The best way to conserve (when it comes to automobiles) is to keep your car unti it dies and to own as few cars as necessary for the family. I know families who have an electric car AND another car. One for commuting and one for longer trips. The manufacture of the unnecessary extra car uses up a lot of resources and consumed energy which otherwise could have been saved. Consume less all around. Don’t buy so much crap. Turn off unnecessary electrical users. Downsize. Oppose population growth. If this country had fewer people there wouldn’t be the need for filling up pristine vistas with solar factories or wind factories.
Did you forego having children, though, TatinG? I didn’t.
We drive our cars into the ground, though, AND we own Priuses. Having traveled to Saudi Arabia, I’m plenty happy not handing those people my hard-earned gas money. When my kids were littler, I was able to chauffeur my twins (car seats and all) in a Honda Civic just fine; a minivan / SUV would have been a huge gas guzzling waste.
If you like the car, buy it, if you do not like it, do not buy, it is up to you to include or exclude into your criteria the emission numbers. I would not buy a car with the known bad safety record. I do not think that emission has to do with safety. On the other note, we can try to minimize emission at our liking as much as we want, you still cannot control the worst polluters, they do not live in the USA. And how about those cows? They pollute much worse than cars. If the emission is a criteria for buying a car, I have to assume, that the person stopped eating beef, well, he better, since eating beef promotes high air pollution by cows. Maybe we should demand to get read of cows, just ban them? But then it has to be decided by UN. or maybe we should demand a cut in beef price because of cows bad PR?
The transmission selector is a couple of wires… Some have a direct link to a parking pawl, but since the early nineties most just send a signal to the powertrain controller.
If piston speed rather than valve float is your main concern, the scenario of simultaneously removing the load while not changing the inputs should lead to dramatic overspeed and scoring if the cylinder walls. I can imagine wanting to prevent that in the name of warranty, but do not know for certain that was the case.
The clutch continues to be a physical linkage, and differs from brake, accelerator, and transmission inputs in that regard.
I’ve been thinking more about what this is going to cost VW. If you have one of these cars, in order to be made whole from the fraud, VW would have to either (a) modify the car so that it conforms to what they said they were selling you or (b) give you an amount of money equal to the difference between the value of what they said they were selling you and what you actually have. Considering that this will probably destroy the resale value of these cars, that will be a lot of money.
@MomofJandL :
That claim that nothing was wrong with the Toyota products is the drivel I have seen on blogs and such, that this was the ‘government’ persecuting business, it was anti car nuts out to get the companies (which was the same thing said when Nader went after GM in the 1960’s, was said when the Pinto was proven to be a piece of crap roasting people), it was the same thing said when safety and emissions regs came about. With Toyota, one of the reasons they were hit with massive fines was because internal documents, as with GM, show that Toyota knew they had a problem, and they had reports from their own engineering department that the throttle linkage had a design defect that could cause it to stick. These were internal memos, not meant for public consumption, so it wasn’t the company “not wanting to say customers were idiots”. Outside studies of the Toyota design issues concluded that the problem was real, that it was a faulty design. The mats were a big less of an issue to me, crap can get stuck under the gas pedal easily, but the linkage was real. More importantly, set against the backdrop, it is hard to say it was all idiot drivers, at the same time Toyota was having serious quality problems with their products, they were in a race to be the #1 car producer and like GM and the rest of the Detroit bunch had for years, they ignored quality to increase numbers and this was part of it. I heard the same thing with the gm ignition thing, that it was the stupid drivers, that GM had done nothing wrong, that Rick Waggoner was a great CEO that Obama shouldn’t have had fired, all the usual drivel…I also have the mechanical and technical background with cars that in reading what I did about Toyota, there was a real issue there, that this wasn’t the same as the Audi 5000.
@ucb:
With automatic transmissions, unless they have changed them recently, they had lockouts from drive to neutral, the same as if you wanted to go from drive to park, you need to have your foot on the brake. The only thing they do allow is shifting from drive down into low gears (ie d3, d2, etc) when moving.
