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
>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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