The world is campaigning to highlight climate change and as a result there are only three people in Washington D.C. who still don’t believe in it. The trouble is they are in charge of the free world. Or so we are told.
The net effect of this ongoing campaign to prevent global flooding and general catastrophe is that more people are showing interest in electric cars, although a large chunk of the credit has to go to Tesla Motors for making powerful “washing machine” engines.
Thanks to the fast-growing interest in electric cars, analysts are suggesting that people are holding back their new car purchase, while waiting for affordable electric cars to come into the market and this, they say, explains the steady drop in car sales.
Worse still, we are hearing major car companies like Daimler AG saying that it is cutting back on internal combustion research and development to instead focus on electric drive and self-driving car technologies.
Daimler, and its arch-rival, BMW, are known for making nice, expensive cars. But in the last two decades they have been forced to use smaller, four-cylinder engines to power their cars to comply with European emission rules and United States fuel consumption regulations. That is a sad development.
Sad, because these two companies were known for making inline six engines, and boy, were they smooth. But now we can see that larger engines are becoming even rarer as even the two marques’ limousines can now be bought with two-litre four-pots.
While it’s not good to breathe in exhaust fumes, burning less “dead dino juice” is a good way to conserve resources. We must also protect that which is equally important, silky smooth inline sixes.
I also believe in saving V8s and V12s, but they are large and expensive to build, purchase and maintain. Only serious collectors can afford them.
For the rest of us, we should do everything we can to make sure that the next classic car we buy has an inline-six engine under its bonnet.
As fans of “tinworm buffet”, we know how a straight-six engine is the best configuration for smooth and torquey engines. The only way to make that better is to add a second bank of six to make a V12.
It all has to do with harmonics and vibrations. In a four-stroke straight-six engine, there is a firing of every 120 and this results in an engine that lacks imbalances because the jolt of the power stroke is balanced out by the other pistons being in the right places.
Basically the first three pistons are moving like a mirror image of the last three pistons, one mirrors six, two mirrors five and three does the same thing as four.
Such an engine run on flat plane crankshafts, and even V12s tend to run on a flat plane crankshaft without any need for counter balance weights due to the inherent primary and secondary balance of the straight-six engine.
We have to save the straight-six engine because it is proof that we, as a species have cracked this wonderful code of universal balance in creating one of the most important technological marvels of our time, have created the internal combustion engine.
The engine is a gift and a curse. It is a gift because it allows fantastic acceleration of technology by giving humans the ability to generate mobile power.
The earth is basically a rechargeable battery that is tethered to a fast charger we call the sun. The chemical process that helps us to capture and store the sun’s energy begins with photosynthesis, which occurs in plants and trees that are then eaten by animals. As carbon-based lifeforms, we take the carbon out of the system and concentrate them into living creatures.
We can then use the concentrated carbon as firewood and petroleum, which is a by-product of long dead organisms, or coal or natural gas. When we use them we release carbon back into the atmosphere and that goes through the same process of concentration again.
Lately, it seems, we are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than before. This is leading to a change in climate, which is a natural process of rebalancing.
The problem is that the rebalancing process may see the earth’s ocean levels rising, which would inundate cities.
Electric cars will replace internal combustion engines eventually. When exactly? We don’t really know.
Therefore it is important that we save the crowning jewel of the technological leap we call the internal combustion engine.
At least when we are dead and gone, future generations will have an ancient six cylinder engine to look at and “decode”. When they finally figure out everything about the straight-six engine, they will take their hats off to their ancestors, that is us, for figuring out how to build the best power unit this side of a warp drive.
This is important because we don’t want future generations to think less of us. We want them to see just how wonderful this invention is. If they search their database they may find that the internal combustion engine has flaws, but it also has wonderful features that our descendants can discover by only having a physical example that they can start and experience.
People say internal combustion engines are not efficient because it only converts around 35 per cent to 40 per cent of the energy in the fuel to useful work. It is hard to argue with the maths but, what it doesn’t calculate is how much work is needed to make a person smile.
You see, the 60 per cent of energy that is seen as wasted through the noise, vibration and exhaust are being used up to upturn lips.
The rumble and roar of such an engine make billions of people smile; it is the reason they wake up before sunrise on the weekends to find the perfect road to drive with friends.
I believe that the internal combustion engine is more of a case of emotion over efficiency.
Twenty Formula One cars generate well over a billion happy faces on race Sundays and that, surely, is an efficient way to play with your “dead dinosaurs”.
I want future generations to start a straight-six engine a few hundred years from now and cry with joy upon hearing the sound it makes — and realise just how lucky their ancestors were.
And we are, aren’t we?