Well, back when I worked for Pharte Automotive, a company best known for making really tiny eco-boxes, I had the brilliant idea to try making, well, I suppose you could say it was supposed to be a luxury sedan, but smaller.
Of course, Pharte made four cylinder engines, and their biggest is a 2 liter block, which, well, let’s face it, is great for propelling a city car around, but it just didn’t have the guts to move something bigger. So I had the bright idea to make my own crankcase, stick two 4-cylinder heads on it, and make a V8. Then it ended up still feeling a little underpowered, so, naturally, I strapped some turbochargers to it, and cranked up the rev limiter. For the most part, that worked.
When it came to the body of the car, I decided it had to be a four-door sedan, and it really needed to be something special.
After a long time of thinking (and waiting for a budget increase because I was already well past the cost of their usual city car), I created the body of what would become the Spirit. The front two doors opened conventionally, but the rear doors… Well, see those two slots over the rear wheel arch?
Those allowed the rear doors to slide backward, like the doors on a minivan. The idea, the hope behind it, was that when parked in a typical mall parking lot, at least some damage could be avoided because the doors slide instead of swing. No more kids booting the doors of your big heavy SUV into the eco-hatch next to you.
Surprisingly, that got me all the funding Pharte thought I needed to complete the car. Supposedly, Pharte wanted to show my car at SEMA when it was completed. I got a blank check and direct access to the spending accounts, and I could spend as much as I wanted, within reason. I was informed that I had a hard budget limit at $16,000, however, and that if I spent any more than that, I’d be in serious trouble.
So naturally, I started cost cutting. Big time. Anything that didn’t technically need to be there was removed. Anything that I could combine together was combined.
Well, of course I didn’t think to check the original bit of hardware I’d made, the engine. Pharte had this funny nature of loving to keep using cast iron in their engines, even though aluminum was lighter. I had two DOHC-4VPS heads designed for the 2L-HPO, their “sports car” four cylinder engine. They had four valves per cylinder, dual overhead cam, with Variable Valve Lift. I monkeyed around with the cams to make them fire in the right sequence, then coupled them to a common four-cylinder crankshaft with thinner connecting rods. Basically, I made a flatplane V8 out of two four-cylinder engines. And yet, sitting there as the common block holding up the cast iron heads… was my cast aluminum engine block.
But, because I didn’t think at the time about the engine, I forged onward. The transmission was reworked at the last minute to use engine oil as transmission fluid. That allowed me to couple it to the engine, hook in some oil passthrough lines, and, in theory, saved me a little bit of money designing a transmission fluid reservoir for the 5 speed automatic. I stuck to my original plan to have all-wheel-drive, and I put limited slip differentials in just to gain the little bit of extra performance that I could.
My tires came in at the right time, and in typical eco-car fashion, they were 135mm wide tires, hard life compound, on my 20 inch rims. Essentially, I got screwed, and was suddenly rather glad I had all wheel drive. Would have preferred tires twice that width.
Another problem that surfaced was cooling requirements against Pharte’s requirement that the front of the car look clean. That meant no big, obnoxious grilles above the license plate line.
My solution to the problem?
Vents below the license plate line, and none above it. Now, in theory, I had more than enough cooling capacity for the engine I’d built. In fact, it was rather comfortably over-cooled, which gave me confidence that maybe, just maybe, this design wouldn’t be too bad.
Now, anyone who knows cars understands that engines need cooling, yes? I had plenty of cooling capacity, but unless I could pass 18 MPG, they weren’t going to show my car at all, nor would they manufacture it. So, despite knowing it would harm reliability, I blocked up about half the vents. That allowed me to pull up the fuel economy just enough to pass their requirements.
With my budget almost gone already, and Pharte insisting I needed to make a five-seat car if it was going to have four doors, I had to go really cheap on the interior. I kept things luxury grade, but ordered parts from the cheapest bidders. Looking back on it, the car wasn’t too uncomfortable, and the electrical gremlins in the SatNav system didn’t really show up until about three years later. Plus, it’s not like it was my fault that the power steering pumps liked to explode, now is it?
One could argue that maybe, just maybe, the hydropneumatic suspension was a bad idea. Especially when on a very tight, dwindling budget. But, I kept hearing about how comfortable and luxurious the ride could be. I had to have it. That and the semi-active sway bar to help with keeping the car drivable. Probably wasn’t my brightest idea to cheap out on the suspension, but it worked. Mostly.
