The same with the battery which is now a much stronger thing than it was in the 1990s, and that’s because when the engine’s stopped, but we still want to keep our lights on and listen to music and run the heating or cooling, and then start the engine when the lights turn green. The aim is to make it easier for the starter motor to do its job. All sorts of things are different, from the type of bearings used, to the long-life brushes, the way the solenoid works, the wiring (beefed up). Indeed, if you took a starter motor from the 1990s and looked at one from today, the modern starter would be much stronger capable of handling up to 500,000 cycles in its ‘lifetime’ – the older starter would have only been designed to handle around 50,000 start cycles. See, asking an engine to stop and then start again places strains on components. The widespread application of stop-start has only been possible because of improvements in things like battery technology, bearings, oils and control systems in vehicles. Does stop-start cause premature wear and tear? And it’s rare, even when conditions are right, that a stop-start system will keep your vehicle’s engine switched off for more than 90 seconds. It’s worth remembering here that stop-start will only work when conditions are ‘just right’, meaning, if it’s too cold or too hot and the HVAC is working overtime to keep your warm or cool then the stop-start will switch off the engine but then a split-second later turn it back on again to prevent the battery from being overloaded. The Formel E kit also included a gear shift indicator which via a yellow light on the instrument panel would advise when to shift up a gear for maximum efficiency.īut the main piece of kit was stop-start which you would activate by pressing a button on the dash and then pressing it again to turn the engine back on, or when you slotted first gear in a manual car. Under Formel E, the relevant Passat, Polo and Golf (be it petrol or diesel) would be fitted with aerodynamic bits and bobs, tweaked transmissions which featured a tall top gear, (called an e gear) for fuel saving while running at a constant speed on the highway. Think of it as BlueMotion before BlueMotion. Stop-start was a suite of technologies the brand launched under its Formel E (Formula E) brand. Or, at least, it was Volkswagen that first applied the idea to production vehicles. Long before some ‘rogue’ Volkswagen engineers decided to game the system in California and cause ‘dieselgate’, some Volkswagen engineers invented stop-start. It was the 1980s, an age of big hair, great movies (Highlander, Ghost Busters, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Star Wars…) and innovation in cars. Sit back and let uncle Isaac learn you… What’s the history of stop-start? PLENTY OF OPINIONATED writers will tell you how stop-start is all about carmakers gaming the system in lab-based fuel economy tests, and to some extent it is, but there’s more to stop-start than that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |