Every winter UK roads seem to descend into chaos for a few weeks. But it really doesn’t have to be like this.
There are two factors vital to safe driving on snowy or iced roads, the correct winter tyres and adequate driver skill. It is a sad reflection of our attitude to driving that for the majority of road users both of these factors are sadly lacking.
I have been arguing for decades that winter driving skills and skid training should be a compulsory element of the UK driving test, as it is in many other countries where similar conditions exist, I also strongly believe we should all retake our test every 5 years. But irrespective of any test conditions we should all do a refresher course every few years, I am fortunate that as part of my work I am frequently assessed and receive driver training, and even after a third of a century behind the wheel I am still learning. Most good driving schools offer refresher courses for experienced drivers, and many also offer specialist skid training, a sound investment in your own safety and that of other road users.
But all the skill in the world would be pointless if your car still has hard summer tyres on. Winter tyres use a different rubber compound that maintains better grip on cold, wet or icy roads, they also have a very different tread patter with many tiny groves to allow the tread to grip the rough surface of icy roads. If you have never tried them the difference is amazing, not only allowing you to pull away in slippery conditions but more importantly they dramatically reduce stopping distances and help maintain steering. In many countries using winter tyres at this time of year is effectively compulsory, with very good reason. Some people use a spare set of wheels for their winter tyres and swap over when temperatures dip below 7C, using winter tyres in summer is possible but causes them to wear much faster and on a hot day they are no where near as good as summer tyres, it’s all about the right tool for the job. Winter tyres usually have a snow flake symbol on the side and the word ‘Winter’ just to make it clear what they are.
Recently I have been using All Terrain (AT) tyres all year with good results, not quite as good as full winter tyres in extreme conditions but effective enough to work with a bit of care, and good in summer conditions too.
With these steps, and driving slowly leaving plenty of stopping distance, you can enjoy winter motoring just as much as in the summer.
And if you don’t enjoy motoring then catch the bus and stop cluttering up our roads ?
But the thing is that most people who drive have no interest in cars or driving, cars have become a necessity to the vast majority and are marketed as convenience goods, just like a microwave or dish washer. So they are not likely to read blogs like this or tweets from the AA, and to be fair most of the time they don’t need to.
I was watching cars struggling up a very slight incline to get out of a car park at a retail park recently, a BMW 3 series took several runs and needed the backed up traffic to reverse out of the way before managing to slither onto the road. This was quite entertaining, but the point is that although these cars were on summer tyres and the drivers hopeless, they all managed to get out eventually.
I suspect that as long as most people can get away with it, any calls for improved driving skills and appropriate tyres will fall on deaf ears.
Heritage and Engineering are two words that don’t often hang around in each others company. But maybe they should.
Heritage and Engineering are two words that don’t often hang around in each others company. But maybe they should.
Heritage is an important idea, it’s the things in the past that are the foundations for the present.
Chances are that we all have at least a small but amazing bit of Engineering heritage in our family, maybe your grandma built mighty rolls Royce Merlin engines for second world war spitfires, or great grandfather rolled the steel that made the Titanic.
Engineering is fundamentally creative, it’s at the heart of what it is to be human, solving problems with practical solutions. And it’s probably part of your family story.
Just think about the world around you, computers are everywhere and the inventor of modern computer programming was Ada Lovelace, her legacy is in the very device you are using right now. Brunell’s bridges, railways and ships shaped the way towns grew, people gained mobility and society developed, engineering has a big impact.
But it’s not just the big names that made a difference, it’s the people who make things happen at ground level such as the multitudes of people at Bletchley doing their bit to push computer science forward in WW2, or the countless people involved in steel making, making nuts and bolts or maintaining machines in great factories. Millions of people shaped our engineering heritage, it’s part of who we are.
Just as important as creating things, the art of Engineering also creates skills. These skills are passed on and allow others to share in the experience and abilities of others. It’s a brilliant thing.
However, we seem to be at a turning point in history. Skills are in real danger of dying out by accident. The number of students deciding to study technical subjects is nowhere near enough, coupled with traditional Engineering skills being eclipsed by modern automated systems. The bright dazzle of high technology blinding us to the humble foundations of traditional Engineering.
But thankfully there is hope. The Association of Heritage Engineers has a mandate to preserve our Engineering skills and show our brilliant engineering history in new and exciting ways to the next generation.
There wasn’t so much an actual ‘Design Brief’, more a sort of chat about really cool things to have on a car, and which were the best-looking desert race cars ever…
There wasn’t so much an actual ‘Design Brief’, more a sort of chat about really cool things to have on a car, and which were the best-looking desert race cars ever.
It was an unusual conversation from the start:
I need you to build a pickup, Dakar rally-style, with hints of Pre Runner, really massive tyres, and an aircraft wing on top.
A wing? For lift? Do you want it to fly?
No, it’s just to house the swarm of camera drones that need to be launched at the touch of a button.
Oh, right, that’s special. Anything else?