Now, I wanted to do LED tail lights because everyone else was doing LED tail lights. Unfortunately, I’d spent most of the budget already, and a mass shipment of white LED’s would have put me dangerously close to the limit. So for the tail lights, each little bulb inside the light housing is nothing more than a flashlight bulb. Apparently, they were a huge pain in the butt to replace when the tiny bulbs burned out.
Now, we showed up to the SEMA auto show with our new car, the Pharte Spirit. The guy before us caused a huge delay because he rolled his SUV across the stage, and it took quite a long time to get the mess cleaned up. Our car worked okay on stage, once we got there, and other than some very mild technical problems, like the air conditioning being stuck on maximum cold, or the radio not working quite right, we had a reasonable time. As I drove the car off the stage, there was a loud clunk, and the rear wheels lost all power. We got the car out of sight, mentioned that this was just a prototype, and set to work finding out what the horrible noise was. I blew the rear differential because, in my haste to get the car ready, I forgot to put oil in it.
But that’s not what got me fired.
What got me fired was the next five years of powertrain warranties. You see, that brilliant little cost-cutting measure I had in linking the engine and transmission together, using the engine’s oil as transmission fluid? It worked out great, right up until someone decided that they wanted to see if the engine really could rev to 9200 RPM like the tach said. Remember what I said about the engine being a bit of a hack job? Well, I wasn’t the one who fully tuned that. Someone in Marketing decided that if we could beat the Honda S2000’s 9000 RPM redline, maybe, just maybe we’d sell more cars to young people. If they’d have left it alone with my original 8000 RPM redline, there wouldn’t have been as many problems. Instead, some genius in marketing went 1200 RPM above my recommendation. At 9000 RPM, tiny little pieces of the pistons start filling the engine oil.
The same engine oil that’s used in the transmission.
Now maybe you do this once or twice, using the sport mode, and you get lucky, where the transmission just shrugs it off and keeps going. But maybe you don’t get lucky. Maybe one of those tiny little pieces gets jammed in the fluid control mechanism, and prevents an upshift. At 9200 RPM, the engine is only a fraction away from disintegrating. Maybe one of those pieces comes in contact with the gears and you lose something important, like first or reverse. Or maybe nothing happens for a couple thousand miles, only to hear your mechanic say “uh oh” when he goes to change the oil and gets more metal flakes than fluid.
Combine those failures with the ones caused by dodgy transmissions, and you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.
After three years, the cars that were driven gently started having problems. The radios went screwy, navigation failed to work, the seats became hard and uncomfortable. Occasionally, the sliding rear doors would come off the track, and that cost a couple thousand dollars to fix. Sometimes the suspension failed and the car would just slump against the bump stops, making a huge puddle of oil on the ground. The power steering pumps tended to clog up, then explode, usually under heavy cornering.
But the thing that got me fired?
In my haste to get the car to meet Pharte’s ridiculous demands, I made the poor decision to compromise the safety, to go with the lowest bidder. Supposedly, the only thing keeping people alive in the majority of accidents was the steel chassis refusing to give way. Nine out of ten accidents, the airbags never deployed. Sometimes the seatbelts broke. The windshields tended to shatter and fill the car with glass. But they were the lucky ones.
Everyone’s heard of that one car that explodes when hit from behind. Well, ours liked to do much the same.
In a rear end collision, the trunk would collapse. Typically, not a huge deal. Better that the trunk squishes instead of the occupants of the car. However, the gas tank was part of the trunk structure, and in a rear end collision, would crumple like a can in a crusher. The crushed fuel tank tended to spill gasoline all over the exhaust pipes. But what typically sparked the fuel fire was the dodgy tail-light designs. The cheaply made circuit boards tended to spark. Gasoline vapors tend to ignite under sparks. Our carpet in the trunk, the foam in the seats, and the carpet in the car tended to be highly flammable. It was a perfect recipe for disaster.
“But,” you may ask, “How on earth did such an unsafe car get past all the safety inspections?”
Remember that blank check? A few million under the table as hush money got the car a high enough safety rating to be sold. Somewhat my revenge on Pharte Automotive for screwing up what could have been my perfect car with their insane demands, their impossible schedule, the ridiculous requirements, and their moronic marketing team. After the lawsuit and investigations into how the car got into the market at all… Well, I got fired.
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