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America's Cars Are Suddenly Getting Faster and More Efficient (bloomberg.com)
Kyle Stock and David Ingold, writing for Bloomberg: Sometime in the next couple of months, the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon and its 808 horsepower will show up in dealership windows like some kind of tiny, red, tire-melting factory. Yes, 808 horsepower. There's no typo. Last year, U.S. drivers on the hunt for more than 600 horsepower had 18 models to choose from, including a Cadillac sedan that looks more swanky than angry. Meanwhile, even boring commuter sedans are posting power specifications that would have been unheard of during the Ford Administration. The horses in the auto industry are running free. We crunched four decades of data from the Environmental Protection Agency's emission tests and arrived at a simple conclusion: All of the cars these days are fast and furious -- even the trucks. If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he'd be at grave risk of whiplash. Since those days, horsepower in the U.S. has almost doubled, with the median model climbing from 145 to 283 stallions. Not surprisingly, the entire U.S. fleet grew more game for a drag-race: The median time it took for a vehicle to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour was halved, from almost 14 seconds to seven.
Essentially you can either use the same improvements to make the cars more efficient in terms of gas usage or you can make them have more total horsepower. Unfortunately, many of the people buying cars prefer the second, so this is what we end up with. The long-term results of this are going to be not at all good.
The idiots that hoon these things on normal roads provide one of the strongest possible arguments for a hard push for fully automated driving. Nobody (probably) wants a 4500 lb car rammed up their butt because someone wants to have fun. Take it to the track.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The purpose of these is the same as it's ever been. Dude gets dragged inside the dealership by his wife to fantasize about the muscle car, but still leaves with a minivan or a 4-cylinder commuter car plus a 5-7 year loan.
On the other hand, there are just as many of us who geek out on mileage (often just because we hate to blow money on transportation) so there's still hope for the planet.
I never understood this fascination with having stuff you can't use to its fullest extent.
It's like spending thousands of dollars on a water cooled over clocked triple GPU computer so you can check your email and play minesweeper.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Or is it actually a gallon per mile rating? I suppose it's news that any 800+ horsepower car can be made street legal. Too bad for your 85 grand they can't make it look less... Dodge-y.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Did a Daily Mail (UK) headline editor suddenly
get hired by Slashdot?
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
I like the "more efficient" part. I'm driving a car that routinely gets over 40 miles per gallon. Back in the '70s I drove an old (60s vintage) Volkswagen Beetle that used to impress people with its great gas mileage: 26 miles per gallon. What I drive now is bigger, more comfortable, safer, faster, and in short better in every possible way, and still gets almost twice the mileage.
When speaking of sedans, I would actually argue they weigh less (heck, even the latest F150 was built out of aluminum, and weighs significantly less then F150's of yore) and their engine displacements are significantly smaller then cars from the 60's/70's. Heck, a 2.0 liter engine (fairly common nowadays) is easily able to pump out 250HP/250 lb-ft of torque, even if that HP measurement takes into account all of the additional loads/devices on the engine -- which equates to a 122 cubic inch engine. Can you imagine a American muscle car from the late 60's bragging about it's 122 cubic inch engine.
Newer cars are made from lighter materials, and computer aided design has allowed for much stronger designs with less weight.
'69 Mustang is 1400 kg. 2017 Mustang is 1650 kg. But it's also physically wider and longer and there are real back seats because it's no longer a pony car.
People with that kind of money usually buy German cars.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Newer cars likely weigh a lot more, because of all the safety & environmental regulations.
Actually *NOT*, according to TFA.
The opposite is actually observed : newer material used nowadays means cars are lighter.
Steel got replaced by aluminum and modern fibers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You notice these cars are not Fuel Hogs. They are actually using the energy that used to dump into the squishy torque converter. The cars are actually streamlined unlike the box cars of the 80's. They are burning less energy by running a larger percentage of recirculated exhaust gases through the engine when at idle and power is not needed. This doesn't even take into account electric flywheel assist and stop start technology where the vehicles engine is shut off at lights. When the power goes to the road you go quicker. I'd wager the cars are lighter too aluminum engine blocks are the norm now.
But go on about how we're all bad and how we should all drive the Trabant.
The Challenger is a lot of things, but unless you're comparing it to an aircraft carrier I don't think "tiny" is a good adjective for it. Part of why it needs an 808 HP engine is because it weighs ~400 pounds more than the Ford Mustang that it competes against in the same class.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While it *is* a huge, heavy car....that kind of HP is just plain fun to play with...and the engine note just idling, is fun.
I had been looking maybe to get something old form '70's...maybe a '75-'76 Trans Am, last years of the 455 4-speed.
They were horribly air restricted, but I've found that you can get one mostly restored for about $25K...and with a more aggressive cam and some exhaust work, you can get near 500HP naturally aspirated. It would need some suspension work too to be a bit more modern, but also, fun for nostalgia....you just don't see many of them on the road and it would still be a fun torq monster.
Or...maybe the Hellcat...it isn't like that is a kitten, but man, if they'd have done a full run of that 808 HP Demon, I certainly might have had to get one to play with.
