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I may have been detoured and sampled some of the amazing food in the Porsche booth. The cheesecake? Absolutely amazing. The wine wasn’t bad either. I somehow missed Maria Sharapova announcing the new Macan. Oh well.
A preview of things to come is this Honda fuel cell vehicle concept. They are supposed to launch a FC vehicle in 2015. I think Toyota is too.
The big news for Honda this year was their Accord hybrid which uses a new drivetrain concept giving a step change improvement in efficiency. Basically, they’re ditched the transmission. No standard transmission, no transmission losses. Check out the rubber strip on the front part of the hood. It matches up to the snorkel air intake for the engine to seal out the hot air of the engine bay and force cold air to the intake. Hey, my foam strips on Project S2000 were not so far out of left field after all. One thing that surprised me was the weight of the hood on the Accord; it felt to be good ole steel instead of lightweight aluminum. A bit surprising considering this is a hybrid, but I guess the cost of an aluminum hood wasn’t justified by the projected sales volume and efficiency gain.
The engine appears to have the exhaust manifold integrated with the head. The engine also appears to have an EGR cooler which is common on diesels; follow the hard line below the catalytic converter going to the right under the radiator hose. The EGR cooler is the shiny vertical rectangular thing with the coolant line going to it. I guess they will become common on gasoline engines now too.
Joe snagged this picture with his phone of the underside of the hood of the Subaru Forester. As the hood does not use a hood scoop, it requires some serious ducting to feed air to the top mount intercooler.
That top mount intercooler is mounted pretty far back there.
Hyundai had a pair of zombie apocalypse vehicles on display. This vehicle has a major design flaw in my opinion and I think the next vehicle is better equipped.
See all the cutting instruments attached to the sides of the car? That should keep the zombies far enough away so that they can’t grab you. The first car does have bars over the windows, but the zombies can still reach through. I prefer all the blades on the sides of this car which should keep the zombies far enough away.So there you have it, some of the cool stuff I noticed at the 2013 LA Auto Show. More cars have more turbos, more electric motors, more power, and more MPG. There were fewer clutch pedals however. This year, I did find better food but I guess I’ll have to get there earlier next year to avoid the big line at the Mercedes booth.
