unproven model of a product (read not even close to production) with significant engineering unknowns.
There is nothing in the article that indicates a technological advancement over internal combustion engineering of the 1920's. Furthermore, compression ratios are not a limitation of a single piston engine design. Compression ratios for a gasoline engine are dictated by the quality of fuel likely to be available.
aka steal and copy rather than innovate themselves.
Sometimes a radical idea takes a lot of time to percolate in the minds of those who hear it, or even hear of it, before it starts to make sense to them. It's fine to go seeking more open minds to get the concept ironed out and start making money, but maybe he should also drop the scorned prophet act while he does it. Come back with his billion dollars and his 3 million Indian customers as the best damn proof of concept he could possibly have and negotiate with Detroit from a position of strength rather than badmouth the very people he wishes would do business with him.
Also, take a look at Mr. Cleeves Linkedin profile. His industry appears to be Semiconductors and his summary says "Leadership roles in technology development".
Nothing about engineering or materials or chemistry or any other field I'd imagine central to massively repurposing a large engine. But hey, a semiconductors guy with specialty in "Process management" should have doors flying open for him in Detroit.
I can't imagine a guy with that skill set could have an easy time convincing a heavy industry to listen to him, no matter what his idea. It doesn't mean the industry is a closed-minded bunch of trolls, as he seems to think; it just means that he's got no reputation and no credentials, just like the other thousand outsiders who try to send them ideas or schedule pitch meetings every year.
Didn't they say that 30mpg was impossible and would put them out of business, despite foreign car makers doing it for years?
No they didn't say that. Nor have the foreign car makers been "doing it for years". If you make a big heavy vehicle it is going to get crappy fuel efficiency. US consumers, for better or worse, love big heavy cars. All automakers know how to make more fuel efficient cars but those are not the ones most people buy. Designing more fuel efficient cars without regressing on other features customers demonstrably want is seriously difficult and possibly without much prospect of payback for the engineering cost. Relatively few people buy a car with fuel efficiency as their primary concern. That might change if gasoline were suddenly $7/gallon but that simply is not going to happen.
The reason the automakers fought against increasing CAFE standards was simply cost. The government is imposing an engineering cost on their business without any certainty of additional revenue from their customers to offset the cost. Furthermore when your most profitable vehicles are the least fuel efficient (true for every auto manufacturer) and best selling, that is a major problem.
Toyota and other foreign car manufacturers were just as against raising CAFE standards as the US auto makers. The Toyota Tundra simply cannot achieve 30mpg without some combination of horsepower reduction, weight reduction, better aerodynamics and possibly hybridization. That's physics and has nothing to do with being a foreign or domestic car maker. The engineering challenges are just as difficult for Toyota as they are for GM. I've worked with both companies directly and I promise you Toyota does not have better engineers.
When I was young I had this minibike that I bought at a garage sale, and it was my test bed for modified engines of all types! The only time it ever scared me was with an engine that I had made during my study halls in the metal shop out of a converted GM radial air conditioning compressor from a car. We took one apart in auto shop and I thought "now thats how you build an engine right there!" so I asked my two shop teachers about what they thought of such an animal, and they gave me everything I could ask for to make it happen. I whittled and lathed lots and lots of parts, and my two shop teachers helped too with getting whatever materials I needed to make it run (tore apart lots of small engines they new would contain helpful parts)
I got to run it in the parking lot at school, and it didn't last long, but it was much more powerful than any other engine I could stuff in that frame! Motocross bike (YZ 490), snowmobile (440 Liquifire) Motorcycle (750 Nighthawk) had nothin' on this thing for that two minutes of fury I got to have on school grounds!
The poor kids these days don't get to enjoy high school like I did!
