Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 44
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I'd be happy with the NA engine. The K20A is a nice enough motor in stock form, but from what I've heard its still got quite a bit of headroom for modification.

I'd rather just run a big set of cams and a free-flowing exhaust and get the thing to scream, than have all that torque and have powerdown issues. The car's only 500kg, after all.

Quote:-

As you will have seen on Beyond Tomorrow, Ariel Motor Company in the UK make the Atom, a 520kg two seater road car with the dynamics and performance of a single seater racer - a car that's about having a tonne of fun on the road and track. To give you some idea of the background behind the Atom, Ariel designer/director Simon Saunders (who was featured in the programme) has designed both