Who is SAIC, do I hear you ask? Well, SAIC
stands for Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation which builds
the Chery brand, and right now looks to be the fastest moving car
company in the world.
Bricklin
To back that up, it has just bought around 50
percent of Ssanyong to make Ssanyong, South Korea’s fourth
largest auto manufacturer, a subsidiary of SAIC. That cost them a
cool half billion USD.
Now SAIC is looking as if it has purchased MG
Rover, the troubled British car maker steeped in history, that was
gobbled up by British Leyland, fell into foreign hands, but then
cast off by the Germans, revived by the Brits and now to become a
“chicken chow Chery” MG.
Not only that, but SAIC has now signed a joint
venture with Visionary Vehicles, a US firm headed up by Malcolm
Bricklin (remember the Bricklins?) to provide cheap cars for
America by 2007, at a proposed market price around 30 percent
cheaper than any comparable vehicles.
While all this expansion is going on, the
self-same SAIC is in the courts over copyright infringements. A
couple of months back I mentioned that SAIC was being sued by GM
Daewoo for copying the Daewoo Matiz (built by SAIC and badged as
the Chevrolet Spark) and selling it as their own branded Chery QQ.
Which then prompts the question, what model does SAIC intend to
sell to the Americans?
But while still on copyright infringements, it
is not just SAIC that has been photocopying car plans around the
Chinese countryside. ASEAN Autobiz reported in its February
edition that Honda is suing Hebei Xinkai for copying and selling a
vehicle called the SR-V, which just happens to have more than a
passing resemblance to the Honda CR-V. Toyota also claimed it got
‘xeroxed’ by the Geely group, but unhappily for the Big T,
Toyota lost the case when the Chinese courts in mainland China
deliberated on the Chinese industry’s handling of designs from
foreign devils!
Interestingly, last year 46 percent of fake
goods seized by the US Customs were of Chinese origin. In fact,
China has ranked as Number 1 in the copy goods industry for six of
the past seven years! Now there’s a great record!
What is even more disturbing is the report,
again in ASEAN Autobiz, that 40 to 50 percent of China’s auto
parts are duplicates. These include oil filters without filtering
elements, fuel filters without check valves, fuel caps that leak
in a roll-over situation and brake linings made of grass,
woodchips or cardboard!
The cheapest parts price may not be the
cheapest in the long run.
I was standing in the freezing cold at the
Wakefield Park race circuit in New South Wales, Australia,
waiting for my friend’s wife who was bringing their pick-up
over to pick us up. We waited, getting progressively colder,
until my friend yelled out in exasperation, “What’s the
problem?” “I’m waiting for the worm,” was her reply.
Remember the ‘glow-plug’ systems that
were commonly used to fire up a diesel engine when it was
cold? Usually the need to activate the glow-plug was indicated
by a red coil on the dashboard display, hence my friend’s
wife “waiting for the worm.” Since then, auto diesel
engines have become a little more user friendly!
Diesel’s
original engine.
The development of the diesel engine has
been one of experiment, failure, success, intrigue and
possibly murder most foul. That development is still going on,
though the extra-judicial killings seem to have stopped!
The name ‘diesel’ comes from a Bavarian
engineer, Rudolph Diesel (1858-1913) who developed a theory
that revolutionized the engines of his day. He proposed an
engine in which air was compressed to such a degree that this
produced an extreme rise in temperature in the cylinder. When
fuel is injected into the piston chamber at a critical point
with this air, the fuel is ignited by the high temperature,
causing an explosion to force the piston down. On February 27,
1892, Diesel filed for a patent at the Imperial Patent Office
in Germany. Within a year, he was granted Patent No. 67207 for
a “Working Method and Design for Combustion Engines - a new
efficient, thermal engine.”
Diesel demonstrated his engine at the
Exhibition Fair in Paris, France in 1898, where it used peanut
oil - now considered the “original” bio-diesel. Like many
‘visionaries’ he hoped that his invention would benefit
the ordinary man, particularly the smaller industries and
farmers, and stop the dependence upon the petroleum industry.
Unfortunately Diesel did not live long
enough to see the full force and longevity of his invention.
With the First World War looming on the horizon, Diesel did
not agree with the politics of Germany and was reluctant to
see his engine only used by their Naval fleet. With his
political support directed towards France and Britain, he was
on his way to England to arrange for them to use his engine
when he inexplicably disappeared over the side of the ship in
the English Channel. Did he jump? Or was he pushed? We will
never know. All that we do know was that this was an untimely
end for an engineering genius.