Thanks to Mr Gwinn, Mr Iverson and Mr Mildebrandt, and all my other teachers who went the extra mile to keep school interesting for me!
is the obvious foot-dragging old-guard mentality of Detroit.
theres no real incentive to change or innovate anything since they can lobby government bodies to simply inject cash when theyre punished by the market. these companies are headed by people who charter private jets to washington for their dole, and when faced with the disgusting irony of it simply cherry-pick a "hybid" or "green" car to return to washington with. the car or truck they drive doesnt matter, it wont be produced for consumption or if it was, it will be killed in a year (chrysler aspen anyone?)
Arguably the only incentive for chevy to produce the volt was that it was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by bureaucrats. As for ford and its hybrid malibu, it was a predictable cat-and-mouse reaction to the Camry, which had long been known to detroit as the yearly kick in the teeth from japan. Its hybrid drivetrain and regenerative braking were so embarassingly identical to toyotas synergy drive that it was forced into a patent deal.
so yeah i dont fault these guys for headed to silicon valley. detroit automotive industries are to engine design as Dennys is to the culinary arts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
(and, from what I've been told, although I've thankfully been spared this for obvious reasons, strip clubs)
You are a girl ???
These are two stroke diesels!
Honestly, given their situation, I'd strongly advise trying to work their way into some of the Tier 1 suppliers. It should be a lot easier than approaching the Big 3 directly (I really wouldn't expect them to give this startup the time of day).
I absolutely guarantee they won't give them the time of day. Really though that is just fine. You DON"T want to be a Tier 1 supplier. When the Big 3 want to cut costs the first thing they do is cut payments to the Tier 1 suppliers. Unfortunately the Tier 1 suppliers frequently cannot pass on the cost reductions to the smaller Tier 2 and below suppliers without killing them. My company is a Tier 4 on a GM product and we certainly could not afford a significant price cut. Tier 1s are basically the big auto makers bitches.
WTF? Is it a Slashdot affiliate?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Ever since hybrids became more prevalent, I've been waiting for somebody to produce a car modeled after the tower PC case design.
Imagine a car with standard busses for power and data. Imagine plugging a USB cable into the dash for diagnostic readout. Finally (the hardest part) imagine standard bays for generators and batteries. No, you're not going to swap out an engine too often, and some of the connections like exhaust and fluid cooling are tricky.
OTOH, the idea of getting the "efficient new engine" the way you get "the fast new graphics card" is intriguing to the geek in me. Unfortunately, it's not very interesting to most consumers, and it's probably downright threatening to the current business models of most manufacturers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Junkers Jumo engines in WWII had opposed pistons, they were the only diesel aircraft engines that I know of, at least in large production scale. Ironically, the British Napier Deltic engines were licensed technology from Junkers, perhaps one of the last technology transfer agreements between both countries before the war.
Opposed pistons are very interesting in that they can have a large compression ratio without increasing weight too much, because they do not need cylinder heads. That's how they could get a diesel engine lightweight enough to power an aircraft.
However, differently from the engine mentioned in TFA, Junkers and Napier made two-stroke engines. Opposed pistons allow one to build a low-pollution two-stroke engine, because the pistons don't run exactly opposite each other. The piston on the side that has the exhaust port reaches the bottom end before the admission port side piston.
I think that, from an engineering POV, the Junkers Jumo/Napier Deltic is one of the most interesting concepts that have been invented and abandoned. I know the Deltic engine had reliability problems due to its triangular configuration, it was difficult to get proper cooling in the core of the triangle, but the linear Jumo design has no intrinsic faults that I can think of and had lots of advantages. It had two crankshafts, true, but that's nothing compared to the complexity of modern motors.
The man claims that the scooters he wants to build for India will consume 25 to 50 percent less fuel while being cheaper, lighter, and adaptable to every fuel from diesel to ethanol with a trivial change in the piston spacing.
Let's assume for a moment that his engineers can achieve all that. (HUGE if but...) He still has to prove that they can be produced cheaply, are sufficiently reliable, have no design showstoppers, are safe, can mass produced, and can scale in size/horsepower without screwing up any of the previous items.
Of course an electric motor does the same thing and can use solar, nuclear, wind and coal in addition to liquid fuels.