Yes, it needs an emergency survival moped fitting to the load bed. Oh and a winch, some jerry cans, on-board tyre inflater, and lights. Lots of lights.
An unconventional start to a design and build project certainly, but then again the customer was not exactly conventional either. Tom Ford, known as Wookie for reasons lost in the mists of time (see early episodes of Fifth gear for clues), is an adventurer and ghetto engineer, apparently, with a genuine passion for great engineering and design. Usually, he is fairly involved with his projects but in this case, he was slightly inconvenienced by having to nip over to the USA to present Top Gear America.
Most sensible engineers would say that this would take a lot longer than the three months we actually had to build it. But I’ve never really got on well with sensible so I leapt at the chance.
Clearly I needed the best team I could find, luckily I’ve worked with Dave Bridges and Brad Harrison before, awesome people who do amazing work (ask Dave about the V12 Studebaker) and who will stop at nothing to get the job done. Add to this the legendary Paul Cowland helping by wrangling a whole host of suppliers and that gave me the confidence to take it on.
Everything is bespoke on this build, either built from scratch or using modified parts; the SuperPro suspension parts were for a slightly different model and had to be adapted. The roll cage was a custom build from Performance & Protection but with extra modifications for camera arms and all the other clobber we put in there. They are superb creators of roll cages and every time I asked for some extra bits of high tensile tube bent in certain complex ways they met the challenge with grace and speed.
The team at Mitsubishi were absolutely heroic during the build, their enthusiasm matched by practical assistance whenever called upon.
One thing that struck me as soon as I started working on the truck was how well the Mitsubishi L200 is put together. This is a working vehicle and everything does its job properly; it’s robust, reliable and efficient. This made the project that bit more enjoyable to build.
The way I approached this was to start by making it look right, arranging the features in the best way for the filming work it had to do, then engineer it to get around all the hideous compromises that this gave it.
One thing became apparent very early on; there was a lot of weight going on it, but worse than that the weight was high up and a lot of it was behind the rear axle line. This is a bit of a nightmare from an engineering point of view as it makes it very unstable. The roll centre was high too, meaning that as you turn into a corner it takes time for the car to react, and when it does finally react, there is a tendency for it to wallow, unload the wheels on the inside of the corner and lose traction.
With all that weight hanging over the back I needed to think of a way of making it handle, so my mind turned to what other cars also this fundamental design fault, so obviously the Porsche 911 sprung to mind.
That particular miss-balanced relic corners by putting most of the side force through the rear tyres and just using the front tyres to point the car in the right direction, or a close approximation of it. Really, when you analyse how a 911 suspension works, it’s prey similar to steering a wheelbarrow backwards… Ok, I can hear the hate building now from the Porc fanciers, I might have gone too far with that analogy!
Anyway, using that solution on the L200 meant loading up the rear tyres a lot more than the front, changing the front geometry, changing the drop link angles on the roll bar and running the rear tyres at 50psi with the fronts set to just 35 psi.
To get some stability at speed I wanted to increase the front caster angle significantly, and as luck would have it the L200 has adjustable offset bolts on the wishbones, but due to the extreme nature of this truck even on its maximum adjustment, I couldn’t quite get enough angle without the wheel fouling the wheel arch at full bump. The last thing I wanted was the tyres ripping the arches off when Wookie lands a massive jump off a dune, so further modification followed.
I also needed a rear anti-roll bar (standard L200 doesn’t have or need one) and a stiffer front roll bar. Now, stiffening roll bars actually reduces traction on normal roads as it reduces the wheels ability to react to road irregularities interdependently. Stiffer springs and dampers would be needed, but crucially I needed to increase grip by making the tyre contact patch bigger. Well, any excuse for bigger tyres.
The standard truck has tyres with a diameter of 28 inches, I tried a few ideas out, moving the suspension up and down and the steering side to side though its full movement to see how much space there was for bigger tyres, we could just about get away with 32-inch with a few adjustments, but that wasn’t really big enough for the look Tom wanted, with a bit more modification I could get 35-inch tyres in, this did involve cutting a chunk of bulkhead out, some footwell too, and welding it back together again in a slightly different shape. I also moved the washer bottle from the front left wheel arch to the rear right one and removed most of the ends of the plastic bumper.
The challenge with the wing was firstly where to put it. If it went on the roof it would look like one of those roof boxes that caravan owners seem to like, and I don’t think Wooky was going for the happy camper look. My preference was to hang it right out the back, like a Top Fuel drag racer, but then it would completely ruin the ability to get the emergency moped out in a hurry, which misses the point somewhat.
So that left the load bed area which is good for several reasons; firstly it looks good, secondly the air flow will be fairly turbulent in this area so the chances of the wing giving us unwanted lift are reduced. To be on the safe side I also angled the wing with its tail up a bit, so if anything it would give a small amount of downforce. Now, I expect you’re wondering why we didn’t just fit it upside down so it definitely gave downforce and not lift, well according to Wooky it’s something to do with aesthetics, meh. And anyway I didn’t want huge downforce there as the rear axle is already loaded heavily enough.
