Cadillac ATS - the car you should at least consider

Interesting set of circumstances led to me having a Cadillac ATS 2.0T AWD model as a rental car for a day on a business trip. First of all this is a car I've been interested in driving since it has gotten positive press coming out as a BMW 3-Series competitor, and second I've been interested to experience the "new" Cadillac as a brand. I was more than a little surprised to see this car show up as a rental of all things. That was just the start of the surprises. In summary for those that don't want to read further, the car is very comfortable, incredibly engaging to drive, and is really sharp and attractive inside and out. Just an all around great car and truly reminded me of the "old" BMW driving experience.

 Exterior - it is what it is and what it looks like in pictures. It's the new Cadillac styling and I find it pretty attractive. The rear exhaust treatment and apron I think look fantastic. The car is sporty and shapely without being obnoxious. Not a lot to say about that!

 Suspension- really one of the true highlights of the car. Body roll is nearly non-existant, yet the ride is compliant. It's "sporty" in that you will feel the bumps, but they are damped in such a way they make no real noise in the car, the chassis stays balanced, and they aren't intrusive. The pavement is flat out bad around Madison right now, and I drove over some terrible rodes and was amazed at how well it soaked it all up. Truly impressive to get such a responsive handling and turn in feel without getting a jarring ride. Perfect for driving every day and still being confident in hitting the twisties when the mood strikes.

 Brakes and electronic nannies - the brakes are fantastic, no nose dive, great feel, great linearity. I grouped electronic nannies in here because I have to say the ABS system and traction control were fantastic on some bad ice. Like all traction control it steps in too early and a bit too aggressively, but to my surprise worked genuinely well. And you can shut it off.... that's perfect!

 Transmission/drivetrain - One of the biggest surprises was with this being an AWD model that it wasn't numb. It is clearly rear biased and the rear would start to ease out first, but the traction was there and the steering still engaging. When I've been in AWD BMW's they lose a LOT over the RWD versions. This AWD Caddie was fantastic and so much more communicative than the BMW baseline I'm familiar with. If for some reason the RWD is even more engaging... wow. The automatic transmission (it's a rental what do you expect) was the usual... you don't have the control so the downshifts and the upshifts are never quite what you want. That said the manual mode was actually very good, shifts were quick in response to your request and it let you hold RPM's where you wanted. Again, nicely done.

 Engine - a turbocharged Cadillac. And a good one. No real noticeable turbo lag, a great overall engine tone and exhaust note, strong linear power that is beautifully smooth. Just absolutely impressive. I was in awe of the engine almost as much as the steering and suspension. It's THAT good. At 272 horsepower it's not going to light the world on fire in a 3500 lb car, but it was plenty adequate and truly fun to drive. At highway speed it passed and merged and hustled when you wanted to and how you wanted to.

 Steering - this is one of those things that BMW had the market cornered on before. If you wanted sharp intuitive steering you got a BMW... move over.. get a Cadillac. Best steering I've ever seen in a car. Just perfectly weighted and does what you want before you even think about it. It really gives you confidence to steer through corners and it really feels like the car does everything you want it to.

 Handling - Steering and suspension really cover it, but it's just worth emphasizing again that the car handles beautifully. You just want to carry speed in to corners and feed the throttle in right out of the. Absolutely engaging and fluid and confidence inspiring. Beautiful handling. You have to experience it yourself to really get it, but wow does it drive great!

 Quality - The overall impression of materials and looks is extremely high end. That said there was some quibbles. The steering wheel had a weird plastic click and squeak as you turned it. There as a vent for the side windows that didn't sit truly flush with the dash. The whole center stack is a big glossy plastic piece that while it looks high end is just a lot of gloss and finger print magnetism. There were also some switch buttons that had uneven gaps around them. Overall the look and feel was fantastic, but there were definitely some "I'm American made" type quality gaffs that were a bit jarring considering how great the rest of the car was. There were really nice touches like the leather-esque stitched dash panels. The aluminum brushed trim has polished accent images on portions of it. The dash system has haptic touch and the CUE entertainment center worked great with my phone and overall seemed easy to use.

 When it comes down to it, for about 35K this is a heck of a lot of car that performs fantastic. I haven't been that impressed by a car in a long time. Truly, it is a car you NEED to consider if you are looking at any kind of sport sedan or luxury sport vehicle. Worth the look... or just see if you can rent one for a day from Enterprise ;)

Sanka, you dead?

No mahn! I am still around, and still planning to write more... so keep checking back!!

Hail no!