If the man can't get people to listen to him it's because he's not telling the whole story and he doesn't have all the problems even nearly worked out. I just can't imagine a more likely alternative.
The guy has a model engine and is trying to raise money in Silicon Valley. What isn't mentioned is that Detroit engineers have worked with pretty much every type of engine over the years, including this type. Maybe this guy's engineers have made a breakthrough but he'll have to prove it first.
Over 20 years ago, a gentleman named Kristiansen developed what he called the 'K-Cycle' engine. His idea was to use horizonally opposed pistons, contained in a drum of cylinders, and have the pistons follow a cam profile that brought the exhaust portion of a revolution down to almost atmospheric pressure. It only needed a single spark plug and its efficiency came from venting the exhaust as atmospheric pressure. The last model he built was 120 lbs motor that produced about 100 bhp. It ran so quietly that everyone thought it was an electric motor.
Unfortunately, after only a few million raised from private investors, the project was closed up after solving the last technical problem with maintaining an oil seal on a rotating cylinder, and shortly afterwards, Kristiansen passed away. The problem isn't that ideas that aren't there, but they are not snapped up by the big money interests, ie oil companies, and automakers, so all too often they 'wither on the vine' for lack of R&D funding. And don't ask me about getting government support. The bureaucrats couldn't tell a brilliant idea from a mosquito bite on the end of their noses.
D.
Because when technology is purchased, it is considered an asset, and appears so on the balance sheet.
True but it also costs something so you have less of another asset, usually cash which is more fungible. You are typically trading a current asset for a (hopefully) future asset.
Internal research and development organizations, however, are viewed as liabilities, since they have payroll and other continuing expenses.
Actually R&D is expensed, not a liability though perhaps that is what you meant. Calculating it is often complicated.
It's an accounting advantage when outside technology, either in the form of entire companies or just their IP, is purchased.
Not necessarily since you have to carry goodwill on the balance sheet which can be subject to writedowns if the value of the property acquired turns out to not be as expected. This is fairly common with R&D and intangible assets purchased since it is very difficult to predict future financial benefits from R&D activities. In fact that difficulty is precisely why internal R&D is not permitted to be treated as an asset - management would be sorely tempted to misstate their assets based on imaginary predictions of future benefits expected.
Said another way, the external technology has a value that is explicitly recorded on the balance sheet.
Subject to periodic review and possible writedowns.
Perhaps they should invest in tooling that does not require a massive investment to make a simple change?
Go ahead and do it. Fame and fortune await you. Clearly it must be very simple for someone so bright as you to create tooling flexible enough to accommodate any conceivable design change without increasing cost. That must be very easy to do. [/sarcasm]
Here's a little test:
1) Find an SUV that gets 30mpg or better.
2) Find a Ute that has a 1.5t towing capacity that gets 30mpg or better (unloaded).
3) Find a large luxury saloon that gets 30mpg or better. Bonus if it is a petrol engine.
For the record my car gets close to 40mpg. But I'll leave it up to you to change the bigger=better American mindset and convince people to buy my small 3door hatch with 1.5L engine.
Piston engines waste a ton of energy because they move in a linear motion, stop and then reverse direction. This causes an acceleration deceleration acceleration deceleration profile.
The most efficient use of energy is to accelerate to the most efficient power level for the applied load and then maintain that power level until the system is shut down. Preferably using a rotational system like a turbine or a rotary engine. Freedom rotaries are interesting multifuel engines.
Locomotives use short stroke two stroke diesel engines which run at their optimum RPM powering generators which are used to power electric motors which drive the train. This is the most efficient system found so far and converts between 50 and 65% of the energy from the diesel fuel into electricity.
Not buying this one. The most efficient hybrid vehicle systems should use a system similar to locomotives, the problem is weight. Balancing rotational engines with weight and hybrid technologies to achieve 50% fuel energy conversion is the dream. Pinacle does not achieve it.
It's an engine type that, relatively speaking, scales up well. Sort of like how almost all large engines are diesel and almost all small ones are gasoline.
