Hacker News Reader

Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

Very much off topic: 3.6l is >2 times more cylinder volume than useful in >95% of scenarios.

Pick your favorite reason to minimise your crude oil consumption. Global warming and not subsidising oil despots are two good ones to me.

View on HN

Cars are very expensive ($30k on average), and their production is a huge use of crude oil and water and electricity. What you seem to be advocating (and maybe I'm reading this wrong) is that people buy multiple cars, one small fuel efficient everyday driver, and one bigger more powerful vehicle for the 5% of the time they need something bigger than a Fiat. Humans are heavy, cargo is heavy, trailers are heavy, and furniture is big. A 1.8L engine in a subcompact can't always support those use cases.

I don't know too many people who could afford a $20k car to drive to work and then a $40k truck just to park in their garage 95% of the time. And if they can, they're buying a BMW instead.

What do you require a 3.6L for? A 1.8L will move all the cargo you care to. A 2.5L tows my 1200lb camper over high mountain passes. A big engine is really only a must if you are towing something north of a ton, as far as I'm aware.

People tend to buy more engine than they need, and 1.8L's are more powerful than ever. And nobody had 300hp thirty years ago except the sports cars. We survived.

The average American camper weighs 5,200lbs [1] completely empty. Once it's loaded with water, fuel, and gear, it's about 1,500 lbs heavier. I encourage you to find a 1.8L engine that will tow a 6,000+ lb trailer over a mountain pass.

I'm guessing the next argument will be "yeah but no one needs a 5,000 lb camper" to which I will say "why do you need a camper or car at all if you're trying to save the environment" to which the response will be "yeah but" and then I'll come back with "but no" and then I'll get yelled at by `dang so let's skip all that and say someone buying a 3.6L engine they don't need is a bad thing but so is the self-righteous idea that what works for you must always work for everyone else, and then agree that we're not going to solve the world's climate problems with throwaway HN comments.

[1] https://camperreport.com/camper-weight/

The original comment was 3.6l is >2 times more cylinder volume than useful in >95% of scenarios. Towing a large american camper would be one of those 5% of scenarios. Many people have large campers, but far far more do not.

And your comment was "A 1.8L will move all the cargo you care to", which is incorrect.

Again perhaps a bad assumption, but I generally hear "cargo" to refer to personal items that go in the car. Clothing, backpacks, shoes, groceries, books, etc. Hardly a strict definition of course, but that's what I was thinking about, not towed loads or a bedfull of dirt or construction materials, that I might call a "payload". But I hate quibbling semantics; my apologies.

And nobody had 300hp thirty years ago except the sports cars...

My first car, 45 years ago!, was a '66 Chevrolet Impala with a standard, small block, run of the mill, 283cu in. (4.6L) engine. The motor was blown so I bought a used one for $75 and swapped it out myself. Took about 6 weeks because I had never done it before.

The 283 was rated between 200 and 345hp. It was my daily driver for school (hardly a sports car) until markvdb's "oil despots" tripled the price of gas. I sold the Impala and bought a Volvo 144S with a 1.8L 4 cyl. engine.

Neither car (or engine) was ever able to get better than 25+ mpg and the Volvo made you very aware of how much power you had available.

I guess I always considered muscle cars to fall in the same basket as sports cars, and the postwar Impalas to be muscle cars. Maybe that's wrong.

My friend's father had a black '67 Buick GS400 droptop. It was a true "muscle car" in that it sucked in birds and leaves and spit out twigs and feathers. My Impala on the other hand, had a "three on the tree," a bench seat, and no a/c. But it always started in Chicago winters and ran well delivering pizzas.

You really can't compare HP ratings of cars from that era with modern cars. The old ratings were generally "gross brake horsepower" which was what you got at the crankshaft on a dyno with all the auxiliaries (oil pump, water pump, alternator, fuel pump, fan, etc) disconnected and powered separately and with special exhaust and intake arrangements, eg headers and no air filter. Modern HP is usually "SAE net horsepower" which is measured in almost an as installed in a vehicle configuration. Gross BHP significantly inflates the number.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower#SAE_gross_power

Thanks for the link DavidGould. Learnt me some I didn't know.

The '66 Impala was a heavy car and I didn't purchase it for racing. I did put a heavy duty clutch plate into it when I replaced the engine. It did burnouts just fine until I snapped the welds on the rear differential and sent the universal joint banging upward against the bottom of the car. Learned a little bit about welding, u-joints and spider gears on that one.

> I don't know too many people who could afford a $20k car to drive to work and then a $40k truck just to park in their garage 95% of the time.

You could just rent a truck when you need to transport something that's beyond the car's capabilities.

In order to show that the engines are wastefully large, you first have to show how a smaller engine provides better fuel efficiency over the 95% range, and then show how the remaining 5% is unimportant. For example, if the big engine is 5% less efficient over the power range of the little engine, but the increased max power it provides allows you to accelerate out of getting stuck in the snow, or travel at safe speeds up mountain roads, reasonable people might decide that the trade offs are acceptable.

Have you ever seen a muscle car in the snow? A big engine in a car is practical for nothing except having fun.

That’s why my car has 300hp and my next will as well. But I don’t pretend I’m saving the environment or that it’s practical.

Disagree it's off-topic. Automobile manufacturers are focused on sales and right now they are moving with the market toward SUV's. The 3.6L engine is in both GM sedans and GM SUV's. Same engine, different body style. This move by GM means they are focused on production and it's probably too expensive to retool these plants.

Very much topic-related.

Not sure where you're going with the "oil despots" statement. That seems off-topic.

Clearly, 640K is enough RAM for anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com