Diesels in American vehicles

If you go to Europe, you see diesel-powered vehicles everywhere. Diesel engines typically get roughly 40% better fuel economy than gasoline engines -- for example, the VW Golf gets 23/33 city/highway in gas trim, 30/42 in diesel trim.

So why aren't diesels so popular here in America? Well, let me count the ways...

1. No market for fuel economy. Fuel is $10/gallon in Europe right now. It's "only" $4/gallon here in the USA. So people don't care about fuel economy, they get the engine that's cheapest, and a gasoline engine is generally cheaper than a diesel because it doesn't have to be built as sturdy (due to lower compression and less torque).
2. Poor diesel fuel. Even current "low sulphur" diesel fuel here in the U.S. would be illegal to sell in Europe, because it still has enough sulphur in it to cause soot (the black smoke you used to see coming out of the back of diesel-powered vehicles). This in turn means it's extremely expensive to certify diesel vehicles here in America, because you must add filters and traps and possibly urea injection in order to deal with the poor fuel. Not to mention the number that the crappy diesel fuel sold here in America does to injectors and fuel pumps... you go by the VW TDI forums, you'll find that VW has been replacing thousands of fuel pumps because gas stations mixed gasoline in their diesel tanks and wrecked the lubricousity of the fuel, thereby depriving the pump of lubrication and causing it to self-destruct.
3. No volume. It costs roughly $100M to certify a new engine/transmission combination if you have to do major work to it in order to . If you sell 10,000 vehicles per year over the next 5 years with a given engine/transmission combination, that means you need to charge roughly $2,000 extra apiece to pay off the EPA certification costs. And see #1.

This situation especially pisses me off because I want to see a diesel engine in the Jeep Wrangler because the extra fuel economy would make longer expeditions more feasible. Fiat has a good 2.7L dual-turbo TDI engine that would work in the Wrangler. But they only sell 90,000 Wranglers per year so, assuming that they'd sell 10,000 diesel Wranglers per year (about what they sold the last time they put a diesel into the Grand Cherokee), it just doesn't make financial sense for them to do so. It just takes too much money, time, and effort to certify an engine/transmission combo to make it worthwhile to make a Euro-diesel engine work in a U.S. vehicle.

So next thing I'm waiting for is the 3.6L Pentastar engine to make it into the Wrangler. The Pentastar makes almost 300 horsepower. It was supposed to make it into the 2011 Wrangler but didn't, probably because it turns out that it makes too much horsepower for the old transmission and they had to use a new transmission but the new transmission is three inches longer, meaning they had to relocate the engine slightly forward to make room for the new transmission, meaning they had to put slightly longer sheetmetal on the front of the Jeep to make room for the engine being further forward, meaning it required more work than just swapping a new engine into the Wrangler. But with the 3.6L Pentastar and new sheetmetal, the Wrangler ought to get better mpg than it currently does. Not that this would be difficult... my Wrangler is averaging 12mpg in the city. Something to do with the aerodynamics of a barn door and big sticky tires...

-- Badtux the Auto Geek Penguin

50,000 miles and five years

The TuxJeep now has 50,000 miles on it and is five years old. It seems like yesterday that the silver demon forced me to bring it home, but no, it's been five years. So I'm starting to change out all the fluids, just on general principle. First up was engine oil, which had about 6,000 miles on it (max 7500 mile change interval on this engine). This weekend I swapped out two gallons of coolant for two gallons of 50/50 Zerex G-05 HOAT and distilled water, just to start the process of refreshing its anti-corrosion properties.

Now, a note about anti-freeze. There's basically three kinds of antifreeze out there. The first kind is the old-fashioned green shit that has to be changed every year and which causes deposits in your radiator if you mix it with anything other than distilled water. This is what's available at your local Wal-mart. The second kind is the GM OAT (Organic Acid Technology) coolant, which is dyed orange, which has a bad tendency to eat pot metal parts of your engine such as the thermostat housing. This is *also* available at your local Wal-mart. The third type is a hybrid, HOAT, which has silicates to protect pot metal but also has the long-lasting organic acids to combat corrosion of the other metals in your engine. Ford and Chrysler have settled on this one for their new cars, both use Zerex G-05 HOAT coolant, dyed yellow for Ford (and for the aftermarket), pink for Chrysler. (Yes, *PINK* -- there are sources on the web that say that Chrysler's HOAT is dyed orange like GM's OAT, but the factory fill in my Jeep was quite blaringly PINK). Unfortunately only professional auto parts places like NAPA and Carquest, or dealerships, carry the HOAT coolant -- unlike the OAT or the green shit, you can't get it at Wally World or Auto Drone. And it's *expensive*, $15/gallon at NAPA...

