The Decline of Naturally Aspirated

For several years now, the writing has been getting clearer on the wall. NA engines are becoming niche, and there's little evidence that automakers are running off to design new NA engines from scratch apart from a few modifications year on year.

A casual look at this year's 2015 Ward's 10 Best engines shows that 8 out of the 10 winners are forced induction and 6 are specifically turbocharged engines. (Incidentally, my favorite "sports" car is on this list with its fine 6.2L supercharged V-8... actually this makes it twice in a row as it had won in 2014 as well).

An article in June's Engine Technology International puts some figures to the case for turbos. Apparently, even the worst turbocharged engine will get you an honest mean effective pressure of 15 bar. Put into other words, these low end turbocharged engines already put out a specific power of 100 kW/liter, which is roundabout the same figure the best NA engines muster today.

There's really no competition, or is there ? What can possibly compete?

Electric superchargers are independent of parasitic losses but lose a ton of power in energy conversion. Further, they are only transient devices. Commercial entries to "electric boosters" have been labeled a scam. They don't work.

PHEVs offer promise, since they supply instant torque on startup and eliminate the need for turbo assisted low speed torque. Hybrids also cut back on range anxiety since you can technically always fall back on an IC engine. However, battery costs are looking prohibitive for most people right now. In countries like the U.A.E where I live, the electric infrastructure is only starting to pop up, and in minuscule amounts.

At some point in the next few years, I'll buy a new car and it won't be special to tell others it's turbocharged.  I'll most likely get disgusted looks if I say it's NA.

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Ward's 10 best engines of 2015 (link) :

127-kW Electric Motor (BMW i3 electric vehicle)
6.2L OHV V-8 (Chevrolet Corvette Stingray)
6.2L Supercharged OHV V-8 (Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat)
1.0L Turbocharged DOHC 3-cyl. (Ford Fiesta)
100-kW Fuel Cell (Hyundai Tucson FCV)
1.5L Turbocharged DOHC 3-cyl. (Mini Cooper)
3.0L Turbodiesel DOHC V-6 (Ram 1500 EcoDiesel)
2.0L Turbocharged DOHC H-4 (Subaru WRX)
1.8L Turbocharged DOHC 4-cyl. (Volkswagen Golf)
2.0L Turbocharged  DOHC 4-cyl. (Volvo S60)

Possibilities in Automobile Hacking

Image courtesy : Koscher, Checkoway et al

Last month, I sat among a crowd of about a hundred at the Dubai Silicon Oasis HQ listening intently to a technical presentation from Audi Middle East on the technologies that go into their cars. Though the presentation had much more of a marketing component to it than the engineering type technical, you immediately got a sense of how dramatically Audi is transforming the car as we know it into a near autonomous system that augments the driver's limited capabilities.

Then I managed to get up and ask the presenter a question : "Does Audi really believe that more systems automation is the way to go in this age of vulnerabilities?" I didn't get a clear answer, and I think he replied something to the effect of 'we have been testing this extensively, it is reliable, safe' yada yada.

Car manufacturers have enough technology in the books to be able to clutch the control from you if you slept over your wheel and shifted lanes by accident. or to monitor the full 360 degree spectrum around your car ultrasonically to regulate vehicular distances, or to auto-pilot a parking maneuver into a very tiny space without you ever having to be present inside. Some technologies are deemed too immature to release yet, but manufacturers have already done a chunk of the thinking work. Implementation could be a few years away.

Last year, while traveling on an interstate trip across the eastern United States, I wondered what the car I
was driving would be doing deep inside it without my knowledge. I imagined the millions of lines of software routines flickering as they ran, hundreds of packets of information being driven on information highways from one control unit to another, the systems watching with precision every sensor on the car and taking in information to decide what to do. Wheel speed, steering angle, in-cabin temperature, door locks, air bags, lights, tire pressure, radio volume, exhaust temperatures....nothing was not known.

