One of the reason American carmakers are in trouble: engines - Page 3

Actually, 25-30 years ago there were actually some cars that could be considered both "sports" and "sedan". I am referring to such enduring greats as the Alfa 1750GTV, Lotus Cortina, and BMW 2002. Now we have just overweight, stupidly fast sensory deprivation chambers that marketers affix with the label "sport". Doubtful. Though I've never driven a bloated pig like the RS4 on a track, there's just no way to make a car be fun at 30mph and stable at 180mph. To be the latter it must be dulled at low speeds, because otherwise the merest flick of the wrist will send the car off the road at its top speed. So cars with lower limits, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, are usually far more fun to drive. That's one reason why, as BrianSD noted and I concur, some of the most fun you can have on the road is in a Miata. I'm a bit puzzled by your luxury comment. Besides navigation, which you can get in an aftermarket single-DIN head unit now, what does the Elise lack? It has a 6-speaker (I think) stereo that uses standard-sized components an audiophile can rip out and discard. It has A/C, though only one-zone. It has ABS. In short, it has every luxury appropriate for a sports car. It does not have stupid and heavy things like Mercedes' "air scarf," but it's a long way from the purity (and, admittedly, impracticality) of a Lotus/Caterham Seven or an Ariel Atom. I may just buy the third-generation (2nd generation Federalized one) one as a daily driver, when it comes out. After all, it has over double the cargo space of a Solstice, despite weighing about 1000lbs less and getting about 10mpg better fuel economy. (Not to mention blowing the doors of the Solstice in any situation imaginable.) What scared me away from the Federal Elise are its lack of compliant bumpers and even more than that the problems someone of my height has with ingress/egress with the hard or soft top on. Though truth be told had one been immediately available when I bought my Mini I may have gone Elise anyway. What better thing to do every day than drive a car that's alive! Do you think a 4-door de facto 2-seater makes sense? With even a small person up front, the kneeroom in back shri nks to 3-4 inches! That is simply, IMO, bad design. Just like the Solstice/Sky 's fat ass that can't hold any cargo and its trunk that opens from the wrong end.

My Viper is fun (and very responsive) at 30mph and stable at 180mph, but I guess there are exceptions to every rule.

first of all, 180mph at anything but an oval is pretty hard to come by. and i hope you don't think of ovals when i say track. i mean road courses. and if you hopped in an rs4 and drove it around a road course, you would have fun. if you drove around town to pick up the kids or go to the bookstore, you'd also enjoy the drive. yes it is heavier than an elise, but it also has more to offer.


you dont flick your wrist when you race. smooth in, smooth out.


the miata is a fine car. and your notion of it being easy to drive a slow car fast is exactly right.. no doubt. but two seaters aren't for everyone. i need a sedan, i don't have room in my garage for a second car, and therefore i don't have room for a two seater.. so i have already submitted to having a car heaver than 3000 pounds. i also need awd for the winters up here in michigan. i'm fortunate to have a few cars to choose from that meets all of my requirements (safe, fun, awd, 4 doors, plenty of space, and finally.. trackable with a handfull of basic mods). im also happy to see this pool of cars increasing.


dont get me wrong, i love the exige (convertables are not my thing, so the elise isnt on my list), however, it is a very non-compliant kind of car. lots of noises and creaks and bumps and such. i love a night taut suspension as much as the next guy, but there are limits. i need a car that i can not only race, but that i can take on a 5 hour car trip to toronto or chicago for the weekend.. that i can also haul some stuff home in should i decide to buy something larger than a breadbox.



i agree.

if i had my choice.. id have a lotus exige S to take to the track on weekends and an rs4 in my garage for road trips and daily driving. unfortunately i dont have those kinds of funds (or a big enough garage!), so i settle for my subaru sti... satisfies all of my needs.

What year is it? The only Viper I've driven was back when they still had side pipes and looked less like Corvettes. While obviously it went like stink in a straight line, it felt heavy, plodding, and very reluctant to change direction at street speeds. The steering didn't tell me anything except where the cracks in the pavement were, the feel of the shifter was truck-like (as was the engine note), and the brake pedal had roughly the feel of a Citroën's brake button. Maybe newer ones drive more like cars than trucks, but the only fun thing about that Viper was dodging the leaks from its poorly conceived top in the rain.

I never took it fast enough to see what the big deal was. Unless you count the heads spinning, but if I'm going to make heads spin for sitting in the shaft of a virtual penis I'd just as soon it be an E-Type dhc with a 3.8 and triple SU's.

Not quite. It is easier to drive a slow car at the edge of its limits than it is to drive a fast car at the edge of its limits. However, it is much more challenging to drive a slow car to the edge of its limits than to drive a fast car at the same rates that are the limits for the slow car. In the slower car, you're opposite locking and trail braking and doing whatever you can to keep as much speed as possible through the turns. To keep up in the fast car, you're just going through the motions, maybe fiddling with the radio or using the computer to tell the climate control you want the cabin to be 1/4 degree cooler in the process. In other words, if you define fun as I do - as driver involvement - it is more challenging/fun to drive a well-honed car with limits that are closer to speeds that one actually drives than it is to drive a car with limits well above what one would ever use. It's about feel. Unburdened by the need to be stable at extremely illegal speeds, the designers are free to allow that feeling of oneness between car and driver at all speeds.

True story: one spring break as an undergrad, a friend and took a trip to drive the Gap as many times as possible. We took my 1993 Miata (stock except for tires and cold-air intake) and his nearly new E36 M3. He was crestfallen after his first run in my car. I remember changing the CD during my first run in his car, but not much else. Over that summer, he took a huge financial hit by selling his E36 M3 for a real M3: the E30 with the semi-trailing arm rear suspension that'll actually do something, fender blisters, rear wing, and that awesome, awesome 4-pot. Everything after that car to wear the "M" has been a poseur.


I think Americans often miscalibrate what their automotive "needs" are. There are plenty of families with children in Europe and elsewhere that get by just fine with cars as small as Fiat Pandas or VW Twingos. Single people or DINKs really don't "need" anything bigger than a Twingo, Smart, or for that matter a vintage Spridget/Spitfire/Elan. The only things sold recently in America that is probably impractical for most people are the Solstice and MR2 Spider.

As for hauling stuff, that's why there's home delivery, or why Home Depot and Ikea rent trucks on the premises. For every day chores such as heading to the grocery store or to NM Last Call, the 4-6 cubic feet of trunk space provided by cars like the Elise, Miata, and topless Mini is more than adequate. Also, people in extreme northern climes did just fine with front engine/RWD for quite a while, in the era before computerized traction control even, so I'm not sure AWD is a "need".


I get that the Elise is noisy, though it is slightly less so if you cover up the gorgeous aluminum floorboards with their carpet kit. However, I don't get what you mean by non-compliant in terms of the suspension. The two (European-market) Elises I've driven have had pretty compliant suspensions, following Colin Chapman's time-honored dictum of soft springs with hard dampers. It is certainly more compliant than, say, a Civic Type-R's. It's the Japanese and Americans who equate kidney-punishing with good handling. The British, French, Italians, and to a lesser extent the Germans have always understood that good handling is not punishing to the driver. Admittedly, I've never driven a Federal Elise. It is quite possible that Lotus retuned the FE's suspension into a kidney-puncher to account for ignorance in this marketplace.


I think if you drove an RS4 and your STi back to back on a challenging road, the only thing you'd like better about the experience of driving the Audi is interacting with VW's trademark interior.

I could not disagree with this more (at least that part about DINKs). I drive a sedan and it often times has only me and my gf in it and the backseat full of groceries. Now that could be done in a coupe. However, having a two-seater completely negates the possibility of ever having three people in the car. That means I cannot drive friends around, I cannot realistically car-pool, I cannot transport virtually anything larger than the groceries, and I will forever be the one saying "sorry my car only seats two." In this regard, I do need a sedan that seats four.

[Whether a family with kids needs a behemouth SUV is another matter in my mind...]


bob

Bob, the way I play it is, "Hey baby, my car seats two. Care for a ride?"

Mine is a 2004. It has sidepipes and a V-10 engine like the original Viper roadsters. However, there have been a lot of changes since the early cars. It goes faster in a straight line than the early Vipers, and will go faster round a twisty road course and carry more speed through the corners than all but a handful of other production cars. The brakes are among the best on any production car at any price. Handling is very different than the early roadster models. The 2003+ Vipers have the same suspension geometry with the highly successful Viper Competition Coupe race car. Steering is very direct and precise, and the car is perfectly balanced, with 52% of the weight over the rear wheels.

For me, the "big deal" of driving the Viper is that it does a lot of things well: You can take it to a track day and go faster than just about anything there with a license plate. You can have a blast driving with the top down along a twisty mountain road. You can take it to the drag strip and run high 11 second 1/4 miles on street legal drag radials. You can push the 200mph envelope at an open road race. You can take your wife out to dinner in a car that looks good, has great air conditioning, a nice stereo, and is pretty comfortable inside. It even has enough trunk space to make it feasible for long road trips.

I know someone who did a very enjoyable 6000-mile road trip (up and down the west coast of North America) in a Lotus Elise Track package with his wife. They're still married and happy.

--Andre

This topic makes me so happy I have a dedicated car forum.


I love some of the absolute crap being presented as logic and fact.