Showing posts with label Mustang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mustang. Show all posts

Thursday, December 8, 2016

How Much Horsepower is Too Much Horsepower?


Anyone who has ever had an infatuation with power created by combustion engines will tell you, “you can never make enough horsepower”. But in this day-and-age where smaller engines and better technology takes us to astronomical performance levels, it seems like that thought process may not be so true anymore.


Normal-sized LS motors that already take in mass amounts of air and fuel by design leave the car enthusiast with all kinds of options to upgrade other non-horsepower performance parts on their vehicle to perform better. A tubbed-out, roll cage-fitted vehicle with a massive supercharger sticking out of the hood may look fierce, but you might be surprised to watch a vehicle appearing to be mostly stock smoke the crap out of the wannabe race car.


When building a badass vehicle it should be more about taking the horsepower you plan on creating and making sure you can successfully get it to the wheels and then to the payment.



500 Horsepower Before 1990

Sure, 500-hp has been possible since guys started taking apart engines and putting them back together with the whole intent to go faster. But before the '90s, 500-hp in a daily cruiser in a 1980s Corvette, Camaro, Mustang, etc. just wasn't realistic. 


Not to say that 500-hp in a daily driver before 1990 has never happened, but for the most part, that kind of horsepower was reserved for track use, short drives to the car show, or for trailer queens. Driving back and forth to work every day or taking long drives would have been pretty unusual for 500+ horsepower vehicles in the late '80s, '70s, '60s, etc.


The New Age: Right Off The Showroom Floor Vehicles Are Plenty Fast With Plenty Of Horsepower 

Finding a sports car from this generation with over 300 hp is as easy as going to your local dealership. No upgrades are needed, today's sports cars and muscle cars will leave any stock or upgraded '80s sports car trailing far behind. 


The new Corvettes, Camaros, Hellcats, Chargers, and Mustangs that we see today can easily make big horsepower and awesome 1/4-mile times. Even Cadillac and many other unexpected auto divisions have poured more horsepower into their vehicles than one could have ever imagined in the mid-'80s and early '90s. 


If you would have told me back in the '90s that there would be a six-cylinder Camaro in the 21 first century that would keep up with a '90s LT-1 Camaro and leave an '80s Z28 in its dust, I would have told you that you were crazy.


Well, maybe not. 


My Dad was a Pro-Buick guy, so I attended many Buick events watching my Dad race as I was growing up. The early '90s is when we started to notice V6 Buick turbos pulling the wheels off the ground and turning in 10-second timeslips - that's when we knew technology was going to start to change. But we never even bother to argue the point with the Ford Mustang Fox-Body lovers, they wanted to hear nothing of the sort. Ha. Ha.



How Much Horsepower Is Too Much

It really all depends on what your ambitions are. Let's face it, if you want to go fast on a race track, you can make more power than a top fuel dragster, but that does not mean you're going to dominate anything. 


If you're doing it just for show, I think that's kind of silly, but to each his own. Sure, it's great to sit at the car show or the drag strip and say, “yep, my baby puts out 2,200 ponies”. 


But when a brand new sports car pulls up next to you at the light –quiet and stock looking – and he takes off on you like a rocketship, and your loud, monster setup is gasping for mass amounts of air while standing still trying to find just a little bit of traction just seems kind of embarrassing.


How Much Horsepower Is Just Enough

It all depends on what you are planning on doing with your vehicle. The perfect amount of horsepower to me would be being able to use and have fun with every bit of horsepower that I paid for. Sure, have there been times when I have wanted more horsepower for some of my vehicles? Absolutely, but I also like to eat as well. 

Having an extra boatload of horsepower under my hood that I'll never use doesn't really seem worth it if my bank account is at zero. And on top of everything else, at one point or another, you're going to get curious and try to find out what your vehicle can do. If you find out that the car, you, or both can't handle it, you might find yourself with a vehicle that is wrapped around a tree. 

