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All The Fun Of The Motor Show
The Geneva Motor Show was all on last week and, as usual, was a real drawcard for motoring enthusiasts all over Europe and beyond. One wee post isn’t going to be enough to bring you all the cars that were revealed to the world. But one of the things that we all enjoy about motor shows is seeing the things that the designers have come up with but just aren’t going to make it onto the road for real. This is a great improvement over motor shows in the bad old days when the only thing that the companies could come up with to attract viewer attention was draping scantily clad young ladies over their latest offerings. Now they have to use a bit of imagination.
Once again, the Geneva Motor Show of 2013 didn’t disappoint, and the designers came up with the weird, the wild and the wonderful. It seems as though no company is too staid and conservative to come up with something quirky. Whether these offerings are bizarre or beautiful is a matter of opinion… see what you think.
One offering that was certainly eye-catching came from Land Rover , with their Hamann Mystere. If you saw it in black and white, it was anything but a bush-bashing Land Rover – it looked like a cross between a sports car and a 4×4, with low ground clearance but the characteristic chunky looks of Land Rover. But that wasn’t what made the Hamann Mystere stand out from the crowd: the colour was the thing, and it was a shade of metallic pinky-purple that is about as far from the usual Land Rover colours as you can get. According to my teenagers, this colour is cool and looks good on a sports car. All I can say is that if you drove a car that colour and you were a woman with blonde hair, folk would wonder if you were trying to emulate a certain plastic doll. If this SUV ever gets taken off-road, it won’t get lost in any landscape imaginable.
The small Swiss manufacturer Rinspeed (which sounds like it should be a washing machine brand) came up with something called the MicroMax, which looks as though a commuter bus has been put through the hot cycle and shrunk in the wash. This has no seats for anybody – you sort of lean or squat while standing up, and you strap your bike to the back and carry the pram or shopping trolley in the middle. The target market for this, apparently, is the mobile coffee machine people or possibly the ice cream vendors, as there’s plenty of room to bung in whatever you like, but the thing’s still small enough to park anywhere.
Italdesign played fast and loose with a Lamborghini to make the Parcour, named after that French sport where you run cross-city, climbing walls and hurdling park benches. It looks like an Italian luxury sports car but with the ground clearance of a bush-basher. Wonder if they’ve got Hollywood and a few chase scenes in mind.
Toyota came up with the i-Road concept, which can’t make up its mind whether it’s a motorbike or a car. It’s got two wheels at the front and one at the back, is completely enclosed and seats one. Whether this is a good and practical idea, or whether it defeats the whole purpose of riding a motorbike or driving in a car is debateable. It could catch on – we’ll have to wait and see.
Of course, there were plenty of great new cars unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, but more on those later!
The New Long Range Holden Volt
How would you like a car that costs $2.50 for 80 km, vs a Petrol car that costs you $10 PLUS for 80 km?
Take a look at the new Long Range Holden Volt
The first of the range of Holden Volt Electric Cars will be approx. $59,990 AUD
The Volt is a range extender concept, or an Extended Range Electric Vehicle, that simply means that the onboard batteries allow a range of 80 km when fully charged
They are then charged by a 4 cylinder generator powered by gasoline, while you drive.
This allows 80 km of travel (electric only) using the stored charge in the 16 kw/hr lithium ion batteries.
You can also charge the car’s batteries via a charging cord which will plug into a 240v home outlet.
Batteries only range of 80km will be extended to more than 600 km by the onboard generator, and unlike most hybrid cars, it runs exclusively on battery electric power.
This is made possible by a 53 kw generator that charges as you drive to produce 111 Kw via the electric drive motor.
This is the killer feature of the Volt, as the major problem with electric only cars is that when the batteries are flat, that’s it.
Most consumers don’t like the idea of being “limited” to driving only a set range.
They want to drive as far as they can in a day, and the Volt will allow that, unlike other electric cars.
Price: $59,990 plus on-road
Engine: 1.4 litre 16-valve petrol 4cyl, two electric drive motors, 16.5kW/h battery.
VW Unveils What Could Be The World’s Most Fuel Efficient Production Car
Back in 2011, Volkswagen showed the world a concept car that was designed to be the world’s most fuel-efficient vehicle. Now, just a few days before the Geneva Motor Show, the company has given us all a sneak peek of what’s actually going to be made: the limited edition Volkswagen XL.1.
The Volkswagen XL.1 is yet another example of just how sexy fuel efficiency is these days, with this unit aiming to be the most efficient in the world. And it probably is. It would be hard to improve on fuel efficiency figures of 0.9 litres per 100 km for the combined fuel efficiency figures (I’m pretty sure that those figures are correct; however, I’ve seen at least three figures in mpg, depending on which source you read, ranging from 314 mpg top 261 mpg, with 261 being the most common one quoted). Motoring writers around the globe are getting excited about this “futuristic” car that combines sexy fuel efficiency with equally sexy good looks.