Automotive Tip of the Month: Been working on some idea that I don't have ready yet, but here is a quick tip! For those of you that park your car outside, one of the great summer hazards is hail. We seem to get at least a couple of hail storms every year. Considering most of us have rather expensive deductibles if we carry comprehensive insurance at all, there is a quick and easy way to protect your car. For about 20-60 dollars you can get a simple car cover at a place like Autozone or Wal-Mart. Then, simply cover the roof, hood, and trunk of your car with quilts or moving blankets (cheap at harbor freight!) and then put the car cover on when a storm is predicted. The cover helps prevent the blankets from moving in the wind. I find that moving blankets are pretty effective and are easier to throw in the dryer afterwards so you can store them again than the quilts. Easy way to prevent expensive and annoying damage!

Shortening the lifetime...

Automotive Tip of the Month: Since clearly I can't keep up with every week ;). Lifetime fluids - anything but. A lot of the newer cars come with what the manufacturers call lifetime fluids. The joke among car nuts is that they are lifetime fluids because when the parts associated break, then you change the fluids thus it lasted the lifetime. For example, BMW claims their transmission and rear-end oils are lifetime. If you really let them go much over the 60-100k part failures increase in those areas. Lifetime fluids are better thought of as extended service. So instead of every 30-50k changing them, you should change them every 60-100k. More if you can afford to do so. In other words, in this case, just because the factory says it is okay doesn't mean it really is. This is showing up on oil changes as well. Many manufacturers (BMW among them!) are starting to go to very long service intervals on the oil (some up to 30k!!). While it is justifiable under certain circumstances, and the car can sometimes handle it, why would you really take the risk on something that typically costs you less than 100-200 a year to do regularly? One engine component failure and you'll have more than paid for anything you saved. And I don't mean big things like bearings, pistons, rods, etc. Often sensors (like a cam sensor) will fail because of the buildup of gunk on the sensor, if the oil was changed more regularly it wouldn't happen. I've seen it happen on PCV valves as well. The manufacturers started doing this because for lease and new car owners and those with service included during the first few years it increases customer satisfaction and lowers dealership overhead for those cars. So it is a win for the dealer and in some ways the first owner. Everybody down the line after loses though! When it comes to vehicles, being proactive and doing more than the recommended maintenance often pays off in the end.

Sparks Fly...

Automotive Tip of the Week: When it comes to sparkplugs it is more or less all marketing. The biggest difference between spark plugs really is longevity. You are NOT going to get more horsepower by running a platinum or iridium plug over a copper plug. What you will get is more life. Platinum and Iridium plugs are typically rated for 60-100K miles versus copper usually is rated for around 30-50K. The rating really revolves around the fact that the spark actually eats away a little bit of metal every time the spark makes the gap jump. As this happens the gap between the electrode and the ground point (the arch) gradually opens up and becomes too large. This eventually can result in performance problems as the coil may not be able to get a spark to make the gap jump and then you get misfires and poor engine performance. So the decision you need to make is price/cost. If you change plugs yourself and it is easy to do on your car (like on most 4 cylinder cars) you can save a fair amount of money changing plugs yourself with copper plugs running under 2 dollars many times. Iridium plugs can be north of 20 dollars a plug. So If you assume 50k versus 100K intervals you see the Iridium or Platinum plugs don’t save you much. However, if you have a mechanic change the plug as soon as they charge you the 80 dollars in shop labor, there is no difference in cost over the interval and this is why many cars come from the factory with platinum or iridium as it cuts down warranty service costs for the dealer (and provides any easy upsell item if they want to tell you they think plugs need changing!). There are a lot of other items with plugs to talk about including multi-point plugs, heat ranges, “reading” a plug etc. But I’ll leave that for another time and touch on just one other point. Iridium and Platinum plugs are also referred to as fine-wire plugs because of how small the tips of them are. There are some major downsides to this technology. First, it fouls out MUCH easier. So if you are running a customized car (with added turbo or modified injectors etc), you have a car that burns a lot of oil or coolant, has other issues, or is simply older and doesn’t use precise fuel injection you will potentially have a LOT of problems with a fine-wire plug. Copper standard plugs will be much more resistant to those issues. Therefore, stay away from fine-wire on any car that isn’t running perfectly as you’ll likely compound the issues with poor running. The second major drawback is the fine tips are more susceptible to pre-ignition if the heat range of the plug is not correct or again you have a defect in the motor causing it to run poorly or is being overheated. I personally never run fine-wire plugs in any of my cars for those reasons (cost and reliability) as well as others regardless of how high performance the car is or isn’t. Happy Motoring!

Don't come a knockin'....

