If you watch old westerns, the doors on a saloon (the bar) swing outward from the center as someone walked through them.
The name was originally given to cars that have normal opening front doors and suicide rear doors which would have a similar appearance when you opened them. Eventually it started being applied to any 4 door regardless of how the doors opened.
The expression "dog's breakfast" is also correct - the OED lists it as being first used in 1892 (vs. 1933 for "pig's breakfast"): "dog's breakfast n. slang (in early use only similative) a confused mess; = dog's dinner n." http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56405#eid6367451
What difference should this classification make compared to existing car legislation?
Among the financial advantages mentioned on the Wikipedia article, only the VAT (presumably?) break has meaning in Europe, or at least in France, since the other advantages are either on taxes or requirements that don't exist here (weight tax, road tax, adequate parking requirement) or insurance (which already depends on engine power here).
It seems to be closer to the existing license-less car category, actually (which are also limited to 50 km/h and barred from entering highways).
Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less (or, my preference, large SUVs taxed more). You use less road space, less parking space, less materials, so that is a reasonable tax policy. The UK has a road tax which could cover this, but VAT could also be used to tax the car less at time of purchase.
Current cars have settled on a certain size, for historical reasons. In fact they seem to be getting a bit bigger. But there's no particular reason for a car to be bigger than a single human being, or other sizes (two humans + one suitcase perhaps). We can use the tax system to change that for the better.
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky unproven idea either. Kei cars are hugely popular in Japan, demonstrating that the market exists.
They're pretty practical - I've driven in a 6 seat Kei-car in Japan, and there are Kei vans and Kei flatbed delivery trucks (all fitting into the smaller dimensions).
> Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less (or, my preference, large SUVs taxed more).
What would the benefit of this be? You do not get anything by saving space because the car still takes up the same space on a parking lot. It's not taking up half the space so you can fit two cars there.
> This isn't a pie-in-the-sky unproven idea either. Kei cars are hugely popular in Japan, demonstrating that the market exists.
But that's because the economics in Japan are completely different. None of the reasons why people buy kei cars would make any sense in Europe. People buy cars here because they travel distances and they don't want to die in the process. Kei cars (same with moped cars or what you want to call them) are death traps on highways. If you are in cities in Europe you don't drive a car anyways.
Here's one thing: a vehicle's wear-and-tear on the road is an exponential function of its mass. A vehicle that's twice as big does around 4 times as much damage to the road, leading to cracks, potholes and asphalt crumbling. That, in turn, reduces the lifespan of the roadway and requires an expensive resurfacing sooner than if more people were driving smaller cars.
Kei cars will never drive on roads where the cost of the road maintanance is high: highways. If you would start doing that the cost of dealing with all the dead and seriously insured people would be reason alone to ban them. That's what we did with most. Japan is not Europe.
If someone crashes into you with a heavier car, then that's the responsibility of the owner of the heavy car - just like if you knock over a cyclist (or it should be). The ideal would be everyone driving slower in smaller cars, since reducing kinetic energy saves lives. To achieve that you reduce taxes on the smaller cars and increase taxes on the heavier cars and cars that drive at higher speeds. And change the law so if you kill someone with your big, heavy car, you get a more serious punishment.
It's the end of days for human-driven cars anyway. With self driving cars, it seems as if the cars will be bought and owned mainly by large companies (and hired out to end users), so the companies will be able to experiment much more aggressively with different designs and force manufacturers to make them.
Insurances and the state need to pay for this which is why kei style cars are outlawed on most roads in europe. Don't forget that the speed likit anywhere in japan is 60km/h so the problem does not exist there. The speed limit in europe on highways is 130.
If there was a market for kei cars they would exist.
HGVs already pay annual vehicle tax based on their mass, whether it has "road-friendly suspension" and the number of axles. See page 3 of this document:
Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less (or, my preference, large SUVs taxed more).
Norway essentially does this. Taxes are based on engine size and (I believe) weight. The relative price difference between a large SUV and a small, low horsepower, hatchback is much greater than in most other countries. However based on casual observations in and around Oslo, it doesn't seem to have a huge effect on the size of cars people drive.
The real effect is the 'everybody' owns a Tesla since they are exempt for many taxes and thus cost literally half the price of an equivalently performing petrol powered car.
It used to be based on engine size; for years I would get cars with as small engines as possible, simply because it would drop my tax by about 1/3.
As for car sizes... it does seem to be having an effect here. A lot of people I know go for small cars, preferring the little five-door hatchbacks. My last one was a Honda Jazz, with a 1.2 litre engine and an absurd amount of space inside; under the new tax system it'd be classed in category D (£110 a year), but I'd be totally unsurprised if the next model made it into category C (£30 a year). My father has a diesel Nissan Note, about the same size, and that is in category C. He's very smug.
Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less
Isn't his accomplished more easily and enforceably by taxing energy? Presumably using less energy correlates with smaller vehicles. You also get the benefit of reducing energy use.
Most people remember the analogy that if car engines had progressed at the same rate as computing then a rolls Royce would run at 100,000 km/h and have an engine the size of this full stop. Or something similar.
Ironically, it seems we're now at the end of the internal combustion era and the abacus makers are desperately trying to refine a soon to be redundant craft.
Unless a breakthrough in battery design happens we're far from the end of the combustion engine era. And with oil prices tanking the price difference between a conventional and an electric car still looks unreasonable for most people.
I think it will be a long time (100 years) until ICE's get replaced in semi trucks and container ships. The energy storage requirements are massive, and batteries for such applications have a much harder time justifying themselves.
While the technical hurdles may be surmountable, the political issues are probably intractable.
About the only viable green solution for container ships is going back to sails. Some ships already fly sails (really kites) to reduce their fuel costs, but it's not practical as the ship's only propulsion.
The best solution is probably to switch ships over to burning natural gas or biodiesel instead of filthy heavy fuel oil, but the cost structure is all wrong for this right now.
3d printing a whole engine must surely enable some impressive things. I remember watching a little demonstration using machine learning for the engine timing once you can get the belts out.
I recently switched from a 15 yrs old VW Golf IV with 1.6l and 100HP to a 2009 Tiguan with just 1.4l but 150HP.
I can't say that it has a better mileage but the power is there, the 50% more HP makes a real difference. I was really skeptical at the beginning, but the progress in engine design is indeed visible.
So "PS" is metric for horsepower. Who knew. (it's German for horsepower, but German horses are just as powerful as imperial ones, and not particularly metric: PS literally means "Pferdestärken", i.e. "horse-powers")
Unfortunately they're not just as powerful. Things couldn't possibly be that simple. An imperial horsepower is about 746W, whereas a "metric" horsepower is about 735W. This will make the "metric" figure look slightly overstated if you're assuming the imperial one.
>Three-cylinder engines have a tendency to rock backwards and forwards around the middle cylinder. Carmakers have come up with a number of ways to absorb the vibrations and make sure such engines don’t shake, rattle and roll.
I'm skeptical how effective that is. Smells like planned obsolescence.
>These include more new materials, such as what the industry calls diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings for the surfaces of moving parts.
"Diamond like" sounds nice. But it's soluble to steel. I'd prefer Boron Nitride or TiN by physical vapor deposition. But if other contact surface is coated, then you might be able to use that DLC stuff. But if I recall correctly, it's wear characteristics are not that miraculous in bearings.
> I'm skeptical how effective that is. Smells like planned obsolescence.
I'm not sure why it smells like that to you. Perhaps the word "absorb" is insufficiently precise. The correct term is perhaps "counterbalance", and it's purely mechanical. Some modern parts have fluid chambers and flexible rubber components to damp oscillation, but that's not "planned obsolescence" because the parts will very likely outlast the rest of the car.
Four cylinders is inherently more balanced than three. Fatigue is the second worst killer of mechanisms, right after corrosion. Vibration causes fatigue. The best ideas to balance inherently unstable engine involve balancing axle. But even they usually are not as good as inherently balanced.
But the entire point is that they've invented a novel mechanism for counterbalancing vibrations that are unique to the three cylinder. When you do that, you reduce vibration. This reduces fatigue.
It's worth noting as well that there's no such thing as "inherently balanced" when you're talking about ICEs (except perhaps the inline 6). Four-cylinders are inherently balanced in one mode (first harmonic), imbalanced in another (secondary imbalance), and exhibit torsional effects that may as well be imbalance.
You have point there. No ICE is really balanced, there are 16(?) different vibration modes and the best boxer 6 engines can deal with maybe 4 of them.
I have pretty strong gut feeling that the 1st harmonic is more important than the 15 other modes combined. This far engines with odd numbers of pistons have been exception. Until we go to single row star engines, but they got replaced pretty quickly with two row star engines. Which can take the 1st harmonic into account.
42 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] threadThe name was originally given to cars that have normal opening front doors and suicide rear doors which would have a similar appearance when you opened them. Eventually it started being applied to any 4 door regardless of how the doors opened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
Among the financial advantages mentioned on the Wikipedia article, only the VAT (presumably?) break has meaning in Europe, or at least in France, since the other advantages are either on taxes or requirements that don't exist here (weight tax, road tax, adequate parking requirement) or insurance (which already depends on engine power here).
