I often watched the grand tour and Richard Hammond does it, to increase the car specs. How does that work? I know mechanics do it. But surely the manufacturer would put it on highest specs anyway? Or not?
In: Engineering
The highest specs mean different things to different people. You can optimize fuel ratios, timing, and things like that, but they all come with pros and cons. You can pump out more horsepower, but it will come at the expense of fuel economy and wear and tear on the engine.
Modern car engines are controlled by computer chips.
It’s like the graphics settings in a video game. If the graphics are set to “Low” you’ll have chunky, lower resolution, pixely graphics, but probably a great frame rate. You can change the graphics settings to to “High” to get pretty, higher resolution, photorealistic graphics. Upping the resolution settings might give you better graphics, but at the expense of frame rate. Changing the settings changes the experience.
Same thing with your car’s “settings” in the computer that runs it. The “default setting” in your car’s computer might optimize for gas mileage over, say, a fuel mix that would result in more engine power. A richer fuel mix might give the engine more power, but at the expense of gas mileage. Changing the settings changes the experience.
Car manufacturers have to meet environmental/fuel efficiency criteria and are also concerned with not having the car break while they are responsible for repairing it under warranty. They are also making a tune that has to work across thousands of vehicles. Each vehicle, even from the same model, year, and production line is slightly different. So there is almost always some specific tweaks that can make your specific vehicle work a little better.
An aftermarket tuner isn’t worried about the car breaking from stress (sort of, they do want to provide a working product to the buyer), the tune needing to work on thousands of other cars, and may or may not be accountable to environmental standards. The owner of the car is accepting the risk of it breaking from increased power and is probably not worried about maximum fuel efficiency of they are getting an aftermarket tune.
The manufacturer is more interested in hitting the specs that the largest number of customers are interested in, and meeting government regulations, not necessarily the best racetrack performance.
Richard Hammond probably cares a lot more about speed and acceleration than he does about fuel efficiency and EPA/(whatever the British environmental agency is) emissions limits.
>But surely the manufacturer would put it on highest specs anyway? Or not?
The answer is not. At least for your typical daily driver type car. The idea is not to run the car at the absolute maximum specs it can run at, but have run at an acceptable performance level that will not wear parts quickly.
In addition, just because your engine can be tuned to run at higher specs, it doesn’t mean the rest of the car can take it.
Rigidity of the frame, the quality of the suspension, the amount of torque a transmission can take, etc. all play a role.
For example, you could buy a civic with the 1.5 L turbo engine and manual transmission. You can definitely get the engine to crank out more HP and torque than the stock, but at some point, your clutch will start slipping because it wasn’t designed to take that kind of power. So, now you have to change the clutch, eventually the turbo, and so on.
As someone who uses their car to go to work, do groceries and not race it on track, I care more about fuel economy and the car being reliable than squeezing every single HP out of that engine.
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