Automotive tip of the week: When it comes to gasoline, use what your car recommends, no more, and no less. I mentioned back a few weeks that additives are generally useless. If you are getting gasoline from Citgo, Shell, BP, Mobil, etc they typically already have a ton of additives and detergents. In some rare cases they only put this in their premium fuels, but it is generally done across the board. So why not use premium, etc? The octane rating - 87, 89, 91, 93, etc only means one thing, the resistance to pre-iginition/detonation/knocking the fuel has. The fuel has no actual extra power or energy per gallon than fuel with a different octane rating, so there is no benefit to the vehicle for MPG or horsepower. The reason part of the myth of more horsepower from higher octane fuel evolved is because high horsepower cars required it. This is a factor of the engine design, not the fuel. A high output vehicle will often use forced induction (turbo or supercharger) or uses high compression pistons etc. These things allow more power to be extracted from an engine, but requires a fuel with high resistance to knocking to be safe. When a low octane fuel is used in those applications the fuel can burn incorrectly and cause severe damage to the engine. The pressure waves from a bad burn (engines burn fuel, they don't explode fuel like people often think, in the rare cases that it does explode it can be a form of very severe detonation and will typically destroy the engine) are what make the "pinging" or "knocking" noise people know detonation to be. So the root of the myth of high octane for more power is the fact that high powered cars employed engines that needed the octane to function, not that there was more power in the fuel. So what happens if you use too low of an octane fuel in a car? In newer cars, not much, but it isn't typically considered safe/good to do. The computers in modern cars know how to adjust the engine programming to use the lower octane fuel safely. You will likely lose some MPG efficiency as well as some horsepower but the odds of damage are somewhat controlled. However, some cars are not well suited to this, and the older you get the more and more dangerous this becomes. If you have a particularly high strung vehicle from a couple decades ago you can easily destroy the engine on a hot day with one bad tank of gas. So as always, follow your owners manual!

Thin is in...

Automotive Tip of the Week: Here is a short version of one topic there. The numbers on the oil like 5W30 represent at "room temperature" how thick of an oil it flows like (5) and at operating temp how thick of an oil it flows like at that temp (30). So at low temps it flows like a nice thin 5 oil, and at operating temp it flows like a 30 weight oil. What is a bit counterintuitive, but has to do with how oil behaves at different temperatures, is that even though it is flowing like a heavier 30 oil, at those temps it is actually thinner than if it was a 5 oil at ambient temps. In the end none of this means much to you for your car and matters more for the engineers as long as you follow it. So why do I bring this up? Winter and synthetic oil. Synthetic oil has a bunch of neat properties but we'll talk about just one. Traditional 5W30 oil is usually made from 5 weight oil and then has additives put in it to make it "thicken" (as I just said that is actually not necessarily true) as it heats up so it behaves like a 30 weight oil at temp. Synthetic on the other hand usually goes the other way. It is made from a 30weight stock and then the additives and properties of it allow for it to flow in ways a conventional oil can not at lower temps. What this means is that the bottom number on your oil cap can be considered meaningless when you use synthetic oil. So a car that requests 10W30 (like my BMW) you can put in 0W30 and get the same/better protection as running the recommended oil. So why does this matter? Cold Start. When the engine is cold the oil doesn't flow very well and the most wear occurs. It is also when your starter has to work the hardest to fight the tension the oil creates. By using an oil like 0W30 in your car you get faster turn over, less stress on your starter and battery, and oil flow (not pressure! pressure is meaningless at low temps) is better. So your car will start and run better in cold weather, and you'll get better gas mileage if you drive short distances. Don't believe me? Or are unsure about this whole ignoring the oil cap and manual thing if you are using synthetic? Look at the bottles. Bottles like Mobil1 will say right on it "certified for use in 5W30" on a bottle that is 0W30 and they often market/label it as "green formula" or "better mileage formula" when it is just normal old 0W30. you can learn a lot more on this at www.bobistheoilguy.com if you want...

Safety First!

Automotive Tip of the Week: Winter Kit. With Kirstin and I each having had to use at least one thing out of these kits during a winter I certainly recommend making one. A lot of times it isn't even necessarily for you, but for another driver that may have issues etc. There are lots of levels you can go to, but here is a bare minimum set of items I would try to have. Put all this in a box, spare backpack, or some other simple means of storing it so that if you need extra trunk space you can throw it in the passenger cabin easily. Things you should have: Collapsible shovel, ice scraper, lock/seam de-icer, jumper cables, hand and toe warmers, extra gloves, hat, and scarf, and a tow strap. Most are self explanatory, but I'll hit on 3 of them quickly. The collapsible shovel is great for digging out if you get stuck, helping someone else dig out, or even clearing off that 18" snow pile that gets on the car. Well worth having. The lock/seam de-icer is simple, the fluid in it is intended for freeing a frozen lock or door handle, but it also works good to use as a "torch" to free up your door. Ever had it get covered in ice and freeze to the point you can't get it open? The de-icer will let you free up the seals along the door seam and get in the car. Lastly the tow strap is self explanatory too, but a lot of people don't have one so there is no easy way for a good Samaritan to tug your car out rather than having to wait for a tow truck. They are really cheap at places like Harbor Freight, and they come in handy for emergency tie-down situations too.