The largest problem facing the diesel
engineers was the timing of the injection of diesel fuel into
the cylinders. Too early and not enough power was produced,
and the fuel poorly burned. Too late and a similar problem
emerged.
Look
at the size of the man standing on the crankshaft!
The 1920’s brought a new injection pump
design from the Robert Bosch company, allowing the metering of
fuel as it entered the engine without the need of pressurized
air to propel the fuel mixture into the cylinder. This was a
marked improvement.
The diesel engine was now small enough to
be adapted for automotive use. 1923-1924 saw the first trucks
built and shown at the Berlin Motor Fair. In 1936, Mercedes
Benz built the first commercially produced automobile with a
diesel engine - the Type 260D.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
engineers were also refining the diesel process, with Clessie
L Cummins, a mechanic-inventor who began by looking at the
instability created by the fuel delivery system and developed
a single disk system that measured the fuel injected.
It was also during the 1920’s that diesel
engines began to use fossil fuel residue created during the
refining to produce gasoline, rather than a biomass based
fuel. The petroleum industries were growing and establishing
themselves during this period. Their cut-throat business
tactics and the financial clout of the oil industry greatly
influenced the development of all engines and machinery, and
one side effect was to relegate bio-diesel, as a fuel, to the
historical rubbish bin until ‘rediscovered’ a few years
ago, during one of the recurrent oil crises.
However, passenger vehicles were still not
using diesel engines to any great degree. Even in Europe,
where they originated, they were considered slow, noisy and
dirty. It needed something to give diesel engine technology a
boost. That boost was supplied by OPEC, the Middle Eastern
organization controlling the majority of the world’s oil.
Crude oil supplies were reduced, causing spiraling upward
price of fuel oil and a fuel crisis. This was 1973, and again
in 1978.
The buying public began to panic and diesel
fuel became popular again, being more efficient and economical
and the public began buying diesel engined automobiles. These
automobiles accounted for 85 percent of Peugeot’s sales, 70
percent of Mercedes Benz’s sales, 58 percent of Isuzu’s
sales, 50 percent of Volkswagen’s sales, plus a good portion
of Audis, Volvos and Datsuns during the 1970’s. For the
first time, an American manufacturer (General Motors) also
began producing an automobile with a diesel engine. However,
when fuel supplies returned to normal, the fickle general
public also returned to the gas-guzzlers, but all this is
starting to change.
One reason for the shift towards diesel
engines is the technology that has allowed diesel engines to
become clean, quiet and increasingly powerful. Much of this
relates to the fuel delivery system, the previous Achilles
heel of the diesel engine. The new technology is called the
Common Rail Direct Injection.
All functions in a modern engine are
controlled by the ECM communicating with an elaborate set of
sensors measuring everything from R.P.M. to engine coolant and
oil temperatures and even position in the crankshaft rotation.
(Glow plugs are rarely used today, so my mate’s wife will
have a very long wait for the ‘worm’ these days!) The ECM
senses ambient air temperature and retards the timing of the
engine in cold weather so the injector sprays the fuel at a
later time. The air in the cylinder is compressed more,
creating more heat, which aids in starting.
Common Rail systems are now the standard,
and the business to supply these systems to the manufacturers
is also highly sought after, being a growing market. Denso
Corporation has announced that it will supply its
high-pressure diesel Common Rail fuel system to Ford of
Europe, who will be using vehicles equipped with the system
starting this year. Denso Manufacturing Hungary also supplies
Toyota Motor Corporation and Isuzu Motors operations in
Europe, and supplies Nissan Europe with units built in Japan.
Denso says its system reduces diesel emissions and noise even
at low speeds and has cleared Euro IV emissions regulations.
However, Denso are only number four in the Common Rail
suppliers after Robert Bosch GmbH, Siemens VDO Automotive
Corp. and Delphi Corp.
But the forte of the diesel engine is still
in the massive power plants used in ocean going vessels, and
as an example is the enormity of the Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C
turbo-charged two-stroke diesel engine which is the most
powerful and most efficient prime-mover in the world today.
The Aioi Works of Japan builds these engines available in 6
through 14 cylinder versions.
Here are some specifications of the 14
cylinder version:-
Total engine weight: 2,300 tons (the
crankshaft alone weighs 300 tons)
Length: 89 feet
Height: 44 feet
Maximum power: 108,920 BHP at 102 rpm
Maximum torque: 5,608,312 lb/ft at 102rpm
That is an engine producing more than 100,000 BHP! Now
that’s something that Rudolph Diesel would be proud of!