This wing has secrets. All is not as it seems. If you look at most aeroplanes you may notice the wings taper as they go out, so if we just cut a section of wing one side would be shorter than the other. A simple solution would be to cut the left and right wing ends off a scrap plane and join them together to make a symmetrical item, but that was not possible with this plane because one wing had been destroyed in the plane crash…
So the skills of Stuart (Stu-Art) were employed to take the wing section apart and let in new aluminium to even it up. Not an easy job, and one made more tricky by the need to fit a large compartment into the top of the wing so we could get the drones in.
After two week solid work, and a couple of all nighters, Stuart heroically set off from up north at the crack of dawn to bring the wing down to the Bedfordshire workshop. He even brought biscuits, top bloke.
Mounting the wing proved a tad tricky, the main spar which is the back bone of the wing runs diagonally, so the mountings had to be further forward on one side, this didn’t look great so we made wide mounting plates that allowed us to use the rear part on one side and the front part on the other.
I made a real effort to enhance the Mitsubishi styling, so the cut angles in the wings and around the front roll cage reflect the lines of the original front end, the mirror ally insert next to the headlights emphasises the width gain but also enhances the lines of the stock headlight, there’s a lot more detail in there than you might at first notice.
I knew I had to widen the wheel arches, but I didn’t want to just stick some plastic arch flares on, that would be far too easy. Thinking about Dakar rally cars and Pre Runner trucks I kept thinking about boxed out arches with big vents in. I also like the way the Mitsubishi design has angled lines joining with tight curves. Putting these two together was easier said than done, so one day I set the front right wing on the work bench and just cut it in two with a plasma cutter, using the existing Mitsubishi lines as a guide and reflecting the headlight cut out from the front. To be fair, at that stage it looked terrible, but I had a dream…
Fitting the remains of the rear edge of the wing back on the car, I then made some 40mm spacers to mount the rest of the wing. This created some interesting spaces and shapes, time to get creative.
Having mocked up a rough approximation of what I wanted on the wings I tasked Brad with making it work properly, creating a set of plastic and aluminium inserts and finishing it to a high standard. As luck would have it Brads dad runs a rapid prototyping firm which specialises in making tricky plastic thingys. Both of them worked long hours to create the extensions, they also added a bit of their own ides too which makes it a much more personal task.
Everything had to be designed so that it wouldn’t break if it was dropped from a great height or hit with rocks, which is pretty much what happened to it in the desert of Namibia
There are also a load of hidden modifications, I moved the intercooler up 5mm so I could make a better winch mount, it now has two batteries linked with a smart control system to run the winch and extra lights when the engine is idling or off. Lots of engineering detail that supports that stunning exterior.
This project has been an absolute hoot, I’ve loved it, sure there were a few sleepless nights but anything worth while does that. Here’s to the next mad project.
Project Swarm Facts
When you fit much bigger tyres the handling and steering is effected in many ways, the steering axis is inclined (king pin inclination) so the new wheels have a greater offset to compensate for the bigger tyres and keep the steering axis in the right place. They are 25mm further out than standard.
The lights, split charge, winch and drone flap are wired up with 360 meters of cable with over 70 connectors.
The second battery can be linked into the main battery at the press of a button to jump start itself.
The battery tray is from a 1989 Jaguar XJ12, it just so happens to fit the Mitsubishi rear wheel arch perfectly.
The on board air compressor can pump up all four tyres from flat on the charge from the auxiliary battery without being recharged.
The shop that sold the tractor exhaust flap also sells Unimogs and cat food.
Spec:
Ground clearance increased (more than doubled) from 205 to 420mm
Approach angle improved from 30 to 42 degrees
Departure angle improved from 22 to 38 degrees
Ramp over angle improved from 24 to 28 degrees.
Tyres increased from 28” to 35” Reinforced off road tyres.
Track width extended 50 mm front and rear.
Full bespoke external roll cage, FIA race spec, main hoops use extra large 3” CDS high tensile steel tube.
Custom fabricated winch bumper with 9500lb pull high power winch with high tensile synthetic rope, full remote control.
High strength side steps / rock sliders made from 2” high tensile CDS steel tubing.
Modified wing of a Beagle Pup aeroplane mounted on custom aerofoil section tube frame, remote control flap releases camera drones from bespoke drone hangar.
Two ‘trawler arm’ camera mounts swing out from the sides for self filming using GoPro Hero cameras.
Two spare wheels on quick release rally style drop down cages, these incorporate rear view camera and auxiliary rear lights.
All terrain survival Motoped mounted in custom built integrated slide out ramp.
Two fuel cans colour matched to body paint.
14 main high intensity LED light units.
Six built in camera mounts
Two long range CB aerials
High lift jack and vehicle recovery system.
On board tyre inflater / air compressor.
Split charge system with additional heavy duty battery, automatic battery charge control.
Custom exhaust stack through load bed, high flow system.
Full race spec Cobra bucket seats with custom Mitsubishi logos.
High strength six point race harnesses. FIA race spec.