Getting out of a slippery situation...

Automotive Tip of the Week: Stuck on ice or packed snow? Take your floor mats out and put them CARPET side down behind each drive wheel (if backing up, in front obviously if going forward). Try to tuck the leading edge of the mat under the wheel as much as possible. Then try to slowly proceed and you'll have enough traction to get going. This can work in deeper snow as well. It doesn't work pa...rticularly well though with all season/rubber floor mats. You may have to try with the "spikes" down or other orientations if the carpet side isn't working or you don't have carpeted mats. If you don't have mats, or don't want to use them for this, you can keep some carpet remnants on the floor of your trunk and use them in case of emergency as well since they won't take up much space and you can have a longer "run" to use. It's a great way to get out of an icey parking spot or the like and if you have a helper and you are very careful (don't try to swap while moving!!) you can swap the mats repeatedly to move as far as you need.

Not as pretty as Christmas lights...

Automotive Tip of the Week: Warning Lights - There are really only two that are an absolute, immediate, no questions asked, PULL OVER as quick as is safe and shut the engine off: A FLASHING check engine light, and even more importantly the Oil Pressure Light. Close behind those two is any time that temperature needle gets anywhere near the red. Those 3 all indicate imminent or already occuring engine damage. There is no case where any of those 3 is safe for the engine for another 100 feet of driving (but YOUR safety has to be priority even over those lights). A steady check engine light or service engine soon light are minor and almost always safe to continue on as are the "maintenance" and "tire pressure" lights. Obviously you should consult your user manual though and use your head - if something smells, sounds, or feels funny STOP DRIVING!. Too many people create massive repair bills because they try to keep going when stopping and spending the 200 for a two would have been cheaper. The steady check engine light though is not usually grounds for a tow, but doesn't mean you should let it go for a week. Places like Autozone have free scans (dealers like to charge about 40-80 to scan a car) and can tell you what the light is. For the tire pressure light, visually check the 4 tires. If none of them are visualy low/flat then it means one or more tires is low on pressure (typically below 30 psi) or one or more tires is 4 psi or more different than the others.

Take black ice out of the picture.

Automotive Tip fo the Week: Last one on tires for a while I think/hope. Snow tires are a bit of a misnomer. Ice/cold tires or simply "winter" tires is really a better description. While they improve snow traction the biggest gains are in cold and ice traction. Continental released data on their tires a couple years ago saying "anytime below 45°F use a snow tire" showing the increase in braking performance and cornering forces. The difference can be greater than 20% just for regular (no ice/snow) braking! On top of that the wet and ice traction are hugely better. Personal anecdote that illustrates this: two winters ago we got freezing rain and I live near a hill I drive every day. I pulled out on to the hill and had to stop. A 4WD Jeep Cherokee with all season tires was struggling and slid over sideways in to the curb. I let go of the brakes accelerated slowly and passed them. On the hill. I drive a RWD car with snow tires and no limited slip differential. This happens at stop lights and the like throughout the winter. I stop and start without issue, other people often struggle or slide about. It's not about having the tires for snow, it's about having them for traction on all the days there is black ice, packed snow, and leftovers from the plow which seems like more days than not! Also, while the initial investment is not small, one minor fender bender and your insurance deductible will have paid for the tires. Additionally, getting 4-5 years out of a set of snow tires is not abnormal since people drive a little less in winter and you only run them for about 5-6 months. Your summer tires last longer then too. I know I'm thankful for the tires at least a half dozen times every winter. If you are curious about tests comparing snow tires to regular tires tirerack.com has a few and it shows how big the difference really can be. Remember, it's not so much about driving in snow, but driving in the cold and on ice you may not see.

Windshields and the blades and fluid that love them.

Winter is a great time to replace your wiper blades. Save your money though on the specialty teflon and "winter" blades. A good set of high quality standard blades will give you everything you need. You are better off spending the extra money on good windshield wiper fluid. The cheap 2 dollar a gallon blue stuff outside the gas station is not a wise buy. In Wisconsin you should buy top quality -20F or better fluid. This fluid has less water content and additional additives that will help brake up ice and lubricate your windshield during the worst conditions. Cheap fluid will evaporate off the alcohol (which is how they make it not freeze) and leave behind water that then freezes on the windshield and makes you use more in very cold weather. If you want to spend money on expensive wiper blades get the newer style arc blades that have no metal carrier. Bosch, Anco, and GoodYear all have those. They also are scooped to provide additional pressure at highway speeds which can be beneficial.