It may be a "Dodge"..but shit....808 HP??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Those Hellcats are major guzzlers. And those tires aren't cheap.
True though you must admit that anyone buying one doesn't give a rip about fuel economy. They buy them to go fast and impress other similarly minded people. Fuel economy doesn't even enter into the picture.
Very bad choice using 1976 as the comparison date. For a better clue tou need to go back before 1971.
1976 was at the end of a notorious low-point in power thanks to the US auto manufacturers responding to new emissions regulations and the 1973 oil crisis:
Example of just Corvettes:
1969: least powerful (base): 300HP Most powerful (LS7) 460HP
1975: least powerful (base): 165Hp Most powerful (L82) 205HP
According to the summary, "The median time it took for a vehicle to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour was halved, from almost 14 seconds to seven," so in this case more HP does mean faster, or at least, means faster to reach cruising speed.
More HP will get you to speed faster provided you do not exceed the traction limits of your tires. That's why simply putting a bigger engine in a car may not result in substantial performance gains unless attention is also paid to the tires and suspension and traction control systems.
Back in the '70s I drove an old (60s vintage) Volkswagen Beetle that used to impress people with its great gas mileage: 26 miles per gallon.
That's because you were comparing it mostly against cars that were designed without fuel economy as a consideration. I drove a '76 Impala many years ago which got something like 16mpg on a good day. The beetle was a complete crap car but it was small and light so compared to the land yachts of the day it seemed efficient.
What I drive now is bigger, more comfortable, safer, faster, and in short better in every possible way, and still gets almost twice the mileage.
Engines have improved a lot in the last 40 years but they aren't going to get dramatically better. If you want to realize significant fuel efficiency gains you will have to go to something based on a different technology. Most likely that will be electric motors whether in the form of a hybrid or EV. No general purpose ICE can touch an electric motor for fuel economy at a given horsepower in most circumstances.
808 hp in a country with 70-75-80(-85) mph speed limits,
What will happen with american built high power cars when - perhaps even by committing a crime - being pushed to the max speed? (breaking apart?)
Because its no such big deal to put much power into a car, the problem of aerodynamic lifting forces come into play interacting with shock absorbers.
The space between the street and your cars under-floor at high speed can make out the difference between driving and flying,
because more distance to the road = more air being pushed under the car = lifting your car off the ground.
So a bump on the road can send you flying, and I don't think american highways are designed for speed like the german "Autobahn".
Just saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If only there were some option other than "make it illegal" or "do nothing"...
Some people get a large amount of utility out of vehicles that use a lot of fuel (e.g. people who need high towing capacity). An omniscient social planner would want to allow these people to pay for the environmental cost of their driving while discouraging others from using inefficient vehicles (and discourage unnecessary driving too). Is there anything that could accomplish these without mind control? Hmm, let's think about it.
Lo and behold, higher fuel taxes accomplish all of the above while still letting people make their own choices. Amazing!
Serious economists generally agree that our gas taxes are too low by $2 per gallon or more. (A prominent example is Greg Mankiw, Harvard prof and economic adviser to GWB and Romney, though, like all economic advisers, too often ignored.) We aren't making drivers pay the cost of building and maintaining the roads, much less the social costs of gridlock and pollution. The road construction subsidies given to private transportation, on top of the externalities involved, distort people's incentives tremendously. Those perverse incentives affect a lot of other choices people make (e.g. employment and housing markets). We could fix this at a stroke, and even do it in a revenue-neutral way by reducing taxes on productive behavior like payroll and income.
Most other first world countries have had this figured out for a long time now. UK fuel tax is something like $3/gal. German fuel taxes are over $6/gallon, and other than problems due to some dude named Assad, they've been doing just fine. Unfortunately, here in the States it's a political third rail, so even though people on both the right and left will admit it makes sense in private, either will lambast the other to oblivion if they ever propose it in public.
Great. Muscle cars are back, and they're high-tech. Meanwhile, we haven't been educatiing, training, or testing drivers properly for at least 20 or 30 years, which means we have an entire generation on the roads who really aren't competent, which has sparked an entire legion of idiots who claim that 'humans aren't capable of operating a motor vehicle competently, therefore we need to ban them from driving and have self-driving cars instead!' which of course is nonsensical bullshit. So we'll have under-educated, under-trained, inadequately-tested drivers behind the wheel of vehicles as powerful as a goddamned Formula-1 racecar, who will wrap it around trees and telephone poles and kill more people, which will just strengthen the strawman argument in favor of taking away everyones' driving privilege and making us risk our lives riding in shitty so-called 'self driving cars' that are not anywhere NEAR up to the task.
Bull-fucking-SHIT.
What we REALLY need is reforms in driver education and trianing (read as: fund highschool driver-ed and driver-training programs again!) and reforms in how the DMV tests new drivers.
Oh and while we're at it: Educate and train new drivers to recognize and properly, safely deal with cyclists on public roads. There should never ever again be an excuse of "I didn't see him" when someone hits a cyclist.
America's Cars Are Suddenly Getting Faster and More Efficient
With a title that notes cars getting "faster" and "more efficient", it would be nice if the, fairly long, summary actually mentioned both things rather than just the faster part -- especially as the latter is more important. Seriously, I can only go so fast so quickly, but efficiency helps out all the time.
As for "suddenly," the only time comparison in TFS is between 1976 and 2017:
If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he'd be at grave risk of whiplash.
We, apparently, have different definitions of the word "suddenly".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To everyone thinking people are suddenly going to be blasting around in the Dodge Demon, it's quite obviously a car designed to be capable of fast drag strip times while also being street legal. And yes, I'm sure some dunce will wrap one around a telephone pole, but they are not going to be hugely prolific cars.
And as someone who is involved in both drag racing and oval dirt track racing, I prefer a car with good mileage, only modest power, and very good handling for a daily driver.
There ARE pretty high performance cars that get mileage I never even believed would be possibly, usually to displacement on demand technologies where cylinders are literally shut off when not needed. This was tried many many years ago with little success, but now they have the ability to actually collapse the lifters and keep the cylinder sealed so pumping losses drop to a minimum and you can realize the full benefit.
And as for the "squishy" torque converter, that was solved years ago with a lock-up converter. The converter only acts as a converter during necessary transitional states. The rest of the time, a clutch inside it locks up and turns it into a direct drive mechanism, removing most of the fluid losses inside.
One of the big gains to thermodynamic efficiency can be had with compression ratio increases, which has been seen. Historically, due to only crude control over the combustion process (carburetor, mechanical/vacuum based ignition timing curves), an increase in compression ratio pretty much necessitated increased fuel octane. Now this isn't as true, given the much more precise control over combustion with direct cylinder injection and individual coil per spark plug . So compression ratio can be increased with advanced control to prevent getting into knock, then detonation, the pre-ignition, then ultimate failure.
EGR is good for efficiency in some cases, but is a horsepower killer. Racing engines intentionally keep the exhaust valve and intake valve open simultaneously (known as overlap) to pull fresh air and fuel through the cylinder on every cycle to "scavenge" out and clean all combustion products out from the previousl cycle. The downside is that some raw fuel is discharged out the exhaust.
Bottom line is we have cars now with horsepower ranges from a 4 cylinder that would have been tough at times with an 8 cylinder engine and getting 2x or 3x the mileage (sometimes even more!). We are on the right track. High performance cars have been ingrained in auto industry DNA for a long time.
Most of the early good big block TAs (watch for the ones with Oldsmobile engines, stay away) had two speeds and 2.83 rears. Monster torque geared to go over 150 made them just torque through DOT tires even at that gearing. Just put a 4.11 in the back and drag racing tires and you are good to go to the quarter mile. If you build the motor, you will have to also tub the back for big old tires. It's not a very popular choice to make into a drag car.
They are fat pigs. Wallow. Had one, don't really miss it. Hate to say it, but the Mustang is much smaller and somewhat lighter, even though it's a convertible. Motor was much weaker, but I 'fixed' that. 'Weak motor' is much easier to fix than 'fat pig'. I debadged it, but the 'blue oval of shame' is still there.
Get a box Nova and put a rat in that. Pontiac race parts are expensive and rare, so are box Novas. Use a Eurotrash car and put a tubular frame in it...e.g. Fiat 850 sport w. V8, my current proj, Chevy parts are still cheap and easy. If you're going to go good and fast, you're going to want the cage and restraints anyhow, make sure it's built to NHRA/IHRA spec for your target ET. Should be the same, double check with your local tracks tech inspectors before spending $. Rules could be changing, they know, ask them. Don't buy the restraint belts until the last minute, they expire and are expensive.
If you're small enough to fit, it's hard to beat a miata these days. Put a stock 5.0 ford pushrod motor and trans in it and you're good to go. You can't build that motor at all or it will explode the Mazda IRS...traction is an issue.
For street fun, get a Civic with a b-engine, if you can find one that isn't riced to hell and back, you want the sleeper. They aren't _that_ fast, but they are excellent for pissing off morons who spend way too much for dealer tuners. The demon would blow any Civic off the road, except the kind of people that buy it, won't know how to drive. Even with all the modern helpers, 808 ponies is going to be on the ragged edge of 'streetable'. No fun, at all, in traffic. I'd trailer it to the drag strip and install a cage before my first angry pass.
If I wanted a 808 HP challenger, I'd buy one with the right block and build the power myself.
Dealer tuners typically cost about (Base Cose + 5 * (RacePartsCost + ProInstallCost)), they only make any sense as collectables. Which, more or less, means they shouldn't be driven, beyond a few miles/month to keep the seals wet. Installing the cage would be a mistake. I'd buy the worn out 10 year old car with the right engine.
The old rule of thumb was: For popular motors, expect to spend about $1000/HP beyond 400 (obvious 'valid range' issues), if you want to be at the strip regularly. Pick your race class and bracket carefully or you will be broke with a garage full of parts but no running racecar. You will blow things up, it will suck. Using that math, buying the Demon can be a very expensive decision, but a numbers matching one will be worth a fortune in 40 years. Pulling the factory engine and setting it aside, would be the good move, if you're going to run it hard.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, but those emissions.
Have gnu, will travel.