The Chinese Are Coming! The Chinese Are Coming!

Word has it that a Chinese company is negotiating to purchase the Hummer brand. Ostensibly to sell the existing inventory and continue building the H3 for a year or so. It would be within reason to expect that at some point the production of Hummers will move to China.

MotorAuthority had a piece regarding a new electric car startup called, Coda Automotive. This is a five passenger sedan that looks vaguely like a Volvo. Hmmm, a little digging shows that a Chinese aircraft manufacturer is involved in this venture, Chengdu Aircraft Company.

A couple of years ago a video of a Chinese car undergoing European crash testing made the rounds on the net. It wasn't pretty and showed that there was a lot of work left to do before folks would trust their families in them. But that will be done.

The Chinese manufacturers have a window of opportunity in the American market if they can get product that will pass US safety standards. There are a ton of dealerships that have had (or will have) their franchises stripped from them. They have the property and personnel to sell and service product. While some of that will disappear before the Chinese cars are approved for sale, there's still time to get in on the next upswing of car sales (which at a rate of 10 million or less a year at the moment has a long way to climb before they're back to normal).

Will the Chinese cars be well received right off the bat. No, not likely, this is a tough market (ask Chrysler ; -). But if they can compete on price initially they'll have the opportunity to compete on features and value later. Think of Kia just a few years ago, or the Japanese in the early '60s.

The Chinese are coming!!

New Life for the Rotary Engine

Mazda has applied for a patent covering a direct fuel injection rotary (Wankel) engine. The rotary engine has some intriguing properties, it can produce good horsepower from a very small size and it is exceptionally smooth (based on it's rotary motion that doesn't involve the violent 'starting and stopping' motions of the connecting rods in a piston engine).

Number 15 is the direct fuel injector.

For grins, here's an animation of the rotary in motion.



It has two significant drawbacks though. One is it's difficulty in 'sealing' the rotors and the second is it's dicey pollution characteristics/fuel economy. The second problem has to do with the shape of the combustion chamber, a wide shallow space that's moving, that is difficult to do a complete burn of the fuel in. That is one reason each rotor chamber has two spark plugs, one leading ignition pulse and one trailing pulse.

The direct injection could reduce the impact of that problem by keeping the cloud of fuel very close to the ignition source (rather than having it dispersed throughout the elongated combustion chamber as has been the case until now). But it appears that they are injecting fuel before compression, which still leaves a fuel/air mixture to occupy the hard to reach edges of the combustion chamber (hard for the flame front to reach that is). Regardless, fuel economy will improve.

Hat tip to MotorAuthority.

Well, It's a Little Early for the Silly Season, but . . .

. . . Ferrari never fails to fulfill the fun factor by throwing a true hissy fit. They've decided to withdraw from F1 next year, because the governing body wants to limit costs.

More in this article from one of my favorite sites: MotorAuthority

Fiat's UK Customer Satisfaction Numbers

MotorAuthority has this story regarding Fiat's UK J.D. Power satisfaction rankings.

I owned a Fiat, a 128, an important vehicle in the grand scheme of things (at least LJK Setright thought so). But it was not a very well built car. That was in 1976, however, and hopefully Fiat has learned a few things about screwing cars together in the intervening years. ; -)

Standard Plug Agreed to for Plug-In Hybrids

One of the first things needed to build an infrastructure to refuel electric vehicles is some sort of standard plug-in and voltage ceiling. Motorauthority had the story up this morning.

Imagine if the nozzles to dispense gasoline, and the openings to accept gasoline in the car, came in different shapes and sizes. Fords would have to have a separate set of pumps from Toyotas, for instance.

There are an amazing amount of standard configurations for automobiles. Some driven by international standards bodies, some by government and many by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

If you ever want a good lesson on why standards are good, arrange to drive a Model T. ; -)

What the announcement of a standard plug configuration means to me, is that we will start seeing a lot of plug-in vehicles within the next five years.