The longest trip I ever made in those days was a 10 hour straight slog with one rest stop. I'm not boasting about it. It came out of necessity to get to a certain place quickly. It tested the very core of endurance of my mind and with some hesitation I must admit I closed my eyes momentarily on more than a few occasions only to wake up with a split second bang realizing that I'm still in control of a 3000 pound vehicle moving at 70 mph.

This is the American way for hundreds of people and making use of the vast road networks to drive from one state to the other is a matter of pride and heritage. Flying is objectionable to many, even if it sounds an odd idea to be hauling your disheveled self from one time zone to the other surviving on highway Burger King. I can't blame them as a foreigner. You actually tend to like having this libery to travel far and wide and if you will allow me, its probably the most enjoyable way to see America.

Some select few have a job to do a trip across the entire continent in 5-10 days. They are called truck drivers and they haul hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cargo to make the Walmarts and Office Depots work. When diesel fuel picks up its pump price, guess who gets hurt most? Yes, its that fleet of semi trucks who are helping fire up the economy indirectly.

Back to the episode when I shut my eyes while driving. Boy, did those instances frighten me that I had to stop and get coffee. Sitting in a 24 hour Dunkin Donuts at midnight sipping the damn drug and looking at my watch, I invited possibilities that this wheeled machine should be automatically controlled from time to time. Or maybe all the time while I could catch the Z.

Sounds like a far fetched idea but OEM's know what I've already been thinking, except they started the thinking decades back.

But every good story needs a villian and drumroll, then came along the hackers. We owe it to these guys for making a mockery out of systems and exposing their security flaws. There is hardly any sarcasm here because if hackers didn't do what they did, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting with the 11th step in evolution of the Windows operating system. I could have the most secure piece of software there ever was, or I could be wrong. I'll wait till I get hacked.

However, unlike computer operating systems which have matured over several decades, vehicles do not apparently have a parallel idea of access control rights in their CAN protocol. Or they don't implement the full spirit of the automotive standards. I was surprised to glean this information while going through paper on the security analysis of a modern automobile.

The authors of the said paper manage to experimentally verify that anybody could reflash, i.e load a piece of potentially malicious code into a car's telematics unit without the need for authenticating! They also showed how it was possible to drive a car on an airport runway at 40mph and do various things to it remotely while it was moving, like killing the engine or preventing the brakes from activating regardless of foot pressure on the pedals.  Fewer than 200 lines of code added to their software, which they creatively named CarShark, could activate a door lock sequence and kill the engine.

It may sound scary. To me, it sounds like a fantastic theme for a short sci-fi story.

This occurred to me while I was driving to work. I imagined the plight of a private detective in a bustling metropolis bulging with traffic on the primary arterial road connection who had to sit waiting in his car on most days for hours in slow moving traffic...until one day he asks himself why on earth are these accidents happening on very select times, i.e rush hour. He decides to investigate.

He had heard various things that the cities coffers were drying up, the metro line wasn't making money, tourism had gone down and a new wireless toll system was announced by the state department. Connected? Sure.

Through a maze of cover ups and paper trails, he discovers that an unknown branch of the city's huge police department had an interesting tie-up with a technology startup known for industrial automation who as it turns out operated under a strange name purportedly selling softdrinks. Together, they entered into a undercover program wherein ordinary looking cars on the roadway would be wirelessly made to crash timing it flawlessly with the peak rush hour. The accordion effect would extend many kilometers down causing a traffic jam and while everyone stood still in their spots until the roadway cleared, the city made thousands from the automated toll gate.

Wishful as it sounds, you don't need a lot of money to do this as we learn that Spanish hackers manage to do such things on a car with just $20 dollars worth of parts. Gulp hard.

It is a given that the development of any technology must harbor a strategic element about what to do when that piece of technology is made to act in off-design conditions. Could it damage property? Could it injure, maim or kill someone?

Given that computers are an all pervasive phenomenon whether it be a watch or a washing machines, whether they are at home, in your cars, in a chemical refinery or a nuclear power plant, unscrupulous elements will tirelessly work at taking advantage of loopholes to disrupt its function.  Let's appreciate the time and costs of developing and testing such systems to perform in the most safe way possible. 

