The Scirocco

It was about 1987. Earlier that year my need for cheap wheels and the vacuum in my cousin’s wallet had collided to form my marriage with a 1977 Mk1 VW Scirocco. The car was a Frankenstein built of a hodge-podge of salvage parts, and even though my cousin had been a part of building the engine he didn't remember what all went into it. I didn't care. It ran hard for no more than it was and really enjoyed life above 3000 RPM. I often gave it that opportunity.

On this particular November evening I was enroute back to St. Louis from visiting family in Kansas City. These trips were fairly frequent, and as I had the attention span of a six year old in a toy-shop, I would often take two-lane to break up interstate monotony. The road was winding, the car responsive, and I was making good time.

The air was crisp at about 35 degrees and somewhere around a megapolis called Rosebud I hit fog. It got thicker as I drove so it wasn't long before my 65 MPH curve-carving spree gave up the ghost. If visibility hadn't killed it the car would have. Soon I found myself downshifting and straining to hold 25 MPH on hills. Up ahead I saw lights and pulled in. A 2-bay self-service car wash with flickering fluorescent lights, It looked abandoned except for the presence of all the wash hardware. Lifting the hood of my $800 wonder, I noted that the aftermarket Weber carburetor was encased in ice. The carburetor heat-riser had been discarded with the OEM induction, so there was nothing to do but sit around until it thawed and limp it along until I hit dryer air.

This would never occur today. The ‘80s brought computer controls and fuel injection, the ‘90s advanced the artform, and today it is rare to have anomalous automotive behavior. Somehow the software engineers have infused their coding with Ritalin and Xanax. Mass-produced cars are no longer flighty, prone to moodiness or angry outbursts. You turn the key and they go.

But sometimes as I stand in a parking lot and push the panic button on the remote FOB to locate my mundane wheels among its Stepford Wife sisters, I find myself missing the fire.

© 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved

The Tale of Two Diesels

In 1919 a man named Clessie Cummins had formed a company building stationary diesel engines. Cummins engines were effective and started to be respected and used in marine applications too. Clessie was convinced the diesel had viability for more purposes that anyone had given it credit for, so he evangelized. He had spent much of the 1930s showboating his concepts, even entering Cummins diesels in the Indianapolis 500 as early as 1931.

In 1938, one of GM’s premier engineers, a guy named Charles Kettering, managed to convince the powers-that-be to let him develop a new diesel engine. Kettering had conviction that the diesel was a good solution for automotive/trucking applications, but believed existing engines were too heavy and too underpowered. He wanted to develop a lightweight diesel engine that was practical in those applications, and so the General Motors Diesel Engine Division was born, later becoming Detroit Diesel.

Both men, brilliant and undeterred, worked their ideas into fruition. And while WWII put a kink in plans, it also provided an impetus for more development. So by the mid 1950s, diesel engines were becoming more common in bigger trucks. Eventually other engine manufacturers such a Mack and Caterpillar started developing their road-going diesels.

The early 1960s had everyone in trucking looking at diesels, and the big grumbling 6-cylinder gasoline engines that had the market foothold up to the mid-1950s were becoming harder to find. The diesels were proving more durable, more powerful and more economical than the gas engines.

As recently as the early 1970s it was the Detroit 238 and Cummins 250 that ruled the streets in fleet tractors. Both had their adherents and detractors and neither was perfect, but they were functional, got double the fuel economy the gas engines doing same work and were comparatively easy to work on. Of note, the 238 and 250 happened to be the horsepower ratings of these engines, so while they went down the road, doing so at modern legal weight required bushel baskets of gear-changes. A guy running an old Detroit had his right hand welded to the shifter; he was constantly downshifting to keep the engine in the sweet-spot.