Special tool store for drone remote control, winch remote, compressed air line, survival tools etc.
Custom switch panel for lighting, drone hatch and battery charge control.
Sacrifice is a strong word. A very strong word. It could mean giving up one’s life for someone you love, or a country you love. It can be used in many ways, but all of them are powerful.
Service is a gentler word. In my world service could mean the things you do to keep a car running at it’s best, oil change, filters etc. Service can also mean the act of doing something for someone, waiters and priests sort of thing.
But I’ve learnt a whole new meaning of the word service, and it’s a meaning that is every bit as big and powerful as sacrifice. Understanding the meaning of that little word has changed my perception of my own life, my world and the people around me.
It all started when I donated some race car parts to a bloke with no legs. His name is Gavin and he was building a Bowler Tomcat off road race car, V8 and 4WD in a space frame buggy doing three figure speeds through forests. Gavin did most of the work on the car himself, he built a special tray that clipped on the front of the engine bay so he could work on the engine, hauling himself out of his wheel chair onto the wing. He is an inspiring chap, and his story is astonishing.
Gavin was one of the founders of an utterly amazing charity called Mission Motorsport, dedicated to helping people who are wounded, injured or sick and have served in the British armed forces. The idea for this came from its CEO James Cameron, a Major in the Royal Tank Regiment who had seen many of his blokes suffer life changing injuries and had an overwhelming drive to do something to help.
I have supported this charity from its inception, and in 2014 I took on the role of training manager, building a training wing so that ex-soldiers could become mechanics and technicians. When someone enrols on one of our courses I interview them to find out what they already know, what they want to achieve and also what is holding them back. I’ve heard many stories, some inspiring, some distressing, all remarkable.
Before this I never had much to do with the forces, one of my school friends became a technician in the RAF, and my dad served in World War 2 but he never talked about it and other than that everyone I know is a dedicated civilian. Like many ordinary folk all I knew about life in the forces was what I saw in the news, films and TV shows gave glimpses but really it was a world totally separate to mine. But what I have learnt in the last three years has changed everything.
That word, service, it turns out to mean a lot. It means to serve your country, to deliberately put yourself in harms way to protect others, to seek out and engage with the enemy. Now clearly not all conflict has a clear cut right and wrong, some of the reasons for our exploits abroad over the years have been deeply flawed, defining what the enemy is comes down to the democratically elected government and is a whole different topic, but getting on with the job comes down to those who signed up to serve their country. The UK doesn’t have conscription, so our army is all volunteers who have made this their profession. It takes a certain sort of person to do that. I didn’t join up for the simple reason that I didn’t fancy being shot at, but of course what that actually means is that I would rather save my own skin than serve my country.
Now, that decision is fine, because the whole point of a country having armed forces is so that the majority of the population doesn’t have to fight and can get on with life. But it does leave me feeling slightly guilty for relying on the service, and sacrifice, of others. There is part of me that wishes I had in some way served, done my bit as it were.
At home we always watch the remembrance day ceremony on the TV, we have brought up our son to appreciate what it’s all about too. And now that many of the people I work with are from the forces, and privileged to call them friends, the ceremony has a new poignancy.
Last year was a break from tradition for me, I did not watch the ceremony on TV, I was at a real ceremony in the top left hand corner of Wales. Mission Motorsport run a race weekend that incorporates a very moving remembrance ceremony, the racing stops and everyone congregates on the circuit, a mixture of veterans, serving personnel and civilians like me. Seeing how deeply those who had served were touched by the ceremony was profound, I know how some of them had suffered personally or had lost good friends which gave the ceremony words striking relevance.
Service, sacrifice, suffering. All words that have very deep meaning, but a meaning worth taking time to understand.
There is a lot of comment about the UK government announcement that by 2040 they will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
Most of the comment seems to be ill informed, made by people with little or no understanding of the motor industry or technology.
The government 2040 announcement is typical politics, to little too late. Even without this law, everyone will be buying electric by then. This just makes it look like they are doing something when actually it makes no difference. Smoke and mirrors. This is a direct response to the legal challenge against their air quality pledges.
The Audi RSQ built for I, Robot, a film set in 2035.
The fact is that the car industry has been trying to get us into electric cars for decades. Range from batteries has traditionally been relatively poor, but still quite usable for the average commute. We didn’t buy them because of anxiety about range, whipped up by poor quality journalism trying to make a big story to sell more copy. Fact is that the average journey is less than 20 miles, with over 90% park time, easily in range with time to recharge.
Anyway, with increasing restrictions on exhaust emissions, and the huge expense of developing petrol and diesel engines, coupled with the rapid advancement in battery technology, we are rapidly approaching the point where electric powertrains will outperform combustion engines for a lower total investment.
At that point, the internal combustion engine will be utterly pointless. I’ve spent my whole career working on fantastic petrol and diesel engines, so it’s a bit of a wrench, but I think it’s a very good thing.
The Lexus car built for Minority Report, a film set in 2054.
