mercedes

Tuesday Wishes!

THe day after Monday when you see your car parked in the lot, wishing you could go cruise on an open road this early morning!

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Well you can’t, because you have to work! (from wheelsandmore.de)

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Manually Getting There.

So I composed a list for North American car manufacturers offering a manual transmission in their line up. I found a lot of interesting things when searching through different car web pages, especially gaudy flair.

The Alfa Romeo webpage was by far the most confusing of them all. I tried to get a simple spec sheet that took me more than 6 minutes to find, I should have been paid for fanyarin’ that kazi. Porsche also has too many options for their cars that they fail in giving a clean webpage to properly choose and differentiate between the options. Honestly, if you are getting a brand new Porsche, find a dealership and let them help you with those choices. The easiest page was Scion, nothing flashy and quite simple to understand and build my car.

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Few surprises were with Audi only having manuals for its A4, A5, and R8 lines, this includes S models. They had the easiest and cleanest web configuration when building a car out of the other luxury brand vehicles. Volkswagen also shares parts with the A3 through the A6 models, so I was surprised that the A3 didn’t have a manual transmission standard/option, yet all Volkswagen’s do. With the release of the new Lamborghini Huracan I won’t be surprised if the new R8 V10 loses the manual option too.

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The three Japanese luxury brands have essentially phased out all manual transmissions in their line up. I know Acura is now officially overseen by U.S. management as of the beginning of this year, so I’m not sure if the ILX will even remain a manual. Infiniti hasn’t released its official Q60 coupe since it shares engines with the Fairlady Z and Lexus decided the IS models don’t need manuals anymore.

For the American brands, Ford had options on almost all their sedans and coupes besides the Taurus. Chevrolet and Dodge also had a great line-up for a manual transmission package on their cars. As for  luxury U.S. cars, Buick and Cadillac had at least one or two options performance cars with manual options.

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Lotus, Porsche, and Subaru were my all time favorites. They still offer manuals as standard and their line-up’s were amazing. The BMW range disappoints me, it looks like they are slowly trying to let go of the manual. However I’m glad the M6 and M5 still have that option available.

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Those LEDS make me bend my knees Lesson#2

Lesson #2 LEDS (light-emitting diodes)

We see them everywhere now, ever since Audi revolutionized the automotive world with the A5 and its brilliant LED’s no other major car company–except BMW’s Halo lights–was in their league in terms of looks! Well we are going to go back to chemistry class and learn about how these brilliant and innovative lights work!

I really don’t want to confuse anyone to begin with so I’ll try my best to skip the more detailed parts….hopefully! So in essence a LED is formed between two intrinsic or extrinsic (contains impurities) semiconductors, a n-type and p-type. When these two semiconductors are put together they form a junction called a P-N junction (predictable name).  The P side is dominated by positive charged “holes” where as the n type has a high negative charge density. The junction created by the two semiconductors serves as the determinate for current flow. Look at the figures below (provided by imagesco.com)!

Now we are getting to the important part of this subject! The electrons want to fill the holes on the P side of the junction, but in order to do that they have to overcome the energy barrier in the junction in order to make it on the other side. The electrons are currently in a lower energy level, but as they make their transition through the junction they release energy equal to that band-gap in the form of photons in order to move across (they move when a voltage is applied to overcome the energy barrier). This energy goes into emitted infrared or visible light in LED’s. The most common semiconductors used are Silicon (Si) or Gallium (Ga), in order to get different colors the chemical composition is changed with the addition of various compounds most including phosphorus. So LED’s are graded on their specific wavelengths and intensities based on the materials used to make them. Since LED’s don’t have any moving parts it reduces their chance of being damaged due to vibration or shock and are also heat resistant 200K/watt. 

So in short that is how those LED’s most of us have on our cars work, I know a lot of scientists and engineers might have something to say about the choice of words I used to describe the processes, but hey I got my Chemistry degree I can say whatever I want right! The application list for these parts is extensiv
“rice” their rides by going on an LED frenzy! There are some applications where the traditional halogen light bulbs still look better then their newly popular LED sisters.

 

Riced OUT NISSAN