Feul economy and performance of future I.C engine vehicles

In order to investigate the feasibility of the various proposed design Improvements in motor vehicles, a flexible computer simulation package has been developed at the University of Durham. The package simulates motor vehicles by connecting a series of subroutines representing individual physical components which contain their own efficiency characteristics and together represent the desired total drive train. It is shown that the replacement of the conventional four- speed manual gearbox by continuously variable transmission in present vehicles can lead to improvements of 7-23% in overall fuel economy. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that by using present technologies improvements of 59-65% in overall fuel economy are possible by the turn of the century. It is also shown that these savings could be enhanced by a further 26% if the ideas at present incorporated in research vehicles are translated to on-road vehicles regardless of cost.