OK, so we’re not there quite yet, but the way things look from inside the industry I’d guess we’ll hit that tipping point in about ten years. After that we may still have hybrids for another decade, maybe, although I think they are a compromise solution that has a good advantage right now, but as pure EV technology improves they will become redundant too.
This does not affect the sale of second-hand petrol and diesel cars, so far our classics are safe, but they are under threat from some quarters, we must remain vigilant.
So you see, by 2040 no car company will have offered a petrol or diesel car for many years anyway, regardless of the government. It’s 23 years away. Look back 23 years; no smartphone, no social media, supercars had less than 600bhp and now you can get a family estate car with more power than that!
It’s no time to be complacent though. This law is a farce, which means there will be challenges and changes to it. The government still has plenty of time to do something stupid.
As a teenager in the 80s I wrote an essay on how robots would end up being the next stage in human evolution.
I had grown up reading great novels by people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, my family were all engineers and I was studying science and technology at college. The future seemed very exciting (which indeed it turned out to be) with huge possibilities for human development.
But I got one crucial thing wrong, let me explain.
The vision I had, based on ideas from many other people far more clever than I, involved machines that extended human ability. This included powered exoskeletons to improve strength and stamina as well as increasing or decreasing the scale of movement as appropriate, increasing dexterity and having specialist tools fitted to do those tricky jobs that only a superhero could do.
But it also involved increasing brain power by having extra memory and computing ability to extend our brain’s capability far beyond natural limits. And that, to an extent, is already happening by way of the smart phone. I have instant access to the world of information, I have maps so I know my way round any town, I have links to thousands of people I’ve never met, I can talk to people all over the world whilst I’m walking down the street etc. We may be used to it, but actually it’s pretty impressive.
As a kid my vision went further than this, to a point where I had an extension to my brain built in, with the robot limbs attached to my body so I became one with the technology that made me stronger, faster, smarter etc. I figured everyone would have this eventually and this would be the next phase of human development. And it almost was.
Let me give you one, very specific, example. CAD, computer aided design, has made designing and making things so much easier and improved quality too. Early systems I used in the ’90s were basic tools that replaced pencil and paper drawings, this was great, then they got steadily better and added functions. Along came analysis systems such as FEA that can not only draw your design out but actually simulate forces going through it and identify where weak point may be, wow, this saved loads of time in testing and made is much easier to design light and strong components. Previously a design engineer would use experience and basic design principals to draw something up, then it would be tested and any failures analysed in order to improve the design. So now the skill and experience was in the machine, allowing CAD users with little mechanical knowledge to design fairly good components. This improved quickly and now these design packages can actually take a vague concept and do all the design work themselves, so it takes far fewer engineers to get a new thing designed and built.
So what happened was I started out with a simple tool that helped me draw, then it improved my design, but now it can do all the design and the machine no longer needs me to be there.
This is happening with AI driven Expert Systems, which pick up the knowledge and experience of many experts and synthesise it into very powerful knowledge systems that can learn from their own mistakes. These are better than any one single human expert. They are replacing Pilots, doctors, teachers, designers, engineers and are also replacing artists. Yes, an expert system can be set up to write new music, paint pictures and write stories to a very acceptable level, and they are getting better all the time.
By replacing humans in a company costs can be dramatically lowered, 24 hour running is possible, there are no strikes or HR problems, you don’t need buildings with heating or air con to the same extent. The financial pressure to implement these systems is huge. And this is driving investment into AI and causing it to be implemented without mitigation of the adverse effects on the people who no longer have jobs.
So whilst many people foresaw that machines would bring greater powers to us, what I missed was that once they got good enough they wouldn’t need me. The human element becomes redundant.
Now, what happens when there are very few jobs available? Mass unemployment is already creeping into the western world, and what the politicians don’t seem to be telling us is that this is because there are less jobs even though there are more companies who are doing more business than ever before.
Manual labour replaced with machines (just look at farming, even the combine harvesters are robots now), knowledge and skills replaced by AI (how long before expert systems replace judges in our courts?). Where do we fit in? Where does my young son fit in when he grows up in this world?
There are other problems too. There is also the issue of corruption. Computer systems get hacked, there are bugs and viruses, so total reliance on these systems is very dangerous. But to have a human back up needs the investment in people, training, facilities etc. that AI has just made redundant.
Then there is the whole rotten cesspit of autonomous military systems. Drones that decide who to kill, tanks without crews, smart missiles. This is stuff that already exists and is getting more sophisticated all the time, and most of the cutting edge stuff is obviously developed in secret.
But also there is the interesting aspect of group intelligence, because the internet is connected with millions of machines, smart systems can be spread across many physical platforms, the Cloud as it has become known. So we have a multitude of smart systems that have potential access to all the online knowledge, plus bank accounts, medical records, criminal records, documentation showing who owns your house and your car, who the legal parents of your child are, your nationality, passport, your social media, your pictures etc. A malicious system could hack your entire life, set up a criminal record and get you locked up. The net also has access to the physical world thanks to the Internet of Things, such as nuclear power stations, flood defences, gas supply and even where that robot combine harvester goes. A hack to Google maps might send thousands of motorists into one city centre location to cause gridlock, or to confound the response to a terrorist attack.