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Major Auto Industry Vehicles and Their Competitors – Can You Tell The Difference?



Mustang vs. Camaro – GM trucks vs. Ford trucks vs. Dodge trucks – Corvette vs. Viper – you can
even throw a Ferrari in the mix, everyone is going to have their own opinions on which ones are better crafted, more stylish – can beat who where and why. But are vehicles made by different companies but in the same class even that much different from each other to even make a solid argument of which one is better?


Growing up in a family where General Motor checks mostly paid the bills, to me GM vehicles ran the earth, and Ford stood for (Find On Road Dead), you could say I had my share of argImage result for 2017 yellow viperuments with kids my age about how Camaros stomped on Mustangs. But in the end, we were really just a bunch of juveniles arguing about things just for the sake of argument.

If someone said that Camaros look like crap, I had to fire back on how the look of a Mustang made me want to puke. But were talking about back when Mustangs and Camaros actually looked different. This was back in the day when Corvettes were boring and the only people who really drove them were older guys with a lot of money, and as far as foreign sports cars were concerned, they weren't really in no ones budget.

Times have changed since then, exotic sports cars are much more affordable, Corvettes are made to kill the road course, not to mention the drag strip, even Mustangs and Camaros are made to pump out a lot of power while turning in road course numbers that are nothing less than awesome.

But with all this technology, what about the exterior styling of these vehicles. A lot of these vehicles share so much of the same characteristics, dimensions, and colors schemes, it seems hardly worth an argument about which one is the best looking. At a quick glance, there is not much that really sets these vehicles apart. Sure there are some attributes that are different, but it's almost like trying to compare one ditsy, blonde haired, blue eyed cheerleader with the other twelve cheerleaders on the squad.


  

As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate all vehicles. Ford vs. Chevy vs. Mopar is nothing more than needing something to stand for – almost like why most people vote for the home team in professional sports. You don't really know anybody on that team, but you feel obliged to root for them and wear their logos.

But to me, if you look at these pictures, it seems like if you closed your eyes you could mistake one for the other pretty easily. Even on the inside – General Motors has the Mylink technology displayed on a touchscreen in the center of the dash, Ford has the SYNC technology located in the same place, and image this, Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge uses what they call the Uconnect that is also placed in the same place. But you can call it what you want to call it, all three of those systems basically work off a platform that is extremely similar. They all share the same connectivity availability, social medias, etc. Even safety features take on names or phases that are different from each other, but do the same thing.  

It's awesome that the power and efficiency of these vehicles are outstanding, but I'd like to see some major changes and attempts to look different in the styling department.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Camaro Gets Different Chassis for 2016




Although no photos leaks of what the new Camaro is going to look like, Chevrolet did confirm it will be using the Cadillac ATS coupe's chassis. The current Camaro chassis is a rear-drive modified version of the Holden Commodore by GM's Australian brand. The big move is due to the fact that GM no longer wants to be building vehicles in Australia in 2017, and this will ensure production will convert easily with no unneeded production shutdowns.



The Camaro will be on sale sometime next year but don't expect any spoilers until at least the North American International Auto Show, and GM says maybe not even then. Motor Trend has produced some spy pictures that showed what could be the 2016 Camaro all wrapped up, but they admitted they were not sure if they were on the right track.

The ATS chassis was designed to help the car compete with the BMW 3-Series. Out of all of GM's chassis, the ATS coupe's chassis is the closest fit to the Camaro. It is shorter in length, narrower, and weighs less than the current Camaro chassis. Chevy says it could help bring a little more of a European sports car feel when comes to the type of ride it will produce. But I'm not sure if that is a huge selling point for American sports car lovers.

The ATS already offers a four-cylinder turbo motor, and Chevy has confirmed that it is possible to see one in the Camaro as an option for 2016. Mustang, Camaros long time rival, already offers one, and since it would take no extra engineering to put a four-cylinder turbo in the Camaro to compete with Mustang, not to mention the European cars, I'd say the possibility is very real.