Knowing What You’re Torquing About
If you’ve ever taken even the slightest look at any car review, some of the key bits that tend to be described and compared are the engine stats and specs. Some specs are easy enough to understand – the 0–100 km/h sprint is a measurement of how long it takes the car to go from not travelling at all to going at full open road speed. It’s a measurement that is easy enough to picture, and it’s easy enough to convert to and from metric units, if you’re not too fussy. If you want to get absolutely precise, 100 km/h is equivalent to 62.14 mph, so if you are presented with an Imperial measurement looking at the 0–60 mph sprint, it’s roughly the same as the usual nought-to-the-ton metric figure. Get out your calculator if you want to be absolutely precise.
However, some specs are a bit harder to get a mental picture of. The key figure is power. Power is defined as the rate at which work is done, or else the rate at which energy is converted into motion. In cars and vehicles of all types, the formula for calculating power is a little more complicated and the power output (measured in kW (kilowatts) using metrics) is the force times the velocity (physics-speak for speed!). If you want a formula, it’s Power = work/time = (force x distance)/time. Force, of course, is derived from the mass, so small cars (and motorbikes) tend to have engines with fewer kilowatts of power – you don’t need as many kW to get up to speed. All sorts of things go into the power, such as the number of cams (pistons) in the engine, the number of combustion chambers in the engine and the size of the combustion chambers. Power used to be measured in horsepower, which was originally used to compare how well a steam engine or traction engine could work in comparison to a big Clydesdale. And here’s some handy little figures so you can compare that European car that measures the engine power in kW against an American car that’s measured in horses:
Kia Ad – Grandmaster Flash
It’s like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder. How I keep from going under…
Don’t normally comment on car advertising but probably should do a little bit more because there are some weird and wonderful ads out there. Some car ads have been shockers but some are very memorable. Other just hit the spot for some reason. Probably not surprising when you consider the amount of money car makers pour into TV adverts, there’s going to be plenty of notable hits and misses.
Thrifty Car Rental Coupon
We just wanted to remind our members that they do have access to a unique promotional code that delivers a discount off the retail pricing of Thrifty car rental. Naturally most of our members will have already bought cars but often this sort of discount is useful for trips away as well as for one off journeys where a different car is needed.
So here is the current Thrifty Discount Corporate Code – CD 4908003767
The Cheapest, The Fastest And The Mostest
I’ve posted a bit about some of the most economical cars in Australia in the small and medium range, which got me wondering about which car really is the most economical – and, for that matter, the fastest, the cheapest and the most expensive. And if it’s world records we’re after, then the obvious place to go is to the Guinness World Records books and website to have a look. I’ve done my best to find the records for proper production cars rather than modified, souped-up, tweaked, customised or otherwise tinkered with cars. So here goes…
The cheapest: The cheapest production car by far is the Tata Nano. Designed and made in India, this is intended to do for South-east Asia what the Model T Ford did for the USA and the VW Beetle did for Germany: a cheap car that the average person can afford, allowing the country to embrace the automobile age. When it was released in 2008, it cost the Indian equivalent of US$2000. It seats four and has four doors, but has a number of quirky cost-cutting measures that mean that it’s not likely to really take off in Australia – if it makes it over here at all. These cost-cutting measures include a lack of power steering (it’s so small and light it doesn’t need it), only one windscreen wiper, three lug nuts per wheel instead of four, only one wing mirror, no airbags and a boot that is only accessible from the inside. In other words, it may look like a hatchback, but it’s not. It’s more like a hatchbelly. In 2009, an upgraded version was released for the European market that had been heavily modified to meet safety standards.
Level 2, 9 Help Street