ideas for a new type of car??

lalababa

I'd imagine most car owners are sick of paying out money to fix electronic problems especially fault codes that have to be read by a main stealer. What I'd like to see is a new retro car to be made taking some of the more practical modern advances but making a very simple car like one from the late 80's early 90's. An example would be a car
1. Without electric windows
2. Without engine codes i.e. ECU?
3 With fuel injection
4. Electric mirrors...etc.
5.aaaaahhhh what else? I'd like to hear from you about this and can we keep ABS if we get rid of ECU ...and so on..

CiniO

lalababa wrote: »

I'd imagine most car owners are sick of paying out money to fix electronic problems especially fault codes that have to be read by a main stealer. What I'd like to see is a new retro car to be made taking some of the more practical modern advances but making a very simple car like one from the late 80's early 90's. An example would be a car
1. Without electric windows
2. Without engine codes i.e. ECU?
3 With fuel injection
4. Electric mirrors...etc.
5.aaaaahhhh what else? I'd like to hear from you about this and can we keep ABS if we get rid of ECU ...and so on..

How would you have fuel injection if you want to get rid of ECU... You'd need a carburetor then.
CO2 emission would be above any norms, and that kind of car would never be allowed for production.

If you have problems with electrics, just learn about them yourself. You can easily diagnose and fix them yourself with some knowledge and some equipment.

Or just buy a well kept car from 80's or 90's.

mathepac

CiniO wrote: »

How would you have fuel injection if you want to get rid of ECU... You'd need a carburetor then.
...

Bosch mechanical fuel-injection systems were used by Porsche until the 1970's and Alfa Romeo used a similar Italian-designed system until the 1980's. None of the cars had what we would recognise today as an ECU.

lalababa

you can have mechanical fuel injection like in a spitfire, or a return to the more simple ecus of the late 80's early 90's early 00's. Maybe have electric motors with no ecus?
What about airbags ?
I also like chrome on a car. Where is all the chrome gone?
And leather interiors from all the cattle in Ireland?;)

Cosmo K

But I like electric windows..........

lalababa

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

johnos1984

I believe what your talking about is called a TaTa NANO

Alanstrainor

lalababa wrote: »

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

This has never happened to me!

stevenmu

Rather than throwing out all of the modern advances because they're too complicated, what's really needed is to simplify them. Cars and their components need to be made more transparent and demystified.

Modern ECUs can detect pretty much anything that goes wrong in a modern car. Instead of requiring a relatively obscure cable (OBD) and sometimes expensive software (I don't know if the free ones are any good?) to read obscure codes; wouldn't it be much better to use a connection based on common standards such as a regular USB or network cable or even bluetooth, with software freely available from the manufacturers to get the error code and provide detailed messages. These days it would even be extremely cheap to build in a simple touch screen which could be fed data from the ECU and display detailed help and error info.

These days people regularly perform relatively complex tasks online and on computers every day with barely any thought. Getting online, signing up for an email address, registering with boards.ie and starting this thread is several magnitudes of order more complicated than removing an inner door panel and swapping out an electric window motor. Or at least the former is much more complicated than the latter needs to be, for e.g. why could the inner door panel not be easily user removable, and why could the motor not be some standardised part easily available through many suppliers and be designed to be just popped out and a replacement slid in.

The computer industry in particular has put a lot of effort into making very complex tasks easy and accessible to anybody. It needed to do this in order to drive more widespread adoption and make more money. Unfortunately this is not the case with car manufacturers, in fact they make lots of money selling proprietary diagnostic equipment and selling service information, and the dealer networks they rely on make a large portion of their profits from charging people €300 to replace a simple little electric motor. Even the OBD standards required legislation to compel manufacturers to comply.

The problem isn't that cars have gotten more complex, the problem is that the manufacturers don't simplify them for the end user, and have a vested interest in not doing so.

Wibbs

stevenmu wrote: »

The problem isn't that cars have gotten more complex, the problem is that the manufacturers don't simplify them for the end user, and have a vested interest in not doing so.

This is it in a nutshell. They want to remove the non approved dealer and defo the home mechanic as much as possible without being too obvious about it. Look under the bonnet of the average car today. Acres of black plastic to disguise the fact you have a big lump of oily bits. It looks more like a plug in module than an engine.

They could quite easily make more robust systems. They could certainly make the systems more standardised. Like stevenmu you wouldnt need to get rid of the advancements doing so either.

To be fair cars while getting more complex have gotten more reliable. Much more. A driver of the 70's was much more au fait with the oily bits. You had to be. They were much less a jump in and go notion than a modern car. IMHO this was a good thing as people were more aware on average of what a car was all about. How many average people have a tyre pressure guage these days? They lasted a shorter time too. A 5 year old car was an old car. A 10 year old was positively fossilised. Now you see 10+ year old cars all the time. Rust proofing alone was often an afterthought, if present at all.

