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Showing posts with label old spice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old spice. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Look down at your center console (now at me, now back to your console...damn Old Spice commercials). I bet there's at least 3 things that you notice right away. There's the shifter, a cup holder probably, and the hand brake. This last item goes by many names. There's hand brake, parking brake, and emergency brake, or e-brake for short. I've decided that e-brake will from now on mean "enthusiast brake." Let me explain after the jump.
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| My Mazdaspeed 3 |
This is a picture of the three most important hand controls in a car. The steering wheel...er... steers. The shifter transmits power from the motor to the wheels. For normal people, the e-brake prevents the car from aimlessly wandering into some negative circumstance. However, the e-brake is an enthusiast's Leatherman multi-tool.
Now, I don't condone anything that I'm about to tell you. I'm just saying that certain people do, in fact, use the e-brake for these reasons. These might include e-brake drifts, j-turns, and front-wheel drive burnouts.
As enthusiasts, we are proud that we can make a car dance around corners and control its every movement. The e-brake simply aids in the festivities. Soon, these stop sticks will be replaced by something like this:
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| Audi parking brake |
This parking brake is from an Audi A6, I believe (correct me if it's an A8). Notice the "P" does not denote e-brake. This is a parking brake. This was not made for hoonage or rally techniques, contrary to Audi heritage.
As I stated in part 1, the art of driving is becoming less and less intimate. Knowing the proper clutch and shift action for a car no longer matters. Shifting is becoming automated with dual clutch, flappy paddle tomfoolery. Add in the new EPA CAFE standards for increased fuel mileage and we have a perfect storm situation that can wash away all traces of analog car controls.
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| Mercedes E-Class |
I know it's like beating a dead horse in this column but bear with me on transmissions for a bit.
Automated manual transmissions use clutches instead of torque converters like in a normal automatic transmission. Lexus and Mercedes use wet clutches in their automatics but that's a story for another time. These automated manuals are getting to be more efficient than automatics because those liquid filled torque converters sap a lot of power just to get moving. These transmissions can be moved around a lot more than a manual transmission due to solenoids controlling the driver/transmission interface instead of a mechanical linkage. This means that the center console can be made smaller which in the case of the McLaren MP4-12C narrows the car to decrease weight and increase fuel efficiency.
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| MP4-12C worldcarfans.com |
Where does this leave the e-brake? We might as well call it Bon Jovi 'cause it's living on a prayer now. Cable linkages are becoming good buddies with the Dodo bird and e-brakes are turning into p-brakes, which sounds more like a panic stop during a road trip. In which case, I don't want to be using that on a daily basis.
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