Fuel Injection Cleaner: Needless upsell

Automotive Tip of the Week: Fuel Injection cleaner is generally a complete rip off. Most modern gasoline's already carry cleaning additives and detergents in them that are quite effective at maintaining (and even improving/cleaning) the fuel injection system. For all the bad things that go along with it, ethanol does also provide some reasonable cleaning effects. Fuel Injection cleaner is really only useful for very poorly maintained vehicles, or ones that have sat for a long time and need an extra kick in the pants to get rid of varnishing from aging. Any daily driven vehicle from the 90's forward will essentially never need the additive. Save your money!

Low Rolling Resistance Tires

Automotive Tip of the Week: Avoid "low rolling resistance" tires. These tires are marketed for their ability to add mpg to your car. They typically only yield about 1 mpg. Keeping your tires properly filled (not over!) is nearly as efficient. The big reason to avoid the low rolling resistance tires is actually Safety. One thing glazed over in my discussions of them is that braking distances increase dramatically because they have so much lower traction and adhesion to the road. It's not uncommon to see 20 feet added to stopping distances at 60 mph. Imagine going from 120 ft to 140 ft. That's nearly a 20% increase! Could be the difference between rear-ending someone or hitting a deer and not. They are also more skid prone again because of the lesser adhesion to the road because of the rubber compounds used to improve rolling resistnace. Some of the newer tires are "better" at this, but are still generally bad in comparison to a good all season tire. Keep in mind that these issues also occur with many "high mileage" tires. Anything over about 40-50k rated life is also typically giving up critical performance in these areas.

Nitrogen - just more expensive air.

Automotive tip of the week: Nitrogen for your tires is a complete waste of money. Yes it technically is more temperature stable, and yes it technically could have a lower loss rate through the pores of the tires, but the atmosphere around you is already 78% nitrogen. You don't drive a race car that needs consistent pressure variation during heat cycles of the tires. Save your money.

Tires

Automotive tip of the week: Don't ever buy the same tire your car came from the dealer with. OEM tires are significantly more expensive, and significantly poorer performing tires than many other tire store options. Manufacturers select the tires they do based on supplier relationships, automotive reviewer tendencies, and efficiency gains for the EPA MPG cycle. Tires that will have significantly better overall traction, handling, and performance will cost much less. Example: 2006 Subaru Imprezza - factory tires are about 220/tire. Much better performing options with same tread life - 70-90.

The Tire Contact Patch

Tires are a very interesting element as they have such a significant impact on the handling of your car. Humorously though, they are pretty misunderstood. How a tire keeps the car gripping the road is an extremely in depth and technical issue, so lets preface this discussion by saying we are going to only go in to the broader generalizations and some of the more easy to understand points. It gets very complex when you start trying to approximate contact patch deformation, sidewall spring constant, pressure distribution etc. There are a lot of great books out there, so definitely find them and read them, but the hope here is to get you thinking about a few simple items to begin with.

So far starters… wider is better right? There isn’t a straight answer to that. So lets discuss what happens with the tire first of all. Think of a balloon for starters. If you could put it on a piece of glass and look at the area that is “flat” where the balloon contacts the glass you’ll notice one thing quickly and simply – the more pressure you apply the bigger that area gets. This is a pretty simple concept. When you have a weight applied to an inflated item it has to respond with a force equivalent to the weight to be able to support it. This applies to your tires on your cars as well. As I mentioned before, though, this gets pretty complicated when you really consider how much support the sidewall gives etc, but for now lets ignore that. Most tires for people on high performance cars will run in the 35-45 psi range. So lets choose 40 psi as your inflation pressure. Let’s also use my BMW 318i as an example. It weighs about 2800lbs and is very close to 50/50 weight distribution. So we’ll assume the car is properly corner weighted (corner-weighting is when you adjust spring height and rate etc to distribute the car’s weight evenly across the diagonals and each side/edge of the car) so that the weight is evenly split between each of the 4 tires. This means that each tire is getting 700 lbs of weight on it. At 40 lbs per square inch (psi) that means we need 17.5 square inches of area to support that for my car. Sounds big right? Not really. My car during the summer runs a tire I can only get in a 195 width. So that means it is roughly 7.7 inches across at the point where it touches the pavement. If I’m 7.7 inches across, to get to 17.5 inches means I only have a rectangle that measures 2.3x7.7 inches. Not a lot of area to keep that car on the road is it! So now lets go to a wider tire and see what happens. If I keep the tire pressure the same but go to a 235 width tire my contact patch now measures 9.25x1.9 inches. It is still 17.5 square inches at the road, it’s just wider now. Yep, that’s right, you just went WAY up in tire size and you still have 17.5 square inches in contact with the road! What you have done is changed the shape of your contact patch. Now, this is somewhat misleading because with many of the larger tire sizes you can run a little less tire pressure which will increase your contact patch for real. However, as you reduce pressure you lose some of the structure effects in the tire and you may actually end up with strangely shaped or poorer contact during cornering as you roll on to your sidewalls or have other issues. This is where you need to work on properly balancing the pressure for your tire.