There is absolutely no control over any of this.
Our society is based on a magic thing called freedom, trying to precisely define it is impossible and probably pointless, but we all have a vague idea it means we can choose our own path in life as long as we don’t do very bad things. We choose what to study, or if to study. We choose what to work in, or indeed not to work in. We choose our partners, where we live (although that’s often dictated by where to work), what to eat etc.
This means that government has a largely reactive way of managing problems, western governments don’t like to get too involved with running things. This means that companies have a large amount of freedom to develop what ever they want, which has generally been a good thing. But this is different, this is one of those things that is about the very future of our species.
We need a plan, we need to agree what direction society goes, how it uses technology to benefit us all. We need control over this situation before something ‘very bad’ happens.
Here is an interesting observation: most drivers don’t want to be there.
Unlike enthusiasts, such as myself, who really get a deep enjoyment and fulfilment from driving, in the mass market most car owners don’t actually like driving at all, it’s just become a necessity of modern life. That’s why so many of them don’t pay attention and would rather chat on the phone, listen to the radio or just stare into the distance like a slack-jawed zombie.
Cars are a very strange phenomenon in that respect, where else would you find a large, heavy and complex piece of machinery that is bought and operated by almost everyone regardless of whether they are interested in that machine or not? It wouldn’t happen with lathes, welding kit or submarines, but with cars we just accept it. In fact, the buying profile of cars is more like toasters or kettles, everyone thinks they need one but has no interest in how to work them properly.
And because of the non-professional nature of the vast majority of car owners, technology is being developed to meet their needs. That is; making the car make most of the decisions. We are entering the beginning of a time when cars become more autonomous, adaptive cruise control will adjust the car speed to the traffic conditions, lane assist can nudge the steering to stop you drifting off your chosen path, we even have auto parking systems.
It is a logical step to bring all these ideas together and link them to the sat-nav to create fully autonomous cars, Google is investing heavily in this idea. Once the systems become common there will be increasing pressure to ban manual driving, after all an autonomous car doesn’t get road rage, doesn’t speed, can see through fog, never gets distracted and should never crash.
All those computer systems running all those programs written by thousands of different people at different times in different places and controlling your car….
Autonomous cars have the potential to reduce journey times, slash road deaths and injuries, reduce insurance costs, reduce financial losses, and reduce emissions. Manufacturers also benefit from a reduction in warranty costs caused by customers abusing their cars. And intriguingly once a car becomes autonomous the interior design focus changes dramatically towards being an entertainment or business centre, windows become less important, seats facing forward is no longer mandatory, just imagine the possibilities.
Fully autonomous cars are now being trialled, you just get in, tell it where to go and it drives you there. To many this is automotive heaven, just like having a chauffeur, and takes the irritating burden of ‘having to do some driving’ out of a journey completely. Plus there are safety advantages which make a very compelling argument, the fact is that nearly all accidents are caused by the driver doing something really dumb, so by taking the driver out of the system lives would be saved. And that argument alone is powerful enough to kill the ‘drivers car’ stone dead, no arguments, it is simply infeasible to argue that autonomous cars should not be compulsory just because we want to have a little bit of fun.
But to enthusiasts this is automotive hell, no control, no involvement, no enjoyment, nothing.
And it also take a lot of skill and judgement away too, what if I want to drive on the left of my lane to get a good view past the truck I am about to overtake? Will the lane control system let me? What if I need to gently nudge my driveway gate open because its blown shut? Will the collision avoidance system let me?
And this brings me to a very important point; cars are so reliable these days that people are totally unable to cope with a simple problem; I would have thought that if the pedal stays down then either put your toe under it and pull it up or drop it in neutral, park up and switch off. Easy, but most people have lost the ability to cope with any sort of problem, and that is scary.
I say scary because we depend more and more on technology, cars, electricity supply, computers, the internet, mobile phones, the list goes on. And for the most part the technology serves us amazingly well, but like all things it can fail.
I remember in the 70’s there were power cuts, no problem; the lights went out so we lit candles, life goes on. We communicated by actually talking to people, we were entertained by actually doing things, we worked by going out and making physical things.
But now, oh dear, if the power fails we seem to be doomed to sitting in a freezing dark house unable to phone a friend or do any work on the computer. ‘Doomed I say, doomed, captain’ (although that phrase probably wont mean a thing to younger readers).
Now don’t get me wrong, I am a great fan of technology. As an engineer I work on car technology that won’t see the glowing lights of a showroom for maybe seven years, as a writer I would be lost without the word processor and its fantastic ability to correct my abysmal spelling. Oh yes indeedey I just cant get enough of the techy stuff.
What I am scared of is the way people are loosing the ability to do things for themselves. To even bother trying to solve problems seems to great a challenge, the mind is being numbed and switched off, its like intentionally loosing the ability to walk just because you can afford a wheel chair.