The other aspect of this is the extra weight of all this stuff. Cars have gotten a lot more bloated in the last 20 odd years. Go to any classic car meet and look at the average family cars of the 70's/80's. They were smaller. Look at a Golf Gti mark 1 and look at the latest one(mark 6?). Bloat takes away from fuel efficiency, increases manufacturing (and scrappage) costs and longevity as there is more to go wrong. For all the talk of the green movement, a lighter, simpler car made from better materials that lasts for an average of 15 years is gonna be more "green" than any prius.

colm_mcm

The aygo-c1-107 is a good example of a car made simply.

bonzodog2

My $0.02 - Dual-Mass Flywheels. Its like more-to-go-wrong on a stick, IMHO.

mawk

lalababa wrote: »

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

You got taken pretty hard.. That happened to me too. I bought a door in a breakers yard for about 30e and pulled put the motor and swapped them. Total time ~ an hour. How long was your car in the garage?

woody33

The Spitfire had a carb, but the Messerscmitt 109 had injection, was able to pull negative Gs without fuel starvation and so could turn faster than the Spit. And (trivia) the BMW logo is a stylised propellor.

pajo1981

lalababa wrote: »

I'd imagine most car owners are sick of paying out money to fix electronic problems

You would be imagining wrongly then.

Cars despite being more sophisticated, are more reliable than ever.

fonecrusher1

lalababa wrote: »

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

To be honest with you, if i was quoted that figure, i'd have a go at fixing it myself.

I know its not the same but i sorted a rear window wiper on my last car.

Eric Cartman

lalababa wrote: »

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

most likely a mechanical problem with the motors gearbox rather than an electrical problem, manual windows fail too ...

cars are more reliable than ever, and the problem is the more you simplify a car the harder it is to maintain , thanks to the ECU mechanics can now pinpoint problems using OBD code readers , and users know when the check engine or oil pressure or airbag light comes on that theres a problem, before all that youd have to know what you were at with a car . if your idea was built, the only people whod be able to keep the car going reliably would be mechanics or enthusiasts who knew what they were at....but theyd take a stab at fixing electrical problems in modern cars anyway, so no real advantage

peasant

Eric Cartman wrote: »

thanks to the ECU mechanics can now ...

...keep swapping (expensive) components until the fault disappears :D:D

The problem is though that with modern emission rules a simply mechanic, non ECU controlled engine is no longer feasible. We need zillions of sensors and electronics to keep the engines running clean

Eric Cartman

peasant wrote: »

...keep swapping (expensive) components until the fault disappears :D:D

The problem is though that with modern emission rules a simply mechanic, non ECU controlled engine is no longer feasible. We need zillions of sensors and electronics to keep the engines running clean

or dipetane

shedweller

I think this is one area where EV's will do very well. There are far less things to go wrong. And i reckon that is one reason why there is such resistance to EV's.
I agree with the point that modern cars are more reliable though. Old cars were easy to work on and it was just as well! I grew up looking at my dad under the bonnet of an escort mk2. Manys the cold night i spent holding a light so he could minimise grazed knuckles!
Having said that, modern cars are a pain to work on. Like the issue of headlights that was brought up here recently. There is no need for that.
All the designing that goes into cars seems to make sure that you have to be "in the know" to fix it. And that means main dealers.
As has been said a few posts ago, this is deliberate.
If any of you has seen a discovery documentary about submarine building you will remember how it is designed on computer. They make a point of making it in such a way that it can be repaired easily by a (normal sized) person. They even have a computerised man that they can insert and see if he has room to work!

I must also say that CO2 emissions are directly related to fuel consumed. So an old banger doing 30mpg knocks out the same CO2 as a new car doing the same mpg.
Thats not to say that carbs are great or anything. I'm only sayin.....

mickdw

lalababa wrote: »

I love electric windows getting stuck open and paying a main stealer 300 euro for a motor and labour. I don't like winding up and down a non electric window for eternity.

Happened me on just out of warranty Audi. Seeing as I had no option but to remove door card and wind up glass on a wet evening, I decided to complete the job myself. Audi were quoting 200 for the regulator required. They covered a large portion of this though as they are all failing.
Handy enough job although northern Ireland Dealer insisted that due to electronics attached to regulator, that I would need to replace both front door regulators in order for them to talk to each other. On investigation I found zero electronics on actual regulator so he was clearly talking sh1t. Job was fine.

bobdole968

bring back the 190e
solid reliable car no bull**** electronics or unnecessary crap
i think it was around 1992/3 they shut down the plants.