Old Car Technologies That Should Be Resurrected If there ever is an object that is in a state of continuous evolution, it’s the automobile. Car manufacturers are constantly changing the technology in their cars to make them perform better, cheaper or just to change things for the next model year (think paint colors). The driving […]
4 Automotive Fantasy Technologies That Are Almost Here Back in the golden days of the 1960s when Hanna and Barbera cartoons were the rage, we were constantly treated to whimsical visions of what transportation in the future would be like. Whether it was just regular cars, aircraft or George Jetson’s spaceship, the future seemed awfully […]
About Cylinder Deactivation “Cylinder Deactivation” has been around for many years. It’s a pretty simple way to make an engine conserve fuel. Here’s how it works: With typical light load driving with large engines, only about 30% of an engine’s potential power is required. This is because under these circumstances, the throttle valve is only slightly open and the engine needs to work hard to pull air by it. The […]
What All-Wheel Drive Car Owners Should Know With winter just around the corner, those that own All-Wheel Drive cars (AWD) are understandably smug because they know they are ready for whatever Mother Nature dishes out. If you are considering joining the AWD club this season, you should know that not AWDs are created equal and […]
Flashback: The Lil’ Red Express Truck Sometimes car manufacturers make special model vehicles to make particular statements. Take the Dodge Viper sports car, for example. This V-10 powered beast was specifically designed to inject a little pizzazz back into the Dodge brand. The first models were built in the early 90s and the concept worked […]
How Fuel Injection Systems Work In the old days, car engines used carburetors to vaporize the fuel going into an engine. This method worked out fine for half a century but during the 1950s automobile manufacturers started experimenting with injecting gasoline directly into engines. This would allow engineers to deliver fuel more precisely into the […]
The Vintage Cars of Cuba – you don’t want one The roads in Cuba are just packed with classic American cars. Take a look at photos of the streets of Havana and you will see classic America cars everywhere. Why is this? Since Cuba has effectively been isolated from the west for over 50 years, […]
Belly Tank Racers Have you ever seen those old pictures of curious, low-slung hotrods with aluminum, torpedo-shaped bodies? These are called “Belly Tank Racers” and they were built to break speed records in the car-crazy 1940s-50s. The body of these hotrods came from aluminum drop tanks, or “belly tanks”, that were common on WWII aircraft. […]
Doing Nitrous If you like fast cars you undoubtedly have heard about Nitrous Oxide. Nitrous systems are a way to dramatically boost the horsepower of engines. They are not for standard street cars, however, because they can be dangerous. That being said, enthusiasts still install them on all sorts of cars and if you’ve wondered […]
Electric Turbocharging Once an exotic technology, turbocharging has become mainstream. Back a few decades ago, turbochargers were expensive and only installed on sports cars and race cars. The reason was pretty simple: to make the vehicle go faster. Today, turbochargers are still used on performance cars but they have become the technology of choice for […]