So why is this important? Well, first of all, don't put the orange shit into your car unless that's what your car came with. OAT works by allowing the metals to corrode, then bonding with the corrosion to form a film. Thing is, some metals don't corrode with the correct chemistry for OAT to bond with to create the anti-corrosion film, and you end up with Bad Things Happening. So only cars designed for OAT (i.e. with the correct metal alloys exposed to its cooling system) should get OAT. But if your car came with OAT, you should stick with OAT for one good reason: all other chemistries will, over the long term, clog up your radiator and cooling system with silicate deposits. Only OAT is guaranteed to never do that, for the simple reason that it has no silicates.

Secondly: For everything else, HOAT is the correct thing to use. I've talked to people who restore old cars. To a man they recommend HOAT for *everything*, because it stops corrosion without unduly clogging up your cooling system and is safe for *all* metals, not just the ones that OAT chemistry was designed to bond with. Which is why any shop worth its salt should have only two coolant types in its quiver: the GM Dex-Cool OAT (orange), and the Zerex G-05 HOAT (yellow). The green shit should be consigned to history along with leaded gas and carburetors, it just doesn't work as well as the new stuff. Yet the green stuff is still the most common coolant even shops put into cars... despite the fact that it's crap. But it's cheap. Which is all that counts when someone cares more about profit than about their car's lifespan.

So anyhow I scored some Zerex G-05 (yellow) for about $5 a gallon less than the pink-dyed MOPAR HOAT at the Chrysler dealership (pink), so now have kind of pinkish-yellow coolant in my Jeep (since the cooling system holds a total of about 2.65 gallons and I put a little less than 2 gallons of coolant into it, the rest was in the heater core and other places in the cooling system). Note that the G-05 *IS* the MOPAR coolant, Zerex simply dyes it pink rather than yellow. It seems that pink is a stronger color than yellow, so 3/4th gallon of pink makes 2 gallons of yellow pinker than you'd think. Curious, eh? So anyhow, mixing G-05 with G-05 should be fine, I just refreshed the anticorrosion package with my infusion. Since I only changed out around 2/3rds of the coolant with the radiator and reservoir change, I'll go ahead and do it again in around three years, since I put around three years worth of anticorrosion additives in there with the new coolant.

Next thing I did was change the front differential fluid. I had two quarts of Royal Purple 75W140 left over from my last differential fluid change, and used that. What I discovered inside the differential was that the old Royal Purple fill had sludged up a little since my last change of the front differential fluid, at 20,000 miles. So this is the last time I'm filling with the Royal Purple, the next fill is going to be the Mobile 1 75W140 synthetic. I've already purchased the Mobile 1 plus the limited slip additive for the rear differential and will be changing that out shortly.

Some other fluids that can be changed:

1. Brake fluid -- probably the most important one to change. Chrysler uses low-spec DOT 3 brake fluid. Going to DOT 3/4 should get me better specs as well as get rid of any moisture that's accumulated in the system over the past five years. I have a Mitey-vac vacuum pump somewhere, I need to find it (haven't used it since I moved to the "new" place eight months ago)...
2. Transmission fluid -- this uses Synchromesh fluid. Chrysler doesn't even have a fill spec on this, it's supposedly a "lifetime" fluid. Probably going to leave this alone for now, and change it at 90,000 miles just on general principles.
3. Transfer case fluid -- this uses ATF+4 automatic transmission fluid, which is good stuff (much better than the old GM Dexron III from days of yore). It's spec'ed to be changed at 80,000 miles. Won't hurt to change it anytime between now and then.
4. Power steering fluid -- this, alas, got changed last year when the moron ran the red light and broke my steering box with the side of his car. So I'm fine there.