It is also very important to keep in mind tire compound. Often you can achieve much more grip with a smaller contact patch area due to the adhesion factors of certain tire compounds. Tires generate their “grip” in a few ways. One way is simple generic friction between the surfaces and the way they bond to one another. This is greatly affected by compound. A second way is mechanical grip that is generated by interference between the objects, for example, if the rubber complies to the shape of a gravely pavement, you will have some significant vertical walls the rubber is being pushed against and torn away from the tire by. This generates grip as well. The third major grip component is adhesion. Some tire compounds actually are truly “sticky” and will adhere to the surface they roll over. This allows coefficients of friction greater than 1 to be achieved! What this means is that for every 1 lb of force applied down on the tire, it can generate more than 1 lb of force perpendicular to that. This is HUGELY dependent on compound and is a significant factor in the advantage that race slicks will have over street tires (although that changes more and more every year with some of the crazier street tires).

You also need to consider what happens to the contact patch during maneuvers. A tire actually provides the MOST grip at a point when it is “sliding” a little relative to the angle of travel. This is referred to as slip angle and varied greatly depending on tire design. It is often in the range of 3 to 10 degrees though. This matters because as you make your tire contact patch wider you change the amount of difference between the arc radius the inner portion of the tire travels versus the outer portion. This can lead to those portions of the tires actually traveling at different slip angles from one another and it can lead to conditions such that one portion of the tire may be at optimal slip, while another is not. This is one relatively extreme case where wider would indeed NOT be better. Also, as tires get wider things like turn in response and their behaviors under braking or acceleration and the changes in the tread deformation introduces a lot of other variables and possibilities. Again, the topic is very complex so it is hard to argue it fully in a short essay. I’ll try to revisit the topic in the future and get into some of the more specific details for the above, but hopefully this got you thinking and drop at least a few new ideas out there for you.

Happy motoring!

Ideas?

I have a few more topics I want to cover, but if you have any suggestions or burning questions you'd like to see my take on, please do comment and let me know! It's no good if I'm not getting at the issues and areas that you are interested in.

Thanks!

Steve

Air Fuel Ratio - Basics

Now that the holidays are past and our year end accounting is nearly done I have a little time to get another post out for you.

We covered timing before, but as I said previously AFR (Air Fuel Ratio) matters a lot as to how the vehicle will perform. First a simple background on AFR. When it comes to standard gasoline stoichemetric (meaning chemically balanced for both sides of the equation for a chemical reaction, in this case combustion) is 14.7 parts of air to 1 part of fuel or 14.7:1. ANYTHING higher than this (say 15.2:1) is considered a lean mixture, and anything lower is considered a rich mixture. A lot of times people will say when a turbo car is running 13:1 in boost that is running to lean, but what they really mean is that the car is not running as rich as they think it should, because even at 13:1 the air fuel mixture is definitely a rich mixture.

So that all said, what do various AFR mixtures get you. Well obviously the leaner you go the less fuel is being used, but that does NOT mean the vehicle will use less fuel. In fact, as you go leaner than about 15.5 you typically lose enough in power output from the leaner mixture that the additional throttle input and resultant use of fuel to maintain that mixture uses more fuel than if you had simply run a mixture closer to 14.7. So in other words, don’t think that if you managed to safely tune your car to 16.8:1 that you are getting better gas mileage as this is often not the case! Additionally, when you go to mixtures leaner than 14.7 two major things happen: combustion occurs at a higher temp thus heating your cylinders and valves more significantly, and second some of the “bad” pollutant gases increase significantly leading to a more polluting or problematic emissions footprint from the car. This is why most manufacturers design cars to run at 14.7 AFR. In fact in the vast majority of vehicles out there, the only oxygen sensors in the vehicle are all what is referred to as a narrowband sensor which can ONLY tell you if you are rich or lean relative to 14.7 and provides essentially no useful information otherwise. Sorry folks on a budget, but you can not ever tune a vehicle accurately to some other AFR value with a narrowband sensor, you need to drop the money and get a wideband! At 14.7 AFR emissions are typically the most balanced and allows catalytic converters to do their job.