So how did Volkswagen manage to make such a fuel-efficient car? As you would expect, it’s not just one feature that makes is so economical but a whole heap of things.
Number one is the shape: the Volkswagen XL.1 has been made to have a very low drag coefficient, which means that it slips through the air easily and smoothly with a minimum of friction. The shape seems to have been inspired by nature, with the side-on profile of the Volkswagen XL.1 looking a bit like a bottlenose dolphin (now, you can’t get more eco-friendly than a dolphin, can you?). Because there’s less friction to overcome, this means that there’s less energy needed to speed up and keep moving.
Number two is what it’s made out of. Simple physics and your own experience lets you known that the heavier something is, the more effort (and hence more fuel) is needed to get it moving. This is why the Volkswagen XL.1 is made out of light-but-tough carbon fibre-reinforced plastics. The makers say that this car is only 23% steel, with the rest being made from all sorts of things, including wood supports in the dashboard. The Volkswagen XL.1 has thinner windscreen glass and a load (or perhaps not a load) of other ways to save weight here and there. The end result is a car that weighs about 800 kg.
Number three is, of course, the engine. I guess nobody’s going to be really surprised that the Volkswagen XL.1 is a hybrid vehicle, as this seems to be the way things are going these days. When it’s not using the battery (20 kW power and 140 Nm torque), the vehicle runs on a little (800 cc = 0.8 litre) turbocharged diesel unit that pops out 35 kW of power and 120 Nm of torque. In the performance stakes, it does nought to the ton in 12.7 seconds and a top speed of 160 kmh (limited). It’s not a racing car, but if the new emphasis on fuel efficiency rather than raw power continues, this won’t really be seen as a downside. This is the same engine that you’ll find in the new Volkswagen Up.
The Volkswagen XL.1 is entering production, being made in the same German factories as the Volkswagen Golf and the Porsche Boxter. Alas, only a limited number will be made and we are unlikely to get any here Down Under any time soon. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that production will eventually become more widespread.
Fuel Economy: Myth or Fact?
Wringing the most out of our fuel is very much the in thing, whether you’re a greenie or a meanie. Information about what you can do to save fuel and improve your car’s fuel economy gets handed on and handed around. But are some of the things that Uncle Fred taught you actually going to help improve your fuel economy?
• Myth or Fact? You need to warm your car up before you can drive it properly.
• Myth. Even if you are in the chilliest parts of the world, you don’t need to warm a car up before you can drive it. Sure, you might need to apply the choke for a little bit in the depths of winter, but if the engine is turning over, you’ve got the energy needed to turn the wheels. If you do use the choke, remember to turn close it off after about five minutes.
• Myth or Fact? Small cars are more economical than large cars.
• Myth. As my fellow-blogger David commented, fuel economy is getting very, very sexy in the motoring world, and the guys and girls who come up with car ads are just as likely to mention the fuel economy figures as they are to mention the torque. This means that fuel-saving technology is being applied to medium-sized and even large cars. This is good news of all of us for whom a little Honda Jazz or similar is impractical – there’s no need to jam a family of leggy teenagers into the back of a little hatchback in the interest of saving fuel.
• Myth or fact? Driving less aggressively is more fuel efficient.
• Fact. If you demand less of the car, it can work more efficiently. Feather-light touches on the accelerator, gentle braking and smooth cornering are easy on the car and mean that it uses less fuel. Fierce acceleration, hard braking and tight cornering might be all right on the race track but are bad for fuel economy, as well as making you obnoxious on the road to your fellow drivers. This is anecdotal evidence, but I’ve recently picked up a 4-litre Ford Fairlane . Keeping a light foot keeps the average fuel consumption (according to the trip computer) nice and low. Plant the boot and the figures soar. Think of the effortless and graceful soaring of a seagull or an eagle compared to the aggressive and frantic flapping of a chook.
• Myth or fact? After-market additives and thingummies can make your car run better.
• Myth. According to a Reader’s Digest article and the US Department of Energy, most gadgets and additives that you chuck in along with your petrol don’t make your car any more efficient, and the only thing that they clean out is your wallet. The exception is a full conversion to LPG or something along those lines.
• Myth or fact? Replacing your air filter will improve your fuel economy.
• Fact – sort of. Changing the air filter does indeed improve the fuel economy of older cars. However, with modern cars, changing the air filter improves the performance but doesn’t actually improve the fuel economy. This is because a lot of modern engines have computerised controls that maintain the right fuel to air ratio, no matter what state the filter’s in.
• Myth or fact? Idling uses more fuel than restarting your car.
• Fact. If you have to wait for that person who’s running late or if you’re held up by road works, switching the engine right off and restarting it again uses a lot less fuel. OK, it might not be a good idea to do this at the traffic lights, unless you know that you’re going to have to wait a long time until the lights go green.
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