So anyhow, that's pretty much all she wrote for now. I'll change out the rear diff fluid sometime in the next few weeks, find my pump and turkey baster and suck the old fluid out of the reservoir, replace it with fresh, and then bleed the brakes to suck the old DOT3 out and put the better DOT3/4 fluid in, and then I'm pretty much done maintenance-wise for the moment.

Oh, while I was at it I put some new light bulbs into my lights. But I'm not telling you what they are, because they're a bit, err, not DOT-certified. But at least I'll be able to see at night!

-- Badtux the Blindingly Bright Penguin

Toyota is the new Philip-Morris

Philip-Morris, you might recall, is the cigarette company that for years insisted up and down that cigarettes were good to you... all the while knowing, within their labs, that they were addictive and caused cancer. They became the poster child for companies that care more about profits than about the health and safety of their customers, so hated that they had to change their name to "Altria" (I guess if you can't X it out, effin' A it out) to escape their reputation.

So why bring up Toyota and Philip-Morris in the same breath? Well... it's because of the testimony of David Gilbert, an automotive technology professor who demonstrates a fault condition that Toyota's electronic throttle control software doesn't detect. Note that Mr. Gilbert does not say -- or prove -- that this particular error condition is the cause of Toyota's problem. Rather, he shows that there is a condition that Toyota's throttle control should detect -- two shorted wires to the throttle position sensors, which are supposed to have different voltages on them because they go to different resistor packs -- which it does not, in fact, detect, and therefore there is at least one bug in Toyota's throttle control software. And software bugs are like cockroaches -- if you can see one wandering around on your kitchen counter in broad daylight, likely enough there's a thousand more in the wall behind the counter hidden from view.

Toyota can try to spin this all they want, but as someone who has an EE+software engineering background, I agree with Gilbert that this seems to indicate that Toyota's throttle control software is not as robust as they claimed and thus cannot be eliminated as a possible cause of the problem. So what's Toyota's response? A) say that Gilbert was paid by trial lawyers (true, but so what? The software problem doesn't go away just because of who Gilbert is paid by), and B), to hold a dog and pony show claiming that Gilbert's *SPECIFIC* bug is not the cause of the acceleration problem. Uhm, okay, but Gilbert himself did not say his bug was *THE* cause, just that it indicated a problem with the software.

All Toyota is accomplishing is making themselves look like the cigarette companies -- i.e., a bunch of lying bastards more concerned about the bottom line than about the health and safety of their customers. This points to a problem in the Japanese psyche that has been sort of shoveled under the covers since WWII -- the Japanese unwillingness to ever admit that they made a mistake or are not perfect. The Japanese refused to believe that their codes had been broken for years after Pearl Harbor, allowing the U.S. to know exactly what they were doing at all times, and even when things happened that should have just blatantly told them "our codes are broken" (like American carriers appearing off of Midway Island *just in time* to sink their own carriers) they refused to believe that any mere American could ever do such a thing to their "perfect" codes. I'm seeing the same mentality at work on the part of Toyota right now... and it ain't pretty, ain't pretty at all.

-- Badtux the Car Penguin

Gimme heat!

I'm not sure when the low speed on my Jeep's heater quit working, but I noticed it one day while driving down the street -- no hot air blowing out of my vents. WTF? I checked the next three speeds up, and they all worked. So it wasn't the motor, and given that my Jeep has less than 40,000 miles on it, it didn't seem likely to be the switch. At that point, it clicked: Heater resistor.

To understand what I'm talking about, here's the deal. Your heater blower motor takes 12 volts. The way pretty much all American cars are wired, it takes that 12 volts straight from the fuse box, through a relay controlled by the "Hi" setting on the air conditioner/heater fan control. If you want the motor to run slower, you have to feed it less voltage. The way that American cars do that is to have a resistor network, where each resistor gives you a progressively lower voltage, and use the heater control switch to switch which pin of the resistor network gets sent to the blower motor. The higher the resistance, the lower the voltage, and the lower the fan.

