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January set a new record for new vehicle average transaction prices, while consumers are hoarding their savings at the pump.
- Another round of software fixes for the ZF 9-Speed automatic gearbox.
- Subprime lending on the ride in Canada, auto loan delinquencies up in the United States.
- What consumers are doing with their savings from lower gas prices.
- The average new vehicle transaction price is $33,993, up 5.2 percent year over year.
- How about this for a Fiesta ST fighter?
23 Comments on “While You Were Sleeping: February 5th, 2015...”
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Any more fixes to that ZF 9-speed transmission and the damn thing will shift itself
Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do anyway?
You see what I did there? ;-)
Heh, they’d better be careful or it might become self-aware!
Open the driver’s door, ZF…
I can’t do that…
Alex, I’ll take oxymorons for 500 please……………
If that Opel were to come here, it would of course arrive as a Buick. But I don’t think it fits the brand image at all, and it would likely cost too much. The Fiesta ST starts at just over $20k, and there’s no way a Buick model would be within range.
FCA builds some ZF boxes under license. Are these the ZF supplied boxes or are these disasters built by Fiatysler? If FCA builds them, are they supplying their own firmware as well? Who supplies the internals for the FCA boxes?
The ZF 9-speed gives me pause about the Renegade. I did read a review that said their Renegade example exhibited none of the oddities found in other FCA cars. But since all Renegades are mfr-prepped for the press (at this point), it’s hard to know if this is a valid observation.
If Jeep is replacing 12-15 of these transmissions a week, that seems like a looming disaster as the deployment of this transmission expands. Not only that, but transmission replacement seems contrary to ZF’s claim that the only problem with it is software, not mechanical.
^This^ As much as I want a Renegade I will not be beta testing them for FCA. I can wait to get one in 2017
wow average car price is $ 34,000 grand, how do this figures count leases, which I assume moves this number up if they are counted, still that is a lot of coin.
Why would whether you lease it or finance it make any difference? You still negotiate a price on a lease, just you are only paying the difference between that price and a calculated residual value, plus interest.
Leases do allow that number to be bigger for a given monthly payment.
If the GM ecotec 1.6 is up and running in Europe, when will it be here? A real upgrade for the Verano and/or Cruze.
Are they waiting for the new model? Hopefully the addititonal power over the current 1.4T will not come at the price of lower mpg. At 205 hp, the 1.6T would be a welcome change for the 2.4 NA Ecotec 2.4 which is neither powerful nor thrifty.
“How about this for a Fiesta ST fighter?”
How about no?
While the 1.6T would be a welcome addition to GM’s US engine lineup, I am far less enthused about the hot Corsa. Opel just doesn’t seem to have the talent to build great hot hatches – something that has been reflected in the previous attempts that have mainly resulted in overweight, understeering and unrefined cars.
“what consumers are doing with the gas savings?”
Purchasing more Katy Perry songs, that would be my guess.
And speaking of the ZF-9, I believe this is a case of “one gear too far”.
Agreed. The Chrysler 8-speed is universally praised. Too bad it can’t be used in smaller cars.
How many gears do we need?
It seems the most efficient use of the ICE is to set it up as a stationary constant speed unit.
It this how we are heading?
Sort of like a turbo prop, they are constant speed.
Design a car engine that ‘idles’ at 1 600rpm and revs out to 1 600rpm.
Stop at the lights to engine stops. Take you foot off the brake and slam the accelerator and the engine resumes it’ 1 600rpm.
How exciting!
Why are we still looking at wide flat torque bands?
With countless gears we only need a torque band of less than 1 000rpm.
Yep, constant speed engines.
The internal combustion engine works best at a high constant speed, and incidentally can be made very clean as to emissions if running that way.
Use a small IC engine, running at a high constant speed, to power a generator, which charges batteries, from which an electric motor draws power. In other words, a series hybrid. Using a diesel for this is even more efficient, and the constant speed running allows the emissions issues with diesels to be largely overcome.
You can probably power a small car (Toyota Corolla size) with a 40 HP ICE in the series hybrid configuration since the average power draw is lower than that, and during times of peak demand (highway acceleration) the additional power comes from a net discharge of the battery; during lower demand times the engine-generator set provides a net charge of the battery.
