…so, confession time: you know when someone said, “we’re designing this to discourage people from going fiberglass -15 quality and ending up with Basic Interior/no entertainment because they ran out of money?” I went fiberglass -11 quality. And while I have a basic cassette deck, I went negative quality on almost everything to afford it.
My current expectations for Packbat Auto Works:
25%: Eliminated in Eco stage for poor comfort, reliability. 50%: Eliminated in Sporty stage for catastrophically low prestige. 20%: Horrifyingly bad tire wear in BROBOT, non-competitive in tournament even after revision. 5%: Wait, what?
So it seems that the writing will take a bit longer than expected, and I decided to keep the suspense and only release the results together with the review. On the mean time, here are some pretty charts comparing all eco cars. I forgot to highlight the average, only realised this when I had uploaded all stats. Whoops. Also, excel was being stubborn and only allowed me to choose one between the name, make and model, so I went for the username. Enjoy. Also, there are six more charts ready for a future post.
Wow, I’m actually doing a lot better than I expected, considering my previous and first challenge.
Now that I see the averages, I definitely went overboard giving the Eco a Turbo as well as the rest, way too much Sportiness.
I should’ve dumped the Turbo and went for more Comfort, and get more Drivability and maybe Economy in the process. MAN Is my car uncomfortable.
I’m … I’m above average on comfort. I’m above average everywhere but Prestige and Sportiness, both of which are Low priority. Wow, I think I’m actually doing decently in the Eco bracket.
My placement in the Prestige category, however … that’s all due to the paper-thin fiberglass body. I’m going to be in huge trouble when we get to the Sport bracket.
Edit: Der Bayer is looking like a strong favorite, just eyeballing the charts - low Practicality, but very good in most of the stats otherwise. Pyrlix is also looking very strong.
Oh, hey, I think there might be an error in the graph - I’m looking at my file, and it says I have a Total Sportiness of 6.11, not 4.20. I think you might have copied my Prestige number twice.
That is very likely, it wouldn’t be the first time that happened to me. But the biggest source of errors were mixing comfort and drivability, because for some reason i decided that the first column to be filled was comfort. Those things will probably be fixed in v.3 of the table. I’ll your score on there tomorrow, packbat.
I’m guessing I made my engine too big for the “eco” category. Those higher efficiency engines are what, 1.3-1.5L? Possibly turbocharged? It’s hard to de-Americanize myself a lot of the time. There are only a handful of sub-1.6L engines here, and “Economical” is usually a 1.6 or 1.8. Hence my settling on a 1.7.
It’s not a monotonic trend in my experience - in terms of grams of fuel per kWh, larger engines are more efficient, so there’s a tradeoff between weight, required cooling, and efficiency when finding the optimal engine size for a given car. I wouldn’t be surprised if 1.7L was too big, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was close to optimal, either.
There’s also the question of gearing. If I recall correctly, my Eco trim’s top gear is purely for cruising - the car reaches its top speed in the penultimate gear. Intentionally giving up an entire gear ratio for economy purposes isn’t the best choice for every car, though.
(…also, stupid question: what’s your air-to-fuel ratio? Because I’m guessing most of the highest efficiency cars are running max-lean 15:1 ratios.)
Yeah, from experience 15:1 seems to be the best choice for optimal fuel economy.
Appart from that, as long as you don’t go too high on the cam slider and that you use a decent amount of valves per cylinder you should get something decent.
As for the optimal size, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was somewhere around 1.3L.
Oh God. Last for drivablity and below average for pretty much everything. I thought my economy would be more competitive but oh well…
On the topic of Eco engine size I used a 1.4L N/A. I can’t remember the details and can’t check so I will have to see if I do any better in the sports trim.
[quote=“Packbat”]
(…also, stupid question: what’s your air-to-fuel ratio? Because I’m guessing most of the highest efficiency cars are running max-lean 15:1 ratios.)[/quote]
Typically either 14.7 or 15:1. I don’t remember what it was in this case and am too lazy to look it up.
No worries. Looking at other people’s reports - and at the performance of my own car, with its all-aluminum NA 1525cc pushrod MPFI inline-four running 15:1 AFR and pushing 71.3 bhp - it seems like somewhere sub-1.6L is probably optimal for fuel economy.
(Yes, I went pushrod in a racing competition where the rules limit displacement. In retrospect, this was probably a terrible idea.)
In any case, while you might not be winning any reviews in the Eco category, you’re nowhere near the drops from what I can see. Given that Leonardo9613 was aiming for 20-30 racers and only has 27 legal entrants so far, I’m guessing he’ll go with something like 6 drops in the Eco bracket and 3 more in the Sport bracket.
