Lighter weight will only take you so far. Rolling resistance, frictional losses, and acceleration take up a small portion of the power required to move a car from place to place under some driving conditions. Aerodynamics and frontal area can be much larger factors, particularly at highway speeds. I'm afraid that styling will start to become more bland as the design of the cars start to converge on the "ideal" aerodynamic shape.

 

We're drifting off-topic.

To stay on topic: Sales in emerging markets seem to be taking off and promise lots of future sales.

The low value of the dollar is actually making it cheaper to produce goods in the USA. This should lead to more manufacturing jobs, particularly at tier 2 and 3 suppliers.

 

Aerodynamics has almost squat to do with vehicles that rarely exceed 45mph in city commuting. It is huge only on vehicles that sustain high speeds over long-distance driving on highways.

The biggest wastes in energy for every vehicle are the efficiency and heat loss of the I/C engine, and the heat generated in braking. Vehicles are simply heat-makers in todays basic form, and they are terrible at that too. Heat dissipating from your engine to the hood and insulators around it are huge. Exhausts are huge, cats are huge sinks for heat (on purpose), the transmission develops lots of heat, power steering, a/c too. Of course the brakes are a huge source of heat. And all of this heat is CREATED by burning a fuel... oh yeah... and we also do a little bit of mechanical work when we move the vehicle through a distance (W=F*d) which is actually the desired end-result in the first place. Even the frictional losses and rolling resistance you mentioned above can be categorized in heat loss - as friction makes heat in shafts and bearings and such, and so does rolling resistance in tires.
Not unusual to see vehicles at 20-35% total efficiency these days.

If we could recapture all the energy that I/C-powered vehicles waste in heat, we'd get mileage that dreams are made of. If we also captured the energy dissipated as heat in braking, we'd cream our shorts.

Some are working on regenerative braking systems and they are getting better. One problem there is that the weight of the system and energy storage device(s) counteract the gains of the system itself - making the return on the investment moot, but technology is catching up.

There are many cars on the road in 2008 with Cd's in the .25-.30 range, and the costs to get much lower are becoming too high to persue. Besides, wind resistance is proportional to the velocity, so if you never go "fast", you also never see the benefits of the aero package.

I simply don't think aero is nearly as big of an issue for commuter cars, o rpickups as weight is these days. Likewise, I would definitely not underestimate the benefits of weight-savings, or pass over weight savings to try to improve aerodynamics instead.

 

You are right. I clarified my earlier post (I spend too much time working on trucks where aero is a much bigger factor). But, the fact remains that improved aerodynamics can lead to more "bland" cars.

 

If you're in a European city or damn near anywhere in Japan, aero really doesn't matter. Here in the US, however, we tend to drive further and faster than the rest of the world. Improved aerodynamics will likely be in our future.

Per what Proud is saying about heat loss, it's amazing how terrible the IC engine is with respect to thermal efficiency. The heavy-truck guys are starting to look at exhaust heat recovery systems (Detroit Diesel/Daimler has such a system in production on the DD15, and we'll see stuff from Cummins soon, I suspect). I haven't seen anything on cooling system heat recovery yet, but it's probably only a matter of time (the lack of temperature differential makes recovery difficult, despite that the amount of waste energy in the cooling system is about equal to that in the exhaust). Those of you with an understanding of refrigeration principles can imagine the sort of technology that might be beneficial here.

If you can obtain a fuel savings of 10% on a truck, it adds up quickly for a truck that does 120,000 miles/year at 6 MPG and $4.00/gallon! The economics aren't yet quite as compelling for passenger vehicles.

 

Intresting.

I just got my modem replaced today. My internet has been down for over 2 weeks. Instead of rushing to get it fixed, I used my former internet time to do other things and did my necessary internet stuff down the street at the Cafe.

Finally called Comcast last week and they walked me through it. Got it working for exactly 15 minutes. Called them up again today and after not being able to troubleshoot it, sent a tech out here. He spent over 2 hours trying to fix the thing.