Checking out my handy dandy factory service manual, I decided to pull the resistor out and test it. The problem was, where is the blasted thing? Finally after sufficient digging around I found where it is: mounted right above the passenger side footwell light. So I unbolted the light and unplugged it and put it aside, unplugged a bunch of wires under there and moved them aside, and there we were, two 8mm bolts holding this thing in so that it sticks into the airflow where it can get cooled down while the heater is operating. So I removed it and it turns out to be a flat circuit board with resistive traces on it. I take my ohm meter, and yeppers, the connection between the last two pins (the smallest one is the low speed pin) is gone, and a glance at the circuit board shows that the trace apparently exploded where the connector's pin attaches to it, probably due to a manufacturing defect that allowed moisture to get into the circuit board.

A quick trip to my local Jeep dealer and $25 later, and I have a new resistor, and have all fan speeds going again. And yeah, this was probably caused by a manufacturing defect of this Hecho en Mexico hunk of junk, but my OEM warranty ran out at 36,000 miles, so fat chance of getting reimbursed. WTF, it's just $25. So anyhow, if you ever run into this with your own car, it might be as simple as that: a $25 resistor panel might be blown. It's a cheap and easy first thing to check anyhow, and it's not as if they're (usually) expensive...

-- Badtux the Now-Warm Penguin

What the fuck is the matter with cars?

Toyotas that accelerate because they feel like it or won't brake because they don't feel like it. Hondas whose airbags deploy with the force of a stick of dynamite. This shit that just came out where all the Jap cars seem broken is just crazy. But you know what? I ain't surprised, because the Japs have gone for that electronic shit big-time -- electric steering, electric brakes, electric throttles, electric everything. And when electronics go wrong, they fucking GO WRONG, unlike old-school shit.

My Jeep is old-school. The cable from the throttle goes to an air flap at the throttle body. I open the throttle, the flap opens. I close the throttle, the flap closes. A throttle position sensor, a mass air sensor in the air intake and two oxygen sensors on the exhaust manifolds send signals to a small computer that adjusts how much fuel gets injected by the injector. If the computer goes out, my engine don't run -- it doesn't suddenly decide to go zooming across the freeway at nine bajillion miles per hour. Same deal with my brakes. The brake pedal attaches to a hydraulic plunger. The hydraulic plunger pushes brake fluid into brake lines and forces the brake pads towards the disk. There's actually two plungers attached to my brake pedal (one in front of the other, one for the front brakes and one for the back brakes) so that if one of the brake lines gets busted, there's still two wheels that have brakes and will stop me.

All these new cars, though, they don't have that kind of old school setup. What they have at the top end of the accelerator pedal is a sensor that tells the computer how much you've pushed down the throttle. Then a motor under the hood opens or closes the throttle flap appropriately to make the car go slower or faster in the most efficient way that the computer has calculated. So if the computer decides that this flap thingy needs to be all the way open even though you've let up on the gas pedal, well, it'll do it.

Same deal with the brakes on the Prius, the Toyota that's been having the problems with braking. The Prius cars that have been having stopping problems, they don't got that old-school piston shit. They got *electric* brakes. You push on the brake pedal, and it signals a computer to start reverse-charging your battery, using the electric motor in reverse as a generator and incidentally slowing the car down. You push even harder, and an electric pump starts squirting brake fluid into the lines until the car stops. If the electric pump decides it's tired and doesn't feel like pumping, or if the computer decides the electric pump doesn't need to pump, you're fucking *screwed*.

Now, I've thought about upgrading to one of those new-school Jeeps with the electric throttle and shit. They get better gas mileage and you can fit bigger tires to them without worrying about breaking shit, because their wheel wells are bigger and their axles are sturdier. But I tell ya, there's something to be said for old school. I can't think of a damned thing that'd make the throttle stick on my hoary old Jeep, and same deal with the brakes -- yeah, old-school master cylinders wear out over time, but they fucking *give you warning* that they're going out, the brake pedal starts going down closer to the floorboard and you might have to pump the brakes, and that's when you know it's time to put another master cylinder in. But that electronic shit... when it decides it ain't gonna work, it just don't fucking *work*. Which is a big-ass problem if you're talking about *stopping*.