The first thought when a problem hits now seems to be ‘who should I call about this problem’, and not what it should be ‘what can I do to solve this problem’.
People have to be more proactive, just like we used to be, and much less reactive and just plain pathetic.
But what drives technological development is consumer demand, so if we want cars to be ‘drivers cars’, totally under our command, then we have to make our voice heard. Not only that but the voice must have a strong and sound argument, and it has to be heard right now.
Now modern cars are introducing collision avoidance, lane control and other complex systems which all have to work in harmony with all the other systems in all the infinite combinations of circumstance.
The complexity is so great that I believe it is now impossible to accurately asses how such a car will react in all conditions. Complexity hides secrets, usually unintentional.
This is true not only for cars, but in many of the systems we rely on today which are also hugely complex and have chunks of third party software in the control system, from automatic number plate recognition and speeding fines, military automatic targeting and smart weapons, to the DNA database and even the way we use the internet.
The potential for technology to assist is immense, but it has to be understood that we have now lost control of every detail. So how far do we let the machines dictate to us, and how much override can we allow to fallible humans? It is one of the most important debates we should be having today.
The answer to this will dictate the future of society and quite possibly our fate as a species.
You may be surprised to hear that there is not always perfect harmony between so called ‘designers’ and the engineers that actually make a car reality.
In fact even the word ‘designer’ is contentious, for what actually is a design? Is it a general sketch of the outside of the car or is it the detailed drawings that parts can be made from? Taken to extremes could I draw a picture of a blue box with a flashing light on top and say I have designed a time machine? Clearly not, but at the other extreme is the chap who draws out the blueprint for a gearbox support bracket a car designer? Again clearly not.
So what is design? It turns out to be a word that is used to mean subtly different things to different people, the dictionary really doesn’t help either with definitions varying from ‘a drawing that shows how something is to be made’ to ‘the general form or arrangement of something’.
And if you think about it the same vagueness exists for the word ‘engineer’ too, in my profession an engineer is someone with a degree in engineering who uses science to solve technical problems in order to create new technology. It’s a complex job with a good mix of practical and academic skills, in other countries such as Germany a professional engineer has the same social status as a doctor. But to British Gas an engineer is the bloke who fixes boilers. So when I create a new thingumyjig after deciding its form and function am I an engineer or a designer?
Maybe it’s ‘engineering design’….
If creating the drawings and working out the form and function is design then it could be argued that what the traditional car ‘designer’ does is actually styling and not design at all.
Either way the few people in the crayon department get lots of credit and go to posh shows to drink bubbly, whilst the many who toiled long hours wrestling near impossible problems in order to actually create a car simply get rewarded with more work. No champers for us just quiet anonymity, although to be fair that’s the way most of us like it.
The tension between the two departments stems from ‘designs’ that make the engineering either difficult or impossible.
In the late ’90s I had the privilege of working at Bentley on ‘Project Bali’ which was the successor to the Continental R/T and would eventually become the Continental GT. The designer there was a very talented chap by the name of Simon Loasby, back then he had to use traditional clay modelling on a rolling chassis made of girders. His studio had the full size clay in the middle and all round were inspirational pictures of older Bentleys and all sorts of stylish items associated with sophisticated high society, it was quite a wonderful place to be, even if rather chilly in the winter months due to the feeble gas heater left over from the war!
Anyway, he created a truly beautiful shape, not entirely different to the car we see today but somehow a touch more elegant. I went to look at it every few weeks as it evolved because I was working on bits of the engine design and crucially wanted to make sure the airflow through the radiator and charge coolers would be enough to let the engine meet the power targets. Critically this means that the apertures in the front have at least the bare minimum area to do the job, but also that the design allowed the hot air out of the engine bay. If the air couldn’t get out as fast as it got in then it backs up, the flow reduces and the engine overheats, so it’s quite important.
Initially the car had nice big air scoops at the front for the charge coolers and a very useful set of side gills to let the air out, I did some flow calculations and all was well.
Then the style changed, the front smoothed out, the holes got smaller and catastrophically the gills went! Undoubtedly the car looked smoother, but did it need to? And now we had to design for the air escaping underneath, which generates lift at high speed and never works quite as well. Simon knew what shape he had to design, and I knew how much air had to go through it, but the two didn’t go together and long conversations ensued.
But before we could go any further on that project the company was sold to a variety of German companies and the whole design was taken over by some other people with stronger accents.
My point here is that both Simon and myself had valid points that contradict each other. Engineers rarely admire ‘designers’, but often study with great enthusiasm the works of great engineers instead. As an aside at Crewe back in the day a Rolls Royce was commonly abbreviated to a ‘Royce’ rather than a ‘Rolls’ because Henry Royce was the engineer.
Designers sometimes complain that engineers keep saying no to everything, and engineers may complain that designers simply don’t understand the implications of their design. So who is right? Well as much as it pains me to say, probably a bit of both.