Nothing depressing on the automotive front. I think things seem depressing around here because the Camaro is about to come out and there is nothing worth chatting about here as proven by the steady downgrade in the worthwhile threadstarters here the past couple of months. I mean how many times can one debate "Z28 vs SS" and sooner or later people realize that yet another thread about weight when the subject is IRS, RWD, and high powered V8 engines has deja vu written all over it many times over.

Then you have the same questions asked over and over with each new member.

Truth is we've just gone through a major turn around in the area of performance car development. Not only have the past 6 years seen the development of new Mustangs, Challengers, and Camaros, we've also seen the development of new lines of RWD cars. We've seen horsepower the past 6-8 years go into the stratosphere.

Think about it for a second, Brandon. Back when we first started coming here a 400 horsepower Corvette (or a 400 horse anything) was an absolute mind blower. In a few months, the spirital successor to the FWD 2002 240 horse Bonneville SSE (the RWD G8) will have a 415 horse V8! Today, we have a 600 horsepower Viper and the new ZR1 Vette has over 630.

When we 1st started coming here, the 4th gen Camaro was nearly a decade old and it's chassis development started when "The Village People" were still big. The Mustang has newer skin, but the people working on the car had the option of taking a break and going to see "Saturday Night Fever". The excitement of having connections and being in tune with what was going on behind the scenes when these 2 cars alone were being gestated was an exciting period that perhaps has never happened before, and will never be repeated again.

In some ways, we are in 1968 as far as automobiles go. But the age we're living in is so much better than 1968 it isn't even comparable.

In '68, base cars got to 60 mph in 16-18 seconds. Quick ones did it in 7-8 seconds. Anything that did it under 6 seconds was both rare and exotic. Today, even a Toyota Maxima will break the 6 second barrier.

Name any car today that was around in the late 60s that has a decendent today. Across the board, the new version will absolutely smoke the '68 version. Not just Mustangs and Challengers either. Impala SS (which are even faster than stock Chevelle SSs were), Cadillac sedans, even all Cobalts (vs Novas) and even Crown Victorias (vs LTDs) outdo cars of that age. Charger R/Ts are quicker than all but perhaps the extremely rare Hemi Roadrunners, while the SRT Charger will even beat even that.

A G8 GT will take on just about any 60s car outside of the Corvette. The CTSv will annilate pretty much anything that came off the assembly line up to the last year or 2.

All these vehicles today get far better fuel economy than the base model economy versions did back then, while not even putting out enough pollution to kill you if you ran it in the garage with the garage door closed (the Hemlock Society doesn't even reccomend using this method for suicide anymore).

There's nowhere else to go now.


In '69 people began turning away from high performance in favor of luxury as the babyboomers began to mature. GTO and Chevelle SS buyers turned to Grand Prixs and Monte Carlos. Then in 1970, the insurence industry attached massive surcharges to "performance" cars, which deflated what was left of muscle cars. Banning lead in the early 70s ended high compression engines. By the time new safety standards kicked in (1973) the muscle car was already dead. This was way before OPEC embargoed oil to the US (late 1973-74), emission standards kicked in (1974), and fuel economy standards kicked in (1978).

This time around, not only are there far less things piling up against performance cars, there is far more available technology available. Cars also have packed on not only alot of size and weight over the years, but also heaps of excess horsepower and a population that demands a certain level of performance in addition to acceptable fuel economy. None of this existed in the late 60s thru the 1970s. All of this promises that we aren't going to end up the way we ended up in the 70s.

No, we probally won't see cars reach 900 horsepower. We probally won't see 500 horsepower Impalas this round. Outside of Cadillac, we're not likely to see sedans with sub 4 second acceleration. But the real cars out there for real people aren't likely to see much drops in performance and we're still going to be in great shape. The new V6 Camaro will still smoke a 3rd gen IROC and give a LT1 a good run. The V6 Impala will still match a '69 Impala SS. A Solstice GXP will still beat a Corvette of just over a decade ago in a drag race. We'll still have Cobalts (or Cruzes) that will by no means be slow.

The future (let alone the present) is hardly depressing as far as the prognosis of automobiles and performance go.