The fact that manufacturers tune most street vehicles to 14.7 AFR is exactly why chipping a vehicle can sometimes get you more horsepower with fuel only changes. 14.7 is the magic number for naturally aspirated vehicles trying to make emissions. However, that number changes whenever you are in boost for a forced induction vehicle, or if you are trying to make power on a naturally aspirated vehicle. The values are hotly contested, and as I alluded to in my last post on timing these values change quite a bit when you work to balance out your timing values with your AFR. But to speak in general rules as guidelines is relatively simple. Gasoline mixtures in MOST modern combustion chamber designs will provide peak power output at AFR’s between 12.3 and 12.8. The value is often narrowed down to be 12.5-12.6 but as I said these values are hotly contested. I personally consider 12.3 to 12.5 to be optimal for turbocharged vehicles and 12.6 to 12.9 to be optimal for naturally aspirated vehicles. So when I’m tuning an NA car I tune wide open throttle AFR’s to 12.8 to 13.0 and then maximize the timing. NA cars are much less sensitive for timing and air fuel balance so this typically works well and is quick and easy. Turbo cars it is much more complicated. Turbo cars I usually tune to about 11.8 and work out the timing. If I can advance the timing fully without detonation issues then I work to see if more can be gotten from leaning out the AFR. This rarely is the case so I settle in near that AFR range almost always.

There are lots of other purposes and uses for AFR though that can yield interesting improvements. Running very rich mixtures can sometimes help with turbo lag and help cool off the valves. The type of injector being used and it’s placement and the atomization of the fuel can also change what AFR is effective in a given vehicle. Sometimes, you need to use rich mixtures to help warm up a car or stabilize an idle, and sometimes a lean mixture will help with rough running on a vehicle. There are a host of options, but we’ll leave that for another post.

Thanks for reading and happy motoring!

Steve

Spark Timing - Basics

Timing is often one of the scariest things there is to adjust on a car in large part because you end up adjusting it blind, especially street or track tuning. What is worse, is that you can adjust it all you want on the dyno, but once you hit the street what you did has almost no basis in reality for actually being safe for driving the car. Conditions simply change too much and too rapidly to really be accurate at all on the street with a dyno based tune unless a sophisticated road simulation dyno tune has been done (but open up that wallet!). This results in nearly every tune out there done for customers of most institutions being on the conservative side for timing and considerably so. There’s a fix for that though, but I’ll get to that sales pitch in a minute.

Timing on an engine in the case we are talking about is simply about spark timing (not cam or valve timing). Timing is measured in degrees of crank rotation relative to the top dead center (TDC) position of the cylinder in question. Since most systems only have single cylinder timing, meaning the ECU can’t set different timing values for each cylinder, it is usually considered to be the same for all the cylinders in question whether you have 3 (i.e. a Geo Metro) or 12 (i.e. my personal lust car the V12 Vanquish by Aston Martin) or something ridiculous like the 16 of the Cadillac Sixteen concept car. Timing is also usually defined as being advanced or retarded. When you say timing is advanced it means before top dead center (BTDC) and retarded is after top dead center (ATDC).

Which immediately brings up an interesting point. Normal timing is before the piston has compressed the mixture fully, meaning you are starting that burn while the piston is traveling toward the spark plug. Bad idea right? No, not really but it does get into discussions of detonation and pre-ignition which we will discuss a little bit in a minute, and in depth in a different post. The reason this is okay or works is due to the fact that unlike many people think, the gasoline mixtures does not explode, but rather burns in a controlled manner. The spark initiates a flame kernel at the spark plug which then spreads out toward the walls and the mixture burns and expands in a controlled manner along the flame front that travels through mixture and the space it occupies. As it does this the pressure increases within the cylinder much like it does as the piston is coming up, just at a new rate when both are in effect. As long as this pressure does not get so high that the mixture spontaneously ignites throughout (one form of preignition) everything is fine!

So what is a common timing value? Timing in most cars runs anywhere from as much as 50-60 degrees BTDC to as little as 5-10 BTDC. That’s a general range for street cars, it can vary widely based on engine type, cylinder head design, spark plug design, fuel type, aspiration type, charge modifications like water or methanol injection, and many other factors. Additionally, this all changes moment to moment in a given example based on engine speed and engine load and density of the air fuel mixture (commonly referred to as the “charge”). The higher your load on the engine and/or the more dense the charge, the lower the timing is, or the closer to TDC (e.g. 5°BTDC versus 15°BTDC). Also, the slower the engine is turning the lower/less advanced your timing is. So extending that to the obvious, a light load, low density charge, at a high engine speed is your most advanced timing situation typically. So for example in a naturally aspirated high compression engine with a nice dense charge coming in at 2,000 rpm’s and 0 inHG of vacuum may run something like a 18° BTDC versus that same engine at 6,000 rpm’s and 20 inHG might run about 55°BTDC.

