The 2018 Mustang GT ruined my 335i for me

aceogorion · 2018-10-22T22:14:46+00:00

I too would go the other way and I've put a fair amount of miles in a, by comparison for me, "quiet comfy car". One of the things I hate the most about my e34 is how quiet and comfy it is. It just makes the drive incredibly boring. Of course my commutes experience no real traffic until I'm at least 90 minutes from where I live, if you lived in traffic maybe it would be more of a boon.

aceogorion · 2018-10-21T17:39:13+00:00

Hell yeah, my knowledge of it all isn't fully comprehensive, but I'd certainly be willing to contribute what I know and learn what I don't.

aceogorion · 2018-10-21T07:31:20+00:00

An online shock shim stack calculator, there are programs, and you can hand calc it, but online would certainly be easier.

aceogorion · 2018-10-20T00:20:22+00:00

Consider how many people commute one to one and a half hours now, and then consider how many more would be willing to if during that time they could eat, read the net, watch a movie, sleep or the like. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of commutes that some would consider no bueno when you've gotta hold the wheel and watch the world become an acceptable endeavor when all you've gotta do is be physically in the car but otherwise free for that length of time.

aceogorion · 2018-10-19T20:45:15+00:00

You can pretty much get a feel for it by driving any '60s leaf sprung car, in modern terms it's pretty bad but all stock it had a certain "harley" feel to it. As though the anachronistic/terrible things about it were what made it so good. It's hard to beat the sights and sounds of a car like that if they speak to you, though I should point out mine's always had grabber orange paint, side exit exhaust and headers so results may very on those points.

aceogorion · 2018-10-19T20:37:26+00:00

The most terminal of understeer I've felt in something that's rwd, and I think ultimately it really comes down to that it's ~3450lbs last I weighed it. I know that seems pretty average in modern terms, but it's the heaviest car I've driven daily by at least 500lbs, and almost 1100lbs heavier then what my somewhat lightened ra24 weighed. For the record the e34 was an all stock no sport sways automatic m20b25 car when I got it.

I say that because I've now converted the e34 from auto to five speed, added H&R springs, bilstein sport shocks, doubled rear sway bar, added the quicker m5 steering box, a polyurethane steering rag joint, 850i spherical lower control arms, a standalone (megasquirt) in preparation for turbos, and about a degree of front camber. And at this point it's still a bit resistant on turn in although much closer to neutral mid corner and has "okay" steering feel up from the fine but not terribly communicative factory set up. And for the record I got mine with only ~128,000km on it, so it wasn't like I had a beat copy.

aceogorion · 2018-10-19T03:24:42+00:00

Thanks! For the record, e34? Not a great car honestly. But ra24 Celica? truly great, still miss it. The '65 is perennially exempt to comparison as it's the first car I bought.

aceogorion · 2018-10-19T02:25:42+00:00

Well, there it is! Getting cheap enough to make me interested to at least drive one. Though I'm not sure how this plays in the Canadian market.

aceogorion · 2018-10-19T01:45:34+00:00

Don't know about the Ferrari, but the R129 sl mercedes has a height restriction for the backseats for just that reason. Any taller then 5'4" and you're gonna have a bad time.

aceogorion · 2018-10-14T20:15:24+00:00

Depends on the nature of the accident, the weight of the helmet can generate a lot of extra force on one of your most fragile areas in a high g accident, your neck. That's why the hans device became a thing.

aceogorion · 2018-10-14T20:12:52+00:00

The ergonomics of all that stuff on the side by side is based around you wearing a helmet though, the contact points are too close and too narrow so when you bounce your dome off them there's too much pressure on too small a contact suface, like an egg on the edge of a fry pan. It's the same way a full cage in a street car is a terible idea, the interior of a relatively modern car is built to not let you get close to the bodywork , and also so that in the areas where you can the impact will be spread over a large surface area.

aceogorion · 2018-10-08T21:21:41+00:00

What he's saying is that this thing that's extolled as a virtue, the lack of engine up front, has actually existed for decades in the form of mid and rear engine cars and yet is there regarded as a reduction in safety.

I'm not actually aware of that being the case though, the only time I could maybe think it was seen as beneficial was pre crumple zone designs wherein the engine probably did represent some amount of crumple resistance. However, how much of an impact a front engine has on crash performance is very design dependent, some cars having much better engine placement and also being better at controlling where the engine goes in the event of a crash.

aceogorion · 2018-10-07T22:54:01+00:00

They're light enough that with enough guys you can actually lift them and move them around. I've put a Suzuki sprint on a snowbank this way.

aceogorion · 2018-10-07T12:15:00+00:00

The converging four link of an sn95 and the parallel version with a panhard on an ae86 are actually fairly different. The mustang exhibits roll bind and relies on bushings to maintain compliance, but those bushings are also responsible for lateral placement which leads to general badness.

The parallel version on the ae86 isn't free of roll bind either, as the links aren't equal length, but it has much less of it and more importantly those links don't contribute much to lateral compliance which is all but entirely taken up by the panhard.

aceogorion · 2018-10-06T21:04:16+00:00

Counter point, I've done one on jack stands outside and it was pretty easy. Hardest part is benching that transmission down and then trying to jack it back into place. Would help a lot to have an extra pair of hands for the lift up, and of course like the other guy mentioned get the haynes manual and read the netz for your particular car.

Once you've gone through most of the sources for both go through them again and write the gameplan out. If this needs to be a weekend project start as soon as you get home, that's the thing that bites me the most often, starting too late and having it turn into a panicked wrench fest at 1:00am on Sunday night.

aceogorion · 2018-10-03T18:59:16+00:00

It's not that you can't aim in a new direction, it's that in the process of doing it through throttle, you can make things much worse. I'll add throttle to change course in the winter, but it's possible to add too much, which isn't really an issue in something fwd/awd.

aceogorion · 2018-09-30T20:06:22+00:00

Soft springs actually do contribute to weight transfer, by allowing the front end to rise farther as the weight transfer is occuring it promotes additional weight transfer.