It seems to be closer to the existing license-less car category, actually (which are also limited to 50 km/h and barred from entering highways).
Current cars have settled on a certain size, for historical reasons. In fact they seem to be getting a bit bigger. But there's no particular reason for a car to be bigger than a single human being, or other sizes (two humans + one suitcase perhaps). We can use the tax system to change that for the better.
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky unproven idea either. Kei cars are hugely popular in Japan, demonstrating that the market exists.
They're pretty practical - I've driven in a 6 seat Kei-car in Japan, and there are Kei vans and Kei flatbed delivery trucks (all fitting into the smaller dimensions).
What would the benefit of this be? You do not get anything by saving space because the car still takes up the same space on a parking lot. It's not taking up half the space so you can fit two cars there.
> This isn't a pie-in-the-sky unproven idea either. Kei cars are hugely popular in Japan, demonstrating that the market exists.
But that's because the economics in Japan are completely different. None of the reasons why people buy kei cars would make any sense in Europe. People buy cars here because they travel distances and they don't want to die in the process. Kei cars (same with moped cars or what you want to call them) are death traps on highways. If you are in cities in Europe you don't drive a car anyways.
It's the end of days for human-driven cars anyway. With self driving cars, it seems as if the cars will be bought and owned mainly by large companies (and hired out to end users), so the companies will be able to experiment much more aggressively with different designs and force manufacturers to make them.
If there was a market for kei cars they would exist.
But yeah, kei style cars are redundant in Europe because bikes, scooters , minis, nowadays car sharing, public transport and more space exist.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
(Edit: I should say ... in the UK. No idea about other EU countries)
Norway essentially does this. Taxes are based on engine size and (I believe) weight. The relative price difference between a large SUV and a small, low horsepower, hatchback is much greater than in most other countries. However based on casual observations in and around Oslo, it doesn't seem to have a huge effect on the size of cars people drive.
The real effect is the 'everybody' owns a Tesla since they are exempt for many taxes and thus cost literally half the price of an equivalently performing petrol powered car.
https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...
It used to be based on engine size; for years I would get cars with as small engines as possible, simply because it would drop my tax by about 1/3.
As for car sizes... it does seem to be having an effect here. A lot of people I know go for small cars, preferring the little five-door hatchbacks. My last one was a Honda Jazz, with a 1.2 litre engine and an absurd amount of space inside; under the new tax system it'd be classed in category D (£110 a year), but I'd be totally unsurprised if the next model made it into category C (£30 a year). My father has a diesel Nissan Note, about the same size, and that is in category C. He's very smug.
Isn't his accomplished more easily and enforceably by taxing energy? Presumably using less energy correlates with smaller vehicles. You also get the benefit of reducing energy use.
Ironically, it seems we're now at the end of the internal combustion era and the abacus makers are desperately trying to refine a soon to be redundant craft.
About the only viable green solution for container ships is going back to sails. Some ships already fly sails (really kites) to reduce their fuel costs, but it's not practical as the ship's only propulsion.
The best solution is probably to switch ships over to burning natural gas or biodiesel instead of filthy heavy fuel oil, but the cost structure is all wrong for this right now.
3d printing a whole engine must surely enable some impressive things. I remember watching a little demonstration using machine learning for the engine timing once you can get the belts out.
I can't say that it has a better mileage but the power is there, the 50% more HP makes a real difference. I was really skeptical at the beginning, but the progress in engine design is indeed visible.
The metric measure would be kW.
I'm skeptical how effective that is. Smells like planned obsolescence.
>These include more new materials, such as what the industry calls diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings for the surfaces of moving parts.
"Diamond like" sounds nice. But it's soluble to steel. I'd prefer Boron Nitride or TiN by physical vapor deposition. But if other contact surface is coated, then you might be able to use that DLC stuff. But if I recall correctly, it's wear characteristics are not that miraculous in bearings.
I'm not sure why it smells like that to you. Perhaps the word "absorb" is insufficiently precise. The correct term is perhaps "counterbalance", and it's purely mechanical. Some modern parts have fluid chambers and flexible rubber components to damp oscillation, but that's not "planned obsolescence" because the parts will very likely outlast the rest of the car.
It's worth noting as well that there's no such thing as "inherently balanced" when you're talking about ICEs (except perhaps the inline 6). Four-cylinders are inherently balanced in one mode (first harmonic), imbalanced in another (secondary imbalance), and exhibit torsional effects that may as well be imbalance.
I have pretty strong gut feeling that the 1st harmonic is more important than the 15 other modes combined. This far engines with odd numbers of pistons have been exception. Until we go to single row star engines, but they got replaced pretty quickly with two row star engines. Which can take the 1st harmonic into account.