So, obviously timing can be spread across a wide range of values, so how does one choose the timing? What you choose for timing depends on a number of things including reliability, gas octane, environmental factors like temperature and elevation, emissions desires, and response of other aspects of the engine. When speaking to maximum power output, which is what I assume most of my readers would be interested in, there is one general simple rule (which like all general simple rules does not hold for every case, nor truly give you an exact answer) is that you want to have your peak cylinder pressure occur in a range of 12° - 16° ATDC. This situation is typically regarded to give the peak torque value for the engine and thus the maximum output. However, many times this can not be achieved due to limitations of the engine and design that can lead to pre-ignition and/or detonation or due to other limitations such as emissions. Most tuners will attempt to estimate this by simply pushing timing forward on an engine until they see some torque fall off on the dyno and the pull the timing back a few degrees. This is rather imprecise and in fact often dangerous as there are many cases where detonation will have already set in and begun threatening the engine even though you can’t hear it or detect it on the EGT or dyno. Furthermore, this only takes that one moment in time in to consideration and thus, you could be dangerously wrong, or wholly inadequate at other points as well.

Timing is also effective for smoothing out various driving situations. Sometimes cars will buck or get unstable outputs from the engine at low throttle openings and slightly lean air fuel ratios. Adding a little timing will often help smooth this out. Timing can also be used to strengthen idle and will move it up a few 100 rpm’s if there is not an idle air control solenoid interfering. Additionally, running very retarded values of timing right as you enter boost on a turbocharged car can also help contribute to improved spool up of the turbo (at the price of significant heat being dumped into the exhaust, fuel into the catalytics, and heat exposure to the exhaust valves and turbo components). At cruising speeds, maximizing timing will yield your best gas mileage as well and should be balanced with a stoichiometric to slightly lean (14.7-15.5) AFR as suits the vehicle best. So, as you can see timing has significantly more effects than just being a path to maximum output on your engine.

Timing also needs to be balanced against air fuel ratios for a good tune. Sometime the peak power of a vehicle will occur at a slightly more retarded timing value that allows the fuel mixture to be made more lean (relatively speaking). However, I have found in most cases that working to maximize timing has yielded better results on the engines I have had. So I’ve run air fuel ratios on the richer side and worked to get more timing out and had good results in the past. However, while I start with this approach it is important to work the other direction and optimize AFR at the cost of timing as every car is different and there is no general rule on this for every car or every situation, so it is really the call of the tuner.

I mentioned it briefly before, but timing does affect your emissions. What your timing is will affect the levels of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, sulfur oxides,and NOx that the vehicle produces. Advancing your timing will reduce some of the emissions while increasing others, and the same for retarding your timing. So when you have to deal with the emissions timing does need to be a consideration, although it typically does not have as significant of an impact as AFR and the overall effectiveness of your emission systems (or lack thereof) on your vehicle.

Lastly, before I end this first pass of discussion on timing the sales pitch I mentioned up in the first paragraph. There is a device out there that takes away the blindness factor of tuning timing and makes your car MUCH safer on the road. It is called a J&S Safeguard system. It is made by a husband and wife team out of California that have been in business for I believe a couple decades now. The device is well known in some circles, unheard of in others, and misunderstood in its usefulness by many! The J&S Safeguard is a simple device that has the ability to retard timing on EACH individual cylinder depending on when it detects detonation. This is unique for several reasons. First, they use a rather sophisticated algorithm and filtering to be much more accurate than most systems out there. Second, even most factory and race systems retard all the cylinders as a whole, so you lose output if one cylinder is more finicky than the others, the J&S reduces or eliminates this fact. Third, the system is much simpler and more accurate that others. For example, the detonation prevention system on EMS’s like the AEM or the Haltech have you set a noise threshold for given rpm’s and conditions. If the motor is noiser than that it thinks it is detonating. The J&S actually knows when and where to look for detonation relative to your spark event and also adjusts dynamically to the engine background noise. By doing all this it achieves much better accuracy than anything else I have ever seen. It is also ridiculously simple. Most install are between 5 and 15 total wire connections and setup involves a simple procedure to set the sensitivity of the system. Once set, the J&S in many ways acts as a “wideband” sensor for timing. You wouldn’t tune your AFR’s blind, so why would you tune your timing blind when you can get this? It’s also typically 500-600 dollars which is cheap insurance for your engine. If you ever lost coolant, froze an injector, or any number of other things the J&S would cover you, without it… boom. It has the ability to show timing retard on an LED array for each individual cylinder, and it also dynamically feeds the timing in and out on each cylinder, so as detonation gets close to happening the system pulls out the timing and when the conditions pass the timing is fed back in, all with no input from you! I’ve used the system on my car and on customers’ cars as well. I’ve checked it against noise canceled ear phones and dyno systems and more and it has been vastly superior in all cases. While I do sell them, I also encourage you to go direct to them. www.jandssafeguard.com Tell John I sent you!

Happy Motoring!

Steve