Bulldozer engine? Diesel. Weed-eater? Gasoline. The meeting point is approximately at 'pickup truck' with a good deal of overlap.
Because it's mechanically more complex, it tends to be more expensive, and smaller parts tend to be more fragile. With newer technology it's time might of come - we can more easily and cheaply produce tiny complex parts today of advanced alloys, whereas back in the '50s machining costs rapidly increased as you decreased the size of parts.
You saw them in planes and submarines because reducing the weight by 80%(with '50s tech) and 'half the size', was worth the additional expense. After all, cut the a couple thousand pounds off the weight of the engine, and that's a couple thousand pounds of extra cargo you can haul. Sure, it required a bit more maintenance - but it was worth the tradeoff.
Today, with us looking at 10k+ mile oil changes and 100k+ servicing periods, we potentially have much of the maintenance problems solved.
Assuming they can make this engine 'tiny' - the Napier Deltic weighed 10,500 pounds to produce 2500 hp, 4.2lbs/hp. My tacoma has a curb weight of 3250 pounds, the 1GR-FE V6 weighs 375 pounds to produce 236 HP. 1.6 lbs/hp. We've come a LONG way since the '50s.
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, CNC machines now do a lot of work that used to be done by dedicated machining equipment. But for large portions of the manufacture of a complex assembly, like an A/C compressor, you have a whole series of machines bending, twisting, pushing, pulling, smashing, slicing, fastening, etc. And all of those machines require holding the assembly in a secure fashion. (So, for that matter, do the CNC machines.) Things that grip to tight tolerances usually can't be adjusted just by running a new program.
Yes, you can design those machines to be adaptable, but that also makes those same machines more complicated, expensive, and error-prone. (And those adaptions are usually done by adjusting movable chucks/grippers/etc. or swapping in new jigs, which is a lengthy, tedious, process.
You design a whole new car and manufacturing process around it. You're retooling the factory from the concrete up, so it's no more or less skin to do it for one or another type of engine design.
That you're building a whole new factory to build the engine, that you might need to redesign cars a bit to fit it, etc...
They'll get to building the improved part/engine, but they'll likely do it as part of a major upgrade cycle, NOT as a 'hotfix'.
I don't read AC A human right
And where can I purchase a Ford Hybrid Malibu?
Tesla is still making low-volume high-powered toys to sell to rich people. There is a world of difference between making a few of a car sold to rich people, and making hundreds of thousands of cars sold to John Q Public.
Tesla knows this, which is precisely why no automaker has snatched them up to scale up their designs and Tesla hasn't done this themselves.. If they were adaptable to a mass-production vehicle, there are any number of auto companies that would have bought them already. GM, Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, VW, Fiat, Hyundai, Daewoo, Tata, Mitsubishi, and who knows how many Chinese companies.
Why not? A turbocharged 2 stroke diesel can be some of the cleanest emitters out there. The trick is that you use the turbo to flush out all the exhaust air, then the exhaust valve is closed(or the piston moves over the exhaust port), followed finally by fuel injection during compression.
Then you get into the reduced weight helping to reduce the need for fuel - saving some emissions there.
The problems are indeed different than for a 4 stroke gasoline, but solvable all the same.
I don't read AC A human right
Basically, the article says that the auto makers wouldn't pay to license this technology. Even if they planned on using it, if it's already used in airplanes and submarines and the auto industry has probably done research on it before, then what would they really need to license? Surely if it seemed like a good idea to them they would do so without licensing the technology from this little company. They have plenty of engineers.
one that promises to marry the fuel efficiency of diesel technology with the lower cost structure of gasoline-burning engines
I also don't understand this quote. Does it mean make a gas engine that is as fuel efficient as diesel? It seems to imply that diesels are somehow expensive. They aren't. In a lot of ways they're more basic. A hybrid can get as good or better mileage as a diesel, but it does come at a cost (stupid batteries). But then there is also the Smart Car or VW Bug, they're comparable to a diesel (and you can even get a diesel bug).