What we have here, ladies and gents, is a case where the geeks who programmed these cars have forgotten what the wrenches knew years before the geeks finished kindergarten: cars ain't a place to experiment with shit that could kill people if it goes wrong. I'm stickin' with my old school Jeep. Yeah, it's crude and ugly as shit, but you can fix the goddamned thing with a big fucking hammer and a pair of pliers, and it don't decide it's going to go galumphing down the freeway at a bazillion miles per hour just because some goddamned computer geek forgot to carry a digit somewhere in his code. As someone who programs computers for a living, I'm happy as a clam that the only computer in my Jeep is the one that handles the fuel squirters and spark plug sparkers. If they quit squirting and sparking, all that happens is that the Jeep stops going. Which sure the fuck is preferable to what those goddamned Toyotas with their little electric-motor-controlled throttle thingies have been doing, yessiree.

-- Badtux the Old-school Penguin

Piece of shit spark plugs

I've been working on cars for over 30 years now. I thought I'd seen every fucking piece of shit car that had ever come down the pike, every crappy half-assed aftermarket part that was possible to see. But this is the first time I've ever seen a brand name that was so fucking cheap ass I wouldn't put it in the car of my goddamned worst enemy.

The culprit: Champion "Platinum Power Premium Spark Plug, part number 3034 RC12PEC5". Look. I've put spark plugs in everything from a 1971 Ford Torino to a 2008 Suzuki V-Strom. I didn't expect a problem putting spark plugs into my Jeep. I mean, fuck. That goddamned I-6 engine dates back to before I was fucking born. So I took the spark plug coil rail off, and grabbed one of these spark plugs out of the box and... what the fuck? The goddamned electrode was set at like 0.60, when a Jeep wants 0.35. Well, fuck, that's not a problem, you just rap the plug on the front bumper with your feeler gage at .35 between the electrodes and... what the fuck? The goddamned electrode won't fucking bend straight it's so over-long for the gap required for the Jeep 4.0L I6, it's like all half-ass and shit? Yeppers, I tried it on two different plugs, same goddamned result. There's just too much motherfucking electrode for a Jeep 4.0L I6.

Fuck this shit. I threw these goddamned piece of shit spark plugs in the fucking trash. I'm going back to the parts house tomorrow and get some better plugs. Sue me for fucking cheaping out on spark plugs, I shoulda known better. "Platinum" or no, these are fucking bottom feeder piece of shit spark plugs, not fit for my worst enemy's car, much less my own.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Performance parts

I've had great fun looking at the excellent selection of performance parts at Kaleco Auto Supply. They have a plentiful supply of flux capacitors and muffler bearings for those tricky repair jobs.

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

Trabant!

East Germany's national car was the Trabant, a cramped and woefully obsolete atrocity with a maximum speed of 62mph that was suspended on transverse coach springs (no shock absorbers) and powered by a 600cc 2-stroke engine that smoked (and sounded) like a chainsaw engine. The only advanced feature of the Trabant was its front-engine front-wheel-drive layout, in an era (the early 50's) when most cars had a rear-engine rear-wheel-drive layout. Here is an example of a Trabant in action, trying to tow a dead Czech 4x4 out of a yard:

Heh!

-- Badtux the Auto Penguin

A reminder

Change your wiper blades!. With the crap rubber they sell nowdays, you should always change'em every six months. Unless you're out here in California, where for six months of the year there's no rain, then you can just change them before rainy season starts. Which is exactly what I did -- last week I bought some new blades and changed'em. So when the rains hit this weekend, well, no problem! I could see -- and, alas, most of the other cars on the road couldn't.

The time to do this shit is before you need it. So have you changed your blades within the past six months? No? What the f*** you waitin' for?!

-- Badtux the Wrenchin' Penguin

Why C-clip axles are evil

Some folks wonder why Jeepers hate thems some Dana 35 axles. Well, it's not just that Dana 35's are weak and break if you look at them wrong. It's what happens after they break that Jeepers hate. See, a Dana 35 is what's known as a "C-clip axle". There is nothing holding the axle on but a big C-shaped clip on the end of the axle shaft inside the differential. Here's the end of the axle shaft inside the differential (note that the cross shaft and spider gears have been taken out, that's the only way to push the axles in far enough to get to the C-clip which otherwise nests in the side gears): If part A (end inside the differential) is no longer on the same physical plane as part B (end outside the differential) because, duh, the axle broke, here is what happens: Is it a little clearer, now, why Jeepers hate Dana 35 (or any C-clip) axles?

-- Badtux the Jeepin' Penguin