Engineers have to design a car that works in the real world, restricted by the laws of nature, legislation, finance and time. But designers have to create a shape the will engage the minds of customers, and most customers don’t give a fig for what’s under the shiny paint as long as it works. Occasionally in big companies the two groups are unwittingly assigned briefs that will inevitably result in conflict.
Sometimes in smaller teams these traditional roles are blurred, and it seems to work better that way, the McLaren F1 road car is a prime example.
Have a look at the original engineering prototype cars for the Range Rover back in the ’60s. They, Spen King & co, recognised all the key features a customer would want, packaged it all together in a way that worked very well indeed but looked very slightly unpleasant. Add a touch of styling and the car was transformed, but without ruining the engineering. That is, I think you will find, the way to do it.
The pipe the takes the exhaust gas away from the engine and lets them loose at the back of the car so the occupants don’t breath it in. Normally it has mufflers (silencers) to reduce the very high sound levels that the engine produces, without some sound reduction the cars occupants would end up deaf very quickly.
Usually the exhaust comes in several parts, the bit attached to the engine is the ‘Manifold’, this is connected to the ‘System’ which goes all the way under the car to the back. The system starts with the ‘Down pipe’ coming from the manifold down under the front bulkhead, then there may be a front section with catalysts, a mid section with a larger silencer and possibly a separate rear section with a smaller silencer and finishing with a ‘Tail pipe’ showing at the back, although there are many other arrangements too.
As well as transporting the waste gasses safely away and muffling the noise down to acceptable levels, the exhaust also effects the engine performance, its has to be big enough so the flow is not restricted. But also the gas speed needs to be preserved for high speed power, so making the exhaust to big can actually reduce power. As with all tuning its a fine balance to get the best performance, and there is no one perfect solution.
The bit that bolts to the engine is the Manifold, it has a tube for each one of the cylinders which join together. The exact way they join together and the length of the tubes makes a big difference to the tune of the engine, they can improve low end torque or sacrifice that for peak power. Its important to get the shape and size of the manifold ports to match up with the exhaust ports on the engine, any mismatch can restrict area or leave a step which causes turbulence and reduces flow.
There are two main types of muffler, one uses absorptive rock wool matting and the other type sends the exhaust gases through a sort of maze which breaks up the sound pulses. Generally the absorptive type removes high frequencies and the labyrinth type removes the basey boomy noises.
Most standard systems have a mixture of both, but for a more sporty sound they can be replaced with simpler ones that have less noise reduction and slightly more flow.
Twin pipes are still popular, factory fitted to most V engines which have two exhaust manifolds, they run an exhaust pipe on each side of the car floor pan and finish with two tail pipes.
On V6 and V12 engines these can be two totally separates systems, but on V8 engines they often have a balance pipe between the two systems close to the engine in order to run smoothly because of the way the firing order overlaps, giving an uneven sequence of exhaust pulses on each bank and that distinctive burble.
The least important part for performance is the tail pipe, usually finished of with a decorative trim.
Many systems run twin tail pipes running from the back muffler, although some systems try to get the twin pipe look by fitting a Y piece close to the back.
Catalysts (cats) convert partially burnt fuel and fumes into carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen. They do this by passing the exhaust gas over an immense area coated with an incredibly small layer of precious metals such as platinum which do the actual catalysing bit.
And it really does need a huge surface area to work, this is archived by folding the surface into a honey comb and by giving it a microscopically rough surface. In fact a typical catalyst can have the same surface area as a football pitch, all folded up into something the size of a 3 litre pop bottle, amazing.
It only works when its hot, at least 300C and preferably 600C, so it is usually put as close to the engine as possible so as not to loose any heat. In order for it to heat up quickly cats are usually made of ceramic which makes them fragile, so the catalyst brick is supported in the can by a soft fibre mat.
So if the cats hit a bump in the road there is a fair chance they will shatter. Also if the engine is tuned badly then un-burnt fuel will burn on the cat face and melt it.
When cats were first fitted back in the ’70s they were too small for the job and would restrict flow, modern cats are usually very good at flowing and can even cope with mild tuning, but for big power gains usually a bigger sports cat is needed. Racing cats use a metal brick instead of fragile ceramic, it takes longer to warm up but can take more abuse.
Exhaust systems can be either mild steel that has been coated in an aluminium based protective layer making it look dull silver, or made of stainless steel which lasts much longer and looks shinier. Stainless is a harder metal and so when it vibrates it makes a higher pitched noise, some people claim stainless exhausts sound ‘tinnier’ than mild steel ones.
The difference between quality brands and budget options is often in the grade of metal, cheap stainless will start to rot nearly as fast as quality mild steel. Also cheaper systems can end up with rusty welds, mild steel systems should have been coated after welding and stainless systems should be welded with stainless wire, not the cheaper mild wire. If the welds on a new system look rusty then it was a cheap one.
Sound affects our mood and generates strong feelings, so the exhaust sets the tone for the whole car. Get it right and the car sounds strong and purposeful, get it wrong and it sounds like a fart in a tin can.