Also, efficiency doesn't necessary translate into MPG. For instance, a rotary engine, like a RX-8, is more efficient than a standard piston engine, but this gives it better acceleration rather than MPG.
I'm not saying this guy's design is crap or anything, it just doesn't seem practical for Detroit. For all the retooling necessary to actual get these things in mass market cars, it would have to be planned to be implemented so far in the future the guys in Detroit probably plan to be much further along than this incremental improvement. Electricity and hydrogen come to mind - only using oil as a lubricant and perhaps not at all considering all the synthetic oils these days.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Seriously, who cares about Detroit?
All the serious engine innovation work is not happening in Detroit. Its happening in Europe, where cars routinely get 50+ to 60+ mpg for Diesel and more specialised cars get 70+ to 80+ mpg. Then you start looking at Hybrids.
Detroit doesn't have a clue about this type of thing.
The story is totally focusses in the wrong place. If Detroit wants to innovate on engines it needs to look to Europe and start following their lead.
I drove a Skoda Octavia Estate (Station Wagon) 1.9L diesel manual. Routinely get 55pmg, sometimes 60+.
GF drive a VW Passat Estate (Station Wagon) 1.9L diesel (auto). Routinely gets 51pmg, sometimes 55+.
And US drivers think 30pmg is good!
Is there some new technology in the pipeline set to radically reduce the cost of batteries? Why do people think the costs are coming down? These items are already mass produced, so whatever economies of scale you're going to get are already there. There's absolutely no reason to think the costs of batteries is coming down significantly anytime soon.
That is easier said than done! In manufacturing, the process is as simple as it can be. The manufacturers have reduced the number of steps to a bare minimum. It's not just minimization for its own sake but because doing so saves them money. If it isn't done, it's because it is more costly to do so.
Back in the 60's or 70's one of the car companies designed a car for a 6 cylinder engine. Then some bozo thought it would be a great idea to market the same car but with a larger 8 cylinder engine. The suits ignored the engineers who said that the engine compartment was too small. The result, you had to pull out the engine just to replace the rear two spark plugs. The clearance was just too tight!
In an Internal Combustion Engine, a third of the power is lost in the form of heat dissipated by the cooling system and another third of the power is lost in the form of heat lost in the exhaust system.
http://www.revetec.com/ claims to be the most efficient. The crankshaft is replaced with a desmodromic cam system. The claim is that efficiency is gained by having no cylinder wall drag and (mostly) by having better "mechanical advantage" between the piston and the driveshaft. (The argument seems fallacious to me.) In any case, it's an interesting design and fairly easy to understand. As a disadvantage, the design seems to be badly unbalanced.
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I mean, GM (let alone the rest of "Detroit") now has gotten within just the last few years variable valve timing (on both the overhead cam and pushrod engines), electronic throttle control, and direct injection. Some current research:
So, engine ping or knock occurs more readily with high engine compression, and advanced engine spark timing, when the gasoline preignites (ignites early in other words.) So, direct injection eliminates the possibility of ping or knock, the gasoline is only injected right when it's needed. When preignition would occur, the gasoline doesn't exist in the combustion chamber yet. So, HCCI (homogenous charge combustion ignition) is something under research, this will actually *use* knock to run the engine, actually rnning gasoline in a diesel operatin gmode with very lean diesel engine-like fuel mixture. All this to gain about 30% efficiency.
If someone came up with an opposing engine design that should be possible to make durable, emissions legal, some mileage improvement and make reasonable power, GM or someone would lap it up. Emissions are a hell of a trick these days, the exhaust limit now is actually cleaner than the ambient air of a city like Los Angeles (and this wasn't cherrypikcing when they had some smog attack..) I'm not for going back to the bad old days, but there are plenty of very high MPG-mileage engines that work in Europe, are clean, but not clean enough for US emissions standards without wrecking the engine behavior (i.e. MPG, driveability, or both go to pieces.)
