The Connecting Rod

So, a few days ago back in India, while I was at the new Canon Experience at the Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, checking out the 5D, the salesman, recognizing me as an automobile fellow from my company uniform, asks me a few things about car engines. And thus, an unlikely connection was made between my two passions.

As a result, today I will be writing about cars and all.

My parents tell me that my love affair with automobiles goes way back, and that the first word I spoke was "car" contorted into something that can be blurted out by a toddler. As a result, gasoline was in my veins even before I knew that such a phrase actually existed. All my toys were cars, and after the ten or twenty customary hours of playing, all were disassembled to take a look into the mechanism that made it go, or made the vroooooom noise as it went and the like. I was a born engineer.

Thus, it was no wonder that when I was old enough to understand these, horsepower, torque, cubic capacity, four wheel drive, transmission ratios, synchromesh, differential gear, pistons, cylinders and connecting rods were the most used terms in my vocabulary. I started pouring the hours into reading whatever automobile magazines I could get my hands on, and as a result, got to know a lot about automobiles. Some of it I have already forgotten, and before I forget the rest, I guess I should put it down here.

The earliest automobiles (lets just restrict our scope to the internal combustion kind for the sake of logistics) were made around a hundred and twenty years ago, in Germany (where else - that place still is the mecca of automobiles - irrespective of what others might want you to believe - and anyone who knows his beemers and audis from the hondas and chevys will vouch for). Then on, it has been a pretty long journey of evolutions and revolutions in automotive technology, which, the way things are looking, will frankly never come to an end.

The earliest automobiles were often popular as horseless carriages, as they were actually those things retrofitted with some sort of engine driving the wheels, and also some rudimentary steering system, lest you drive head-on into the walls or someone walking by the side of the road - or even in the middle of it - as must have been the norm for those days, and apparently still is in my part of the world.

Today's cars are in principle not much different from what those earlier ones were, engine driving the wheels; steering to avoid the obstacles. Though a lot of other things have been added over the years: suspension, brakes, doors, roofs, windows, roll down glass windows, intricate transmissions with multiple gears and later automatic transmissions, seats, seat belts, the instrument panel with (now-a-days) countless tell-tale displays, luxury and convenience things like the air-conditioner systems, radio tuners, full fledged multimedia and navigation systems, safety features like ABS and airbags, and in more recent years lots of electronic jugglery like stability programs, traction control systems and what not.

The earliest vehicles were rear wheel drive, and for a long time, it was the tradition to have the engine up-front under the hood and drive the rear wheels. And if I am to believe the words of the editor of my favourite automobile mag (which I do), it still is the ideal way because "After three months with the 320d, I now know why the power needs to go to the back and the front should be left to do the steering and not battle with the power transmission." This traditional longitudinal front-engined rear wheel drive way of building cars has now been mostly cast aside, sometimes resulting in legends like the rear engined 911s from Stuttgart, mid-engined beasts from Maranello, but sadly for the most part leads to the sea of transverse front-engined front wheel drive cars that we see today swarming all around us like buzzing bees threatening to swallow the few remaining bastions of sanity.

Prejudices aside, the transverse front engined way of building cars is economical and also weighs less because all of the drive train is contained under the front hood. That is perhaps why it is so famous today. The conventional layout is still religiously stuck to by a few and for good reason. Their reputation & identity lies with it. Though with the rising concerns about the environment and the governments taking sterner than ever looks at the miles per gallon figures, it might be a losing battle for these few.

Coming back to the technical stuff, cars have been traditionally propelled by petrol engines, that magical liquid that you get from black gold - crude oil. Referred to as gasoline by the people living in the land of a thousand dreams, this fuel now has some serious competition from the likes of the diesel engines, which for decades were foul smelling, smoke spewing, noisy, overweight chunks of metal, fit only for marine, stationary and truck applications. These days however, so much has changed that unless you pop open the hood of a car, you will not be able to recognise one from the other by performance and sound. So much so that one of the pinnacles of motorsport is so thoroughly dominated by "oil-burners" that the organising agency is trying to amend the rules in the favour of the spark-plugged variety.

Coming to the next thing after the engine that sends all those horses and Newton-meters to the wheels is the transmission - also referred to crudely as the gearbox. From the preselector gear transmissions of yore, through the sliding mesh and synchromesh manual transmission on the manual side to the "hydramatic" and "tiptronic" to the latest fancy dual clutched variety on the automatic side, the transmission has also seen perhaps as much advancement in technology as the the engine has. From simple device designed to provide varying levels of torque as per the vehicle speed and load requirement from the engine, to a highly tuned and integral part of the vehicle upon which huge aspects of performance and luxury depend, the transmission has come a long way.

They used to have a drive shaft earlier in almost all vehicles, but now-a-days the differential built into the transmission case eliminates the need for that. The differential gear however is here to stay, lest the vehicles spin their wheels bald on turns or worse, under steer so severely that the roads would have been planned in a totally different way.

From sticks that you could lower to the ground to cause some resistance to motion and leather bands that could be pulled to tighten around the wooden wheels of wagons, brakes have come a long way today, what with the cross drilled ceramic discs and ten piston calipers. If you go ahead and calculate the amount of stopping power today's brake systems have, you would wish for some magical device of the size similar to the brakes that could generate even half in absolute number the braking power.

Anyway, I could perhaps go on and on about the things that make up a car. Heck I haven't even touched the system that I actually deal with in real life in the car company that I work for, but it would perhaps be fitting to leave that aside for some other day.