To repeat an icon is not easy. To reinvent an icon is even harder. Renault succeeds in doing so. Few small cars have so much visual appeal. The reborn Mini has it, so is Fiat 500. They are successful ...

In 1983, Toyota launched a pair of affordable coupes in Japan. Their official names were Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno. They were basically the same car except some cosmetic differences – the ...

Whenever I mention Subaru, the images of the first generation Impreza WRX always flash in my mind. Undoubtedly, the first generation WRX was the symbol of Subaru as well as one of the iconic cars in ...

First introduced by Mercedes 300SL in 1954, tuned intake manifold is not exactly a new technology. It is discussed here just because its principle is useful to our further study of variable intake ...

The use of twin-turbocharger is a question of both efficiency and packaging. A small engine is of course better to use a single turbo, because it does not produce sufficient exhaust gas to drive 2 ...

Cam-phasing VVT is the simplest, cheapest and most commonly used mechanism at this moment. However, its performance gain is also the least, very fair indeed. Basically, it varies the valve timing by ...

Ram air intake is perhaps the simplest kind of forced induction. When the car is travelling at speed, air will be forced into the intake manifold through the ram air inlet which usually locates at the ...

Skyline GT-R was the first Japanese performance car truly beating the best European sports cars by dynamics rather than value for money. From 1989 to 2002, three generations of GT-R got the highest ...

Manual transmission might be almost dead in the USA – only 4 percent of all new cars sold there are equipped with stick-shift – but in the rest of the world it is still the choice of the majority. For ...

6 cylinder engines, no matter inline-6 or V6, are inherently smoother than 4-cylinder inline engines because all the first order and second order forces can be balanced. However, most small cars do ...

Japanese cars of the late 1980s and 1990s were renowned for high technology. The most notable of them was Mitsubishi Galant VR-4. Introduced in 1987, this car packed the most technologies this side of ...

All cars need energy for propulsion. When they decelerate and stop, the energy is wasted in braking. Why not recapture the braking energy, store it and use it for acceleration later on? That is ...