Silicon Valley startup Pinnacle Engines, which is backed by the world's largest venture fund, is looking to a scooter manufacturer in India as its first partner.
coz you know when I think about reliable, quality engines, I naturally turn to Indian scooter manufacturing.
How about planting your tightwad ass right here in the good ole US of A.
Translation: They'll steal from anyone.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Turbines are simple/cheap/reliable but get terrible fuel economy.
Internal combustion- 25%, steam engine- 75%, electric motor- 90%. We've already got most of the possible efficiency from the old IC engine design, it's time we switched. Given modern tech and engineering we should be able to build gas/oil powered steam engine from about 5-10 years R&D, or we could put power rails into our highways and let our electric cars recharge their (smaller/cheaper) batteries that only need to get them onto/off of the highways (at low speeds).
Foreign car makers didn't have to meet US crash safety requirements on many of their vehicles.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They do NOT have two pistons in a single cylinder.
As a volkswagen beetle builder for 20 years I that I have never sees two pistons per cylinder.
This is not a great design. More modern water cooled engines are superior.
So much tech like the Honda vtec and toyota vvti are far superior.
Want to talk about wrx? Put a huge turbo on anything and it will perform, with no torque.
The first thing I thought was that Detroit is familiar with that type of engines. The names that come to mind: Junkers, DKW, Detroit Diesel, Boxford. All quite famous. Looking it up I see it started with the Grey Marine Diesel > GM Diesel > Detroit Diesel. Two stroke. Turbocharged. They have been there.
1) VW Touareg 3.0 V6 TDI 204PS.
2) VW Amarok Startline 122PS 4MOTION Selectable (over 2.5t breaked towing).
3) Porsche Panamera S Hybrid - with bonus point.
I'd have looked outside of VW and Porsche's lineups, but why bother?
We know how to make efficient engines no matter what the configuration. High temperatures and lean burning. Remember those 60mpg cars in the 80s?
The problem is we want clean air. I'm a libertarian and even I see that as a role for government.
When you run an engine hot or lean you make lots of NOx. So you need a catalytic converter. The problem there is they need a certain chemistry in order to turn the NOx back into NO2. Unfortunately they need close to a stoiciometric mixture. There has been some improvement with lean burn catalytic converters but that is where the work needs to be concentrated. If you come up with one that can take any exhaust mixture at any temperature and clean it up the rest is engineering.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
This the same Detroit that cried like babies over federal fuel efficiency requirements? Didn't they say that 30mpg was impossible and would put them out of business, despite foreign car makers doing it for years?
When did they ever say that? What company was it? I know for a fact that there have been American cars since 1960 that have got over 30 MPG. There was no CAFE or other asinine federal regulation of fuel economy in 1960.
Why, then, does my 1982 S-Class Mercedes with power everything that weighs 3450 at the curb get 30 mpg on the freeway?
First off, the plural of anecdote is not data. We're talking about FLEET averages, not individual cars. Every auto maker is perfectly capable of making cars that get better than 30mpg and most of them have.
Second, did you really want to use Mercedes as an example? They have worse fuel economy than Ford or GM across their fleets. In fact aside from some small luxury car makers they have the absolute worst overall fleet fuel economy of any major auto manufacturer who sells cars in the US.
The same cost is applied to all automakers. Well, those who haven't already made efficiency a priority; it won't cost them anything.
That could not be more wrong. They all have to spend money as a result of CAFE, the difference is when and why. The Asian manufacturers who had low labor costs and thus competitive small (low margin) cars are obviously ahead of the game but they still have to invest to keep their lead in small cars. They also want to get into bigger (higher margin) cars which hurts their fuel economy averages unless they invest in the same technology as the US and European makers. The US and European manufacturers with their historically higher labor costs and resultant product lineups with larger (higher margin) cars have a different problem trying to get people to buy smaller vehicles from them. Basically US and Europe are tying to go small while Asian makers are trying to go big. End of the day they all have to invest a lot of extra engineering money to meet mandated fuel economy standards.