As far as having two redlines, that is possible, though I have not seen a car that implemented what the poster said, but I could understand why. The redline of an engine is how fast it can rev without damage, it is the upper limit where if you go beyond it, you could cause damage because the pistons and other components are not balanced enough and can shake them to pieces (one of the big differences between a racing engine and a street one is racing engines are balanced, the crankshaft, cams, pistons are meticulously balanced, a racing engine has redlines 12, 13k RPM’s, standard car half of that or less). The potential reason for limiting the revs in neutral versus drive has to do with load, 6500 rpm with the load of driving the car and the transmission is different than an engine revving freely with no load, so I could see limiting the free revs, under load the engine works differently, won’t be as likely to shake itself and so forth…try it yourself, drive the car in low gear at redline, then try revving the engine in park or neutral to that level, and see how it sounds and feels.
Toyota had a problem and they covered it up and quietly repaired the cars as they went in for servicing without telling the owners about the extra repairs and all while insisting there was no problem.
That’s bad enough but they didn’t design the cars with a deliberate intent to deceive in order to have greater profits.
D->P requires D->N->R->P, where the N->R is typically blocked if the brakes are not being applied. Since N is adjacent to D, D->N does not have to pass through the lockout that exists when shifting out of N.
And the ECU in a modern car will prevent overrevving (e.g. by cutting off the fuel if that happens). There is no reason to prevent someone from shifting D->N even in a high-rev situation (indeed, that is the same as depressing the clutch in a high-rev situation with a manual transmission car).
If you are that worried about unintended acceleration, just buy a car with a manual transmission. Then the pedal under your left foot will disconnect the engine from the wheels.
@ucb:
I am not worried about it, though I miss manual transmissions, especially in bad weather. Someday I’ll have the funds, once my kid gets out of college, to buy an old Alfa Spyder to fix up and drive, to have the nemesis/love of my life back again lol.
It is true that with modern engine computers they could limit the revs in neutral, I haven’t heard of a lockout based on engine speed, I merely gave a reason why they might do it. The rev limiter would work, if I was in drive at 40MPH at let’s say 2500 rpm, if I shifted it into neutral there is no reason the ECM could not limit it to let’s say 3500.
One of the things that worries me about fly by wire systems that are becoming prevalent is that if, for example, the brakes went from being hydraulic assist with electronic anti lock controls, to being totally electronically controlled, you would have system where the throttle and brakes and transmission all were controlled directly via the computer, and if something is done wrong, oye…on the other hand, aircraft are pretty much all fly by wire, things like the stealth fighter and bomber and the joint attack fighter could not fly under direct human control, they require a ton of tiny adjustments each second to keep it flying. On the other hand, jet fighters are almost hand made, tested one at a time, with millions of cars…
and FBW aircraft have multiple redundant backup computers.
BMW now is under scrutiny. I think this whole industry will be affected.
Of course, when “something goes wrong” in a car that causes a crash, the most frequent place is in the driver’s seat.
BMW has a pretty good denial. I hope they’re telling the truth.
A low inertia engine will overspeed when the load is removed. I think the first data log I saw of this on a real live engine was in the early nineties.
What is BMW’s “denial”? Am also hearing they did what VW did.
Seems they all lie. More than once I’ve complained about something that the dealership flat out denies is a problem… and then…poof, down the road there is a recall on that issue.
“If you are that worried about unintended acceleration, just buy a car with a manual transmission. Then the pedal under your left foot will disconnect the engine from the wheels.”
That ship sailed a long time ago – American consumers have long since rejected manual transmissions for the most part, except for a handful of hobbyists.
I know how to drive a stick. Good thing too. When we looked into rental cars in Spain, they were all stick shifts, unless a person rented the top of the line luxury car. Back in the day, stick shifts got better gas mileage.
i’m hardly a hobbyist. I do proudly remain that last small percentage of drivers who take pride in and enjoy driving a stick shift. I like the control it gives me in all types of situations, especially in bad weather. We had German exchange students visiting us the last 2 weeks. One remarked to me that my car was the only one he’s seen in that time that was a stick.
My husband likes the control of the stick shift but I found stick shift to be a nuisance, probably because I started learning how to drive on a stick shift, that didn’t go so well, no accident, but I determine not to repeat it.
My diesel VW is a manual and my wife’s Subaru is a manual too. I’d consider buying a car with an automatic transmission, but DW, no way. I taught her to shift 30 years ago and, to her, driving an automatic isn’t driving.