The Devil is in the Details : If Everyone Drove a Tesla Now

During the winter of 2013, I had the pleasure of visiting the Detroit North American Auto Show to take sight of the new Corvette Stingray. But while there, I had the ability to see first hand that car makers were trying desperately to up fuel mileage and bring emissions down. As you walked the isles from one car to the other, almost every model and its EPA sticker made you believe it was doing the best thing to save the world.

I will not forget the experience of test driving the Nissan Leaf and a Toyota Prius. While both cars made you feel you were in an over-sized golf cart, the Prius just signaled it bit late, however that transition between IC engine to battery was so flawless you'd have to listen in hard to make out any signs of a hybrid beneath the hood.

Marketing is central to pushing these cars out to market. And perhaps no one is doing it better in the auto market than Tesla. After all, Elon Musk has achieved enough orders that you have to sit 3 months in a waiting list to purchase a $73,000 vehicle! A classy, exclusive panacea to the vehicular emissions issue!

I remember visiting the decorated Model S booth and looking with much interest at this vehicle. Sitting there in an obscure corner of the exhibition hall far away from the GMCs, Dodges and Chevys, it was bright red, its hood wide open showing a luggage compartment. The interior dashboard looking like something out of a sci-fi movie, showing point to point statistics about everything on the car on a generous 17" touchscreen display. And no sir, no petrol here. Just a charging port in the side. You connected it to a wall.

What I was looking at that day was an idea. I was told with this idea, you could travel 300 miles on 85KWh Li-Ion battery that was neatly tucked under the floor board. So in effect, all it took to transport yourself from A-B was 283 Wh/mile. Until I took the fun out of everything and asked the Tesla "model specialist" 'c'mon what are the actual figures?', battery reliability, cold weather issues warranty, insurance and so on.

Interestingly, actual studies have shown the Tesla marketing figures to be somewhat of a myth. Apparently, if you drove this vehicle in cold weather, you'd achieve more like 225 miles on the same 85kWh battery. Now consider the charging efficiency of a lithium ion battery (85%) while pulling out from a 240V wall AC source, you'd notice that the car performance was more in the mid to upper 300's in Wh/mile driven (actual data logged figures are much higher for these charging losses if you look at the attached spreadsheet from EngineerMom).









The other pesky issue not advertised is lovingly termed Vampire Load by Tesla users. If you took into account the battery drain of a 9000 type 8650 Li-Ion battery that this vehicle uses while it is is not in use you'd need the equivalent of around 600 Wh of charge from your wall to drive a mile.

Most importantly, electricity for mass consumption is from a porfolio of technologies, but popularly coal and natural gas. If you are plugging in your Tesla to the wall socket, you are still getting electricity from a non-renewable source. Consider also that the CO2 emissions of producing a Li-Ion battery is a finite amount, not zero.  In other words, the well to wheel emissions cost of a Tesla is not zero, infact one estimation says that some 540 g of effective CO2/mile emissions is involved in driving one. The same report put that figure higher than that of a Jeep Cherokee SUV, which emits 443g per mile, and close to that of the massive Ford Expedition, which emits 556g of CO2 per mile driven!

With all the inclusive losses, you'd have to be charging your car more than what you thought you would be when you bought it. Never mind the rise in your monthly electric bill. If an entire community of say 1000 had Teslas and plugged it to their conventional electric grids, would the grid cope? What would be the jump in base loads at night? And how much more CO2 would be emitted from the invisible tailpipe if you will, while the owners slept?

The main meat I wanted to capture in this post is that it is not so much that the new technology in the Tesla is bad. It is absolutely visionary. However, when you use a new system with an unsustainable infrastructure, perhaps the end result is still an unsustainable system. Hopefully, when our shift to renewables look financially competitive and technologically rewarding, the Tesla will be of far bigger appeal than it is today and without doubt, the numbers coming out significantly better. This is inherently an energy source problem. As you can see, it all comes back in a circle, knocking on the same issue : where do we get our energy from.