I've worked on both types of vehicle directly and I promise you that Toyota has better engineers.
And I've actually worked WITH their engineers in their manufacturing plants. I've helped design assembly lines where the products of both companies are made and sat in design reviews of products. The difference in engineering talent are negligible. The differences in management talent are rather more significant. There is a huge difference between knowing how to engineer a great product and actually being allowed to do it.
The "innovative" engine promising "fundamental improvements" to "50-year old technology" seems to be an opposed piston engine with sleeve valves and a variable compression ratio.
Hmmm, let's see ...
- Opposed piston engine: patented 1877 by Ferdinand Kindermann
- Sleeve valved engine: patented 1908 by Charles Yale Knight
- Variable compression ratio engine: patented 1887 by James Atkinson
Perhaps venture giant NEA might be willing to fund my radical new invention as well? It's called "the steam engine".
There's a disconnect here. If people are buying big heavy cars which aren't fuel efficient, why did the US auto makers need a bailout?
There is no disconnect here. In 2006 almost 17 million cars were sold in the US. In 2009 10.4 million cars were sold. They needed a bailout because they have huge fixed costs which were draining their cash reserves and nearly half their revenue was wiped out. The only way for any large manufacturer to deal with that sort of business environment is to have large cash reserves, cut costs as much as you can and then wait for a recovery. Everyone lost money, foreign AND domestic alike. The only difference is that the recession happened before the US manufacturers could get their high labor costs back to competitive levels. Their balance sheet wasn't in good enough shape going into the recession and it was more than they were able to absorb. Frankly the bankruptcy is probably the best thing that could have happened to GM and Chrysler because it sped up their recovery and made them competitive more quickly than they might have otherwise been.
Because consumers were still buying cars, they just weren't buying the cars the big three were making.
The actual data shows that consumers weren't buying cars from ANYONE. Even Toyota had their first full year loss in decades to the tune of several billion dollars. Toyota, Nissan and Honda sales in 2008 fell more than Ford or GM that year. It was a bloodbath across the board, foreign and domestic alike.
What the hell do you have so much to carry around? Your house?
The linked page pops up (with picture and article), and then disappears beneath an Xconomy page. Nice hijack, you Xconomy pukes.
I'll leave off #3, since I don't know big luxury sedans, but your #1 and #2 requests match up ridiculously well with the Ford Escape Hybrid. EPA combined is 32mpg, towing capacity is 1500lbs. I've been averaging 36mpg, but I tend to do a little better than the window sticker in any car. Your mileage may vary. Pity it's the last year for it.
Might want to research intermittent wipers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns
I can be moderated as Inciteful...
Massive displacement, Yet Tiny in size.
Toroidal design. Very cool and huge power to weight improvement over other designs.
http://www.angellabsllc.com/
Russia liked the design so much they stole it!
What the hell do you have so much to carry around? Your house?
Don't ask me, I drive a hatchback. But my last trip to America I would have to say I've never seen so many cars on the road with more than 4 tires. I have probably seen one car the size of a Ford F250 in Australia and Europe over the past year. In the month I was in the states I probably saw about 2 a day.
30mpg is equal to 7,84 L/100km. I think the americans still use the imperial units to not be embarrassed in front of the world. Even the shitty indian and brazilian cars can do better. Hell, even those giant bmw SUVs are able to do it (though not all)
Really which ones? The latest BMW X5 gets about 15-20mpg.
For car bodies, final assembly, etc., general purpose robots work quite well due to their adaptability.
For small, complicated parts that might only have two or three varieties across a company's entire product line, like, say, window motors, A/C compressors, evap pumps, etc., cheaper, simpler, faster, more accurate, and sturdier one-off tooling makes a lot more sense.
No, you don't want custom tooling to assemble the left taillight assembly of the TSX Station Wagon, but neither do you need universal robots to make, say, gas caps.
Maybe the day will come when we use 3D printers and/or highly-articulated robots to make damn near everything, but that day won't be here for a while yet.