What does “blow the carbon out” really do?
Occasionally, I will see a car in front of me, floor it (gas pedal), and when they do puffs of black smoke, come out the back of the car as the car hits full throttle. What gives?
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There are reasons why an engine might produce smoke; other answers here have covered those. But from your description, I imagine you are seeing more of a dark brown “smoke” when someone floors the accelerator and makes the engine run faster than normal as they speed away, even in a car in perfect working order. It both is and isn’t quite smoke in the usual sense of the word, it’s sort of a bit like secondhand smoke: particulate matter that resulted from combustion, but did not escape out to the atmosphere because it got trapped in the crevices and glass-fibre packing of the muffler or stuck to the inside walls of the exhaust pipes. When the engine revs up to a high speed, there’s a greater volume of exhaust flowing through the exhaust system, and at a higher speed. This blows some of that accumulated particulate matter out of the packing and off the pipe walls, and it leaves the tailpipe as a fine dark-brown dust, which looks like a cloud of smoke.
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