Fast forward to the 70s-80s. More and more weight required more power. Owner operators with baloney-sliced 6” chrome stacks and Christmas trees worth of clearance lights on their trucks were buying big-bore 500HP engines like hotcakes. Farmers had started buying diesel pickups for durability and economy but needed more power to pull their stock trailers. Before long the horsepower wars were raging in the light truck diesel market too. By 1995 pickups with diesels consistently had more power than the fleet tractor-trailers of the 1960s.

But fleet tractors were doing an about-face in the ‘90s; engines got smaller and had more conservative power ratings. Fleet operators were concerned about economy, and they were finding that the custom-tailored programming available on the new electronic mid-bore diesels was actually allowing them to run nearly as well as the old big-bores, all the while getting continually better economy.

Light truck diesels aren’t there yet. While it is true that a few the 400+ HP monster pickups are really used for pulling paying loads, most live out their lives under individuals doing less strenuous activities, like pulling a 16’ bass boat or maybe a camper trailer. Drivers always like more power, but don’t always need more power. Maybe it’s time for light-truckers to ratchet-back the baloney sliced, dual-piped, chrome air-cleanered bravado just a hair?                                                                                                                                                                                               © 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved

Is Thin “In”?

I will admit it. When Motor Trend came out with their “truck of the year” announcement and Ford’s new aluminum F150 was third down the list, I was a little amused. It amused me because of all the hype the aluminum truck had gone to press with, and as the Motor Trend writers indicated, the performance didn't live up to the promise. The truck wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional either. Extensive redesign, bleeding-edge technology and new metallurgy aside, the truck fell in with its peers in actual performance.  So it appeared that the marketing department came out with the guns blazing, but they were shooting blanks.

When I read further, the fact that Chevy’s reintroduced mid-sized Colorado won the Truck of the Year award actually shocked me.

As I've said before, the American truck-buying public has seemed obsessed with bigger/tricker trucks, so they have grown both in size and options. In selecting full-sized test trucks, Motor Trend indicated that if all were optioned out heavily, they would all cost about the same, around $53,000.

I tend towards pragmatism, and to me a truck is a work vehicle. My last full-sized truck was a 1980 Chevy that was about 20 years old when I bought it. A little long in the tooth and all the gloss gone, it still ran great and did everything a truck needed to do. I paid $1000 for it, and it served me well for several years and then through a home remodeling.

In fact the $53K that these half-tons can cost today is about what I paid for the house which the Chevy helped remodel. I prefer to sleep in a bed, take hot showers and have a place to plug in a coffee pot, so I won’t be trading my mortgage for a truck payment anytime soon.

Maybe, just maybe, the Motor Trend selection of the Colorado speaks volumes on this topic of automotive excess. A couple of the test writers even mentioned the smaller size being more appropriate for many things. The fact that the little truck also cost about two-thirds what the big ones do was also noted. To no small degree, auto writers are editorialists. So if they are making these statements, they believe doing so will hit a public nerve, addressing some slightly contentious point that is making the rounds among their readers.

Certainly the automotive market has an earnest place for a full-size 4X4 short-bed truck with a 6” lift kit, but it could be we are realizing that this place isn't the parking spot at our 9-5.

© 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved

The Fickle Fleet?

The year was 1983. Chrysler/Plymouth rocked the domestic market with the introduction of the ’84 Plymouth Voyager/Dodge Caravan. The names weren’t new but the product was. America was downsizing and what had been full sized vans were now smaller products. Mom and Pop America raised eyebrows, abandoned their station wagons and pulled out their checkbooks. The new successful suburban household had a 7-passenger mini-van in the drive instead of the Ford Galaxy or Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser wagons of old.

In other news, the primordial ooze of auto evolution was coughing up other leaner life-forms too. Due to tightening federal CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, Detroit was finally taking cues from Europe and Asia on what small vehicles should look like. Tiny trucks and passenger cars were now filling showrooms and fleet operators were scratching their collective head trying to figure out how to make these vehicles work. But as fast as the popularity of these wheels materialized they were doomed to disappear, because those same CAFE standards had forced reduction of the size of some old rural standbys too.

The Ford Bronco, Chevy Blazer and Dodge Ramcharger all fell under the knife for a nip and tuck routine and came out of surgery trimmer and more glamorous. It is unclear why the Sport had appeared on the Utility Vehicle, but the days of rubber mats & hose-out-the-mud utility were gone. Instead we got carpeting, sound deadening, running boards and 6-channel stereo systems. Ironically these vehicles were functionally 4X4 station wagons, but smaller than those that came before. While the fuel mileage could barely compete with the older/bigger wagons, they helped the CAFE standards because they were classified as a truck. Back then a 17-18 MPG truck was something to boast about.

So again we had the changing of the guard. While mini-vans were still available, they showed up less often in the drive-through. Suburban Sally was now hauling Extra-Curricular Eddie to little league practice in a small 4X4 station wagon with chrome wheels. Eventually Sally realized she needed more space to haul Eddie’s over-committed friends around too, so her SUV grew, and then it grew some more. It became a full sized truck with a wagon body, so the big wagons of old were back in bloom – they just sat higher, weighed more and got worse fuel mileage than they used to. But the public reveled in spaciousness of these living-room sized vehicles and gas was cheap.

Corporate Carl felt slighted. He liked the machismo factor of pickup trucks but they were uncomfortable. He figured if a big cushy SUV was good for Sally, a big pickup with leather seats, 4X4 decals and tube steps should be just the ticket for his commute. Detroit reacted to the market and built him what he wanted and simple trucks went away. And so fleet operators spent a lot of time looking for a product that was reasonably economical to run and without the extras that they didn't really need.

So your average fleet operator is doomed to sweep up after American whim, buying whatever is available that most closely matches the need and available budget. Ironic that a profession which must sometimes buy upwards of 500-600 units at one time can have so little influence on what they have available to buy.                                                                                                                   

© 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved

The Evolution of the Car

We love our wheels. We are seldom far from them; we commute in them, work out of them, use them for our recreation and often don’t even leave them to eat. But the car of today differs from cars of 30-40 years ago by much more than technology, assembly methods and materials. Really the domestic auto industry was never the same after the publication of Ralph Nadar’s “Unsafe at Any Speed”. This one book shredded some of Detroit’s most advanced engineering, put the auto industry on the defensive and resulted in the Feds forming NHTSA. That is both good and bad. Never before in our automotive history have we enjoyed cars and trucks (light and heavy) that have been safer, but at a cost.

I come from an automotive family. My sharecropping grandfather landed a job in GM’s Fisher Body division as a millwright just before the great depression. The job offer was the result of some appreciated carpentry work he had done for a GM production foreman who worked at that plant. Since that time family members have been in and around the car industry and the lore that follows it. 

My mom met dad at that same GM plant. Their early relationship included such flashy machinery as MG-TD’s and Austin Healey 100-4’s. Eventually they settled down and decided to look for a more practical car. They ended up buying a VW beetle but told me tales of test driving such oddballs as the Messerschmitt tandem car and the iconic BMW Isetta before making that choice.

I’m not sure how either of those tiny cars was practical, but I’m very sure neither would do well in today’s simulated crash tests.

More recently my oldest son came of driving age. He developed an infatuation for these same European contraptions as well as the new breed of Asian micro-cars and trucks, the kind frequently seen puttering around college campuses. He bemoans the fact that such cars can no longer be registered for street use here. He suggested that maybe we should have different classifications of cars, some legal only for urban commutes and others which could travel interstate, too. Though this is an idea that has some merit (think about the recent Nissan “Leaf” and the Smart car), we are still up against the reality of these smaller cars needing to cohabit with the 3-ton behemoths that many scoot around in today.

In short, we’ve regulated ourselves out of cars of this type:  vehicles that were designed with out-of-the-box thinking that resulted from Europe’s war-torn transportation needs and limited resources. We allowed our government to be our advocate, sort of outsourced our own responsibility, and then in some fit of irony found ways to circumvent these same regulations in the name of speed, power, handling and personal preference.

A recent Popular Science magazine speculated about the future of the car and what it would look like in years to come. There are so many options ahead of us, so many directions that we could turn, that it is virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy what the future of mechanized transportation looks like. About all we can be sure of is that whatever it is, there will be some 18 year-old kid trying to hotrod it, some technician trying to bolt tool-boxes to it and some federal bureaucrat trying to tax it.

I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.

© 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved

The 9th hour

I admit it. To this day I am baffled by the fact that otherwise responsible/intelligent people, even in higher levels of management, often forget to tell you key information that determines how well you can service their fleet/equipment needs.

In fleet management I often found out after the fact that the company was actively on-boarding new personnel. Those additional positions of course required vehicles to enable them to be productive. Or occasionally operations unilaterally moved equipment to another location without notifying us; this resulted in a lot of confusion when my service vendor couldn't find the vehicle where it was supposed to be. I am forever grateful for GPS systems.

More recently a (hopefully) temporary career segue has put me back into the supplier side of the equation. I am managing production on a contract basis for a company that upfits new trucks with aftermarket equipment.

This same company also represents a major snowplow manufacturer. Not incidentally the forecast for this weekend called for snow. Note I said “forecast”, IE: over 1 week ago the weather-folks were doing the happy-dance excitedly explaining that this system would be approaching. While we were not even open for retail business over the weekend, I believe we received over 80 calls and had 12-14 drive in customers. Some we could help, some we couldn’t. You can’t conjure-up parts out of thin air.

All this isn't to bash these people, well most of this isn’t to bash these people; but rather to say that whatever the circumstance, it is really to your advantage to remain flexible.

The point is that no matter how well prepared one of your customers thinks they are, they have probably overlooked something. It doesn't really seem to matter if they are an internal or external customer. The reason we do what we do is to service their need. And as we are their experts, we have the responsibility to think around corners, down dark alleys, across vast expanse and into the realm of 6-8 months down the road.

That’s why we make the big-bucks!  

Creativity

I recently had lunch with a friend who is in the automotive trade (go figure) just so we could catch up with each other. Like yours truly, he has a past filled with various types of sports cars and now otherwise collectable vehicles. As usually happens with car guys, we found ourselves reminiscing about some of our old iron.

The discussion continued through email after our lunch that day; he forwarded me the link to an internet article discussing the ten most beautiful engines ever made. I am a form follows function kind of guy, not a spit and polish sort. I found myself at odds with the author in a few cases. To me beauty is found in originality, not just execution. Engineering from a time when all was new fascinates me; the designs of men like Charles Kettering, Zora Arkus Duntov and Fred Offenhauser get my attention.

Those of you who drive a Bugatti Veyron can stop reading now, you will find this tedious.

You see man (as in a creature, not as in a gender) is unique in his ability to plan, adapt, design, build and create; no other animal that draws breath or swims has these same holistic capacities. And really the whole reason motorized transportation exists today is that man recognized centuries ago that there was an advantage in being able to move more and do it faster than was possible with just draft animals or by carrying it over his shoulder.  Development of the wheel brought with it continued imagination as to how we could gain more advantage from it.

And so as fleet operators today we have greater choice among many global offerings to continue to do more, do it faster and do it more economically than ever before in history. 100 years ago a Mercedes Benz sporting a 274CI engine (developing an unheard of 115 HP!) won the French Grand Prix with an average speed of 65.66 MPH. This year the Mercedes F1 car was touting a hybrid powertrain with 1/3 the displacement, building 8 times the power and pushing over 3 times the speed potential of that 1914 winner.

The 1914 Grand Prix was the last GP run prior to the Great War, and unfortunately there is no mechanism capable of encouraging technological development at a faster pace than the war machine.  As this is the year of that horrible conflict’s 100^th anniversary, we can only hope that there isn’t someone with an itchy palm on the red button this time around. But much of what we enjoy today in the transportation industry came out of a military development.

By all means, let’s effectively use all the technology available to us today in transportation. But let’s not take what we have for granted, or disregard the efforts, intent and passion of the people who developed it for us. It’s only when we have a grasp of the back-story that we can effectively move the ball forward.

Winter Approacheth

It dipped down into freezing for the first time this winter season in my area the other night. While it wasn’t as brutal an early winter dip as some of the country saw, 24 degrees isn’t a temperature I was prepared to walk out the door and greet that morning.

Two days before I was prepping for winter, and as we live in the salt-belt windshield washers are pretty crucial for winter driving. My washer pump had broken on my stunning little Kia scooter, and so I was under the car hanging a new pump on it. While I knew better than to risk it this time of year, I had dumped some plain water in the reservoir to test the new pump figuring I would get a load of real washer fluid in it before it froze hard.

I didn’t and it did.

There was no damage; later in the day it thawed and pumped fine. But the whole thing starting me thinking about winter and the stress it puts on automotive systems. As the temperature plummets lubricants get thick, battery capacity goes down and slush can freeze a wreak havoc on ABS and speed sensors. The lube is no small concern as it can cause engine and transmission systems to build pressure slowly, shock absorbers to move stiffly (if at all) and make final drives wickedly hard to turn.

It is rare in this day and age that coolant gives problems, at least until something in the cooling system breaks. Coolant now has a potential lifespan of longer than a lot of people own cars. But if you make a lot of short trips as part of your driving cycle and your car is 6-7 years old with only 50K miles on it, it would likely be worth changing your 100K mile coolant anyway. Acids form in it over time and they can damage other engine parts.

There was a time that cars weren’t even drivable in 0 degree weather until they had warmed up a little. Modern fuel systems are so good that most cars run just as well from an extreme-cold start as they do in 40 degree weather. Remember thought, just because they can doesn’t mean they should. I am not a fan of idling vehicles, but I am a strong fan of taking it easy on a vehicle while driving it in cold weather until it is up to operating temperature. 

Thinking ahead while driving in winter is crucial, both to you and your car’s longevity. Not doing so potentially increases your risk of being stranded, getting into a wreck, or at the least, reducing the life of your car.

The Air-Ratchet

This last spring I was thrust into the world of job-search due to a company acquisition/merger. One of several departments dismissed in the no-harm/no-foul integration, my department & I concluded that anytime you hear the word “synergy”, someone is fixin’ to lose a job.

As with all such transitional eras in a career, you tend to ask yourself “what just happened?”, followed closely by “why did that happen?” & “what do I do now?” As mentioned last time, I ended up working with an old business acquaintance running a second production shift on a temp basis. It has been gratifying; not just keeping busy and bringing some income back into the household, but training inexperienced guys in the crafts, keeping them busy & keeping their work top quality.

As I am managing temp-agency personnel, there are daily, errrr, umm hourly issues trying to locate tools, parts and fasteners. In one of these searches I noted that although we had two company air-ratchets, one sat unused. Hooking it up it became apparent why, it was slipping and not producing any torque. I tore into it for a rebuild.

I’ve always had an innate understanding of equipment so the problem ratchet wasn’t much of a problem. Now it screams like a dentist’s drill on amphetamines. Through the process of repairing it I remembered how gratifying it was to take something broken and make it work. I reflected on my career and how this ability has served me. Like many I didn’t purpose to end up doing what I do, the work evolved as my experience did.

It has been good to self-evaluate. I believe everyone should come up for air once in a while, though I would recommend initiating the process yourself rather than have your employer initiate it for you. On my own road to self-discovery, I realized that it was this love and understanding of equipment that shaped my experience and skills as my career advanced. All that has happened since has been a direct outgrowth of this simple interest.

So I guess the dime-store epiphany I would like to share is; do yourself a favor and always remember why you are where you are. View it like a plumb-line. If you true-up to it regularly you won’t be able to veer that far off course.