Re: Trains cut engines to save fuel

In article <47d55312-930e-4565-a26c-a920d64ac7ee@a2g2000prm.googlegroups.com>,
<i.g.batten@batten.eu.org> wrote:
>On Sep 3, 7:47 pm, a...@aber.ac.uk (Andrew Robert Breen) wrote:
>
>> Perfectly safe in a Proper SAAB.
>
>What's proper?  I've owned 96, 99, 900, 9000 and 9-3, and I wouldn't

I was being deliberately obtuse and thinking of the 95 aand 96, with lock
on reverse gear and the freewheel :)

>Anyway, and let's get into real Saab Arcana, the 96V4 had a selectable
>free-wheel (controlled by a tee-handle on the firewall) in order to
>simulate the lack of engine braking on 2-strokes.  With that engaged
>(or disengaged, depending on how you look at it), the car would coast
>downhill on idle.  With the brake technology of the 1960s, you'd have
>to be pretty brave to be confident of stopping at the bottom: mine
>(from memory) had front disks, but the earlier ones were drums all
>around.

It was, IIRC, Erik Carlsson who said that "brakes only slowed you down"...

>The 900, 9000 and 9-3 are all very heavy to brake and the steering
>becomes harder as the year go by and the gearing of the rack becomes
>more and more direct.

Hard it happen once in the 9000 and it wasn't fun. Not quite as bad as
having the engine cut in a Rovere SD1 with the fast Cam Gears rack (which
was dam' alarming), but still not fun.

>And as you say, a modern car (Bosch J-tronic and later, so essentially
>everything made in the past ten years) consumes no fuel on the over-
>run.  Putting the car into neutral or depressing the clutch _costs_
>fuel relative to coasting against the engine braking.

I was mildly surprised by just how big a difference it made when I
compared the two approaches in the 9000.

--
Andy Breen ~ 	Not speaking on behalf of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Feng Shui: an ancient oriental art for extracting
money from the gullible (Martin Sinclair)
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Ian Batten (04.09.2008 08:30)