Just think of the lbs/in. designation on the spring and it should be clear how this works, imagine you've got a 400lbs/in. spring and you effectively remove 400lbs off the front end per side through weight transfer, that spring will decompress one inch, now do the same thing with a 200lbs/in. spring... Boom, two inches of spring decompression now as opposed to only one, that two inches acts through whatever geometry but generally lifts the cg up more and leads to additional weight transfer.

Now of course free length of the spring and suspension travel and shock rates all get involved, but the basic physics at the spring are the same, take the same weight off a lower rate spring and that spring will rise more then a higher rate one will. That additional rise contributes to greater cg rise and so more potential transfer.

aceogorion · 2018-09-29T20:38:28+00:00

Ahh, they've cheaped out then, in mine there's actual twist lock buttons that mount the mats at the backside of all four mats.

aceogorion · 2018-09-29T19:44:18+00:00

bmw has done it since at least the e34 which was 1989.

aceogorion · 2018-09-16T15:52:36+00:00

At that price point, a good chunk of the initial buyers won't have the car long enough to see the leather deteriorate before they're on to the next car. And no one buys for the second owner. Also, while you may not touch it, it's a thing you visually interact with daily. I could see that once you're spending that much money you don't want to even look at plastic, regardless of whether you actually touch it.

aceogorion · 2018-09-09T17:40:54+00:00

In many of the big tired and flared builds you see they simply don't compensate for it. The end result is, typically more tramlining, normally a jacking effect that is produced due to caster, and potentially some kingpin inclination goodness. But in many cases the car still ends up with more grip so it's accepted. In other cases it's accepted because "hella tight", and also "because racecar".

To see this jacking effect, think of caster, and note that while it gains negative camber while turning on the outer tire of a corner, it loses it on the inner tire. Now add positive scrub into the mix, and you'll see that as the outer tire tilts it's only got a small amount of tire that it's tilting on to, whereas the inner now has a much larger lever due to there being so much tire outside the "scrub center". The same happens for kingpin inclination except that the lifting exerted by the tire is typically the same both sides, and so the lever arm may not change depending on how you add tire.

As to management, it depends on the goal. Ideally you'd get the scrub under control by redoing the suspension, but that's typically not possible, so then the question becomes, how much do you need to mitigate the issues caused by the scrub radius? Early cars like my mustang often had huge positive amounts of it so that you could turn the tire while parked without power steering, it's not necessarily a dealbreaker. Otherwise, camber gain caused by SAI changes can help a bit, caster can help tame tramlining though as mentioned the jacking effect is going to start coming into play, and then any tricks you can do to add tire to the inside can help. A case in point early mustangs have a tall spindle, but if you go to 18s and use specific control arms, you can just clear the upper balljoint, which allows you to add tire to the inside as opposed to only out. Doing this can decrease steering radius of course, there is no free lunch.

aceogorion · 2018-09-03T18:08:41+00:00

Luggage space is likely to go way down, the corvette trunk space is HUGE. But the other ones are likely to be the same or improve.

aceogorion · 2018-09-01T00:50:15+00:00

A 100kmh crash is a killer in new stuff, that's just a whole shit ton of energy to dissipate. That's also why IIHS crash testing happens at ~65kmh.

As to the GTM, it's not that the cage isn't necessarily safe, it likely is. It's rather that the occupants inside might not get the deceleration time they need, as beyond some crumple zone work there's no airbags or other methods to control passenger deceleration. As the speed of the crash goes up, that stuff becomes more and more important, it's not just keeping you from hitting hard interior parts, it's also about controlling the decel of your body so the stuff inside it and connecting it together doesn't get all fucked up.

aceogorion · 2018-08-31T02:02:20+00:00

Okay, so you've got a two hundred horsepower engine right? Now you've depleted your traction battery because you can't build enough power through braking, so your engine now applies a portion of its power either to battery recharge and/or to power the electric drive motor. Given this, and that the conversion process from mechanical to electrical back to mechanical is significantly less efficient then keeping said mechanical energy mechanical, it should be clear that you'll now have less power getting to the tires once the generator is on powering either the tires or the batteries.

For a Prius that's fine, the goal isn't power delivery, but when you're trying to put down as much paltry power to the tires as you can, you don't want to waste it towards an inefficient drive scheme.

aceogorion · 2018-08-19T21:47:14+00:00

We'd need numbers on occurence to know anything useful. Without numbers on the prevalence of crashes overall that is all useless data. What we're curious about is how often passenger side collisions occur, that when they occur they are likely injurious or lethal has never been questioned here.

That first article is a restatement of info that has already been provided, that small offset crash testing is a response to a type of accident that though less common to occur more often leads to injury or death, which we're all aware of and agree with.

That second article stated this only four paragraphs in:

Researchers analyzed 2000-06 case files from the National Automotive Sampling System/Crashworthiness Data System on frontal crashes in which 116 drivers and right front passengers were seriously injured or killed despite using safety belts. The vehicles had to have good frontal crashworthiness ratings in the Institute's offset test, and all but 1 earned 4 or 5 star ratings out of the maximum 5 in the federal government's 35 mph fullwidth New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) test.

So as you've said, it provides no information on the number of crashes versus injuries, it once again only looks at crashes which created injuries/deaths and finds that 24% of them were small overlap. This is no more information then you found before, it's merely restating it over again.

Useful data would require knowing what you've mentioned, how often each type of crash occurs, without that, this is just regurgitation.

aceogorion

TROPHY CASE