The Chevy Volt is a half-step toward this, but as far as I know no one in passenger cars has had the nerve yet to do it fully. Instead, for reasons which have always seemed spurious to me, they have released parallel hybrids. Sure, they work well, especially when new, but the penalty in complexity is extreme. I have never seen an actual engineering analysis, with real numbers and data, demonstrating why the series hybrid is a bad idea.
I think the series hybrid is a much better idea than these ridiculous n+1 speed automatic transmissions. But you all know better than me, and of course electronics and software never fail.
Series hybrid has been tried, but it does not work in reality, and that’s why there are few examples (and the BMW i3 is one). The charge/discharge losses are killer. It is better to sacrifice a little bit of prime-mover efficiency (by letting its power output vary to match power demand as closely as possible whenever it can) in order to eliminate the charge/discharge losses whenever it can.
Every time you convert energy from one form to another, there is a loss. Starting at the engine flywheel, a conventional powertrain keeps it as mechanical powertrain all the way to the wheels (but is incapable of regenerative braking). A parallel-hybrid also routes most of the power through a gear set (whenever it can) with only a portion going through the electrical system. The various Toyota and Ford hybrids, and to a lesser extent the Volt, are like this.
In a series hybrid, there is no choice for that mechanical power to first become alternating current, then direct current, then charge a battery to become chemical energy where it sits for a while, then discharge a battery at a different time to go back to direct current, then be inverted to alternating current, then go into an AC traction motor, and STILL go through a set of reduction gears.
There is a loss associated with every one of these conversions. If you keep it all-electric but you allow engine output to vary to match demand whenever it can (steady driving) you can skip the battery charge-discharge loss. But still … a suitably-chosen set of gears will be more efficient than all of those electric shenanigans under those conditions.
When running in combustion-engine mode, neither the Volt, nor the BMW i3, get fantastic mileage.
I don’t believe that is correct about an IC being most efficient at a high speed. Peak efficiency should be at under a relatively high load at moderate/low speed, probably around the torque peak rpm. Throttle wide open to minimize pumping losses, lowish speed to minimize friction and give time for complete combustion. And a turbo to recover waste energy in the exhaust stream.
A great example of this is an early lpt 2.3t Saab 9-5. A 2.3l engine designed to minimize friction, a small turbo to pump up the torque at low rpms, and tall gearing such that a 3500lb luxury 5 pax car could easily get 35mpg on highway trips with late 90’s tech.
This is also why modern CVTs can be very efficient, and the whole point of many-speed gearboxes. That peak efficiency range is relatively small, you need a lot of gears to stay in it. The ultimate example is a big diesel truck engine with a 1200-1500 rpm usable rev range, and a 10-18spd or more gearbox behind it. Or a bicycle for that matter – humans make peak torque over a narrow range of rpm as well!
I think the big problems with series hybrids are both efficiency and performance. To get it efficient enough, the ICE needs to be really small. And then you end up with an i3 where once the battery is run down the “range extender” performance is pretty terrible in comparison. If you make the ICE big enough to have “acceptable” performance, it is a ton of weight to haul around on battery.
I still think the range extender on a trailer is the ultimate way to go. Pure electric and leave 500lbs at home when you don’t need it, unlimited range when you do need it at the cost of some efficiency.
The series-parallel hybrid system seems to be advantageous over just a series hybrid setup. GM found this out designing the Volt, which was supposed to be a series hybrid. The transmission design Toyota came up with for the Prius is absolutely ingenious. It allows for both series and parallel function, as well as creating full CVT transmission. And and all this is in a transmission that’s simpler then just about any other automatic. With a pure series hybrid, you still have the motor and generator, so you really don’t even get weight savings. In a series-parallel hybrid, the system is always using the combined output most efficiently. If engine output is suited to power the wheels, it does. If it’s best suited to charge the battery, it does. If the engine can shut down it does.
The parallel hybrid as engineered by Toyota and Ford hardly suffers any complexity penalty. The transmission of a conventional vehicle is replaced by a vastly simpler single planetary gearset. The only addition is a battery and two electric motors. The software is quite complex, but the hardware is amazingly simple.
And it’s worth noting that the software on the Toyota and Ford hybrids, indeed, doesn’t ever fail. They are some of the most reliable cars on the road today, and when there is a propulsion system failure it’s almost always hardware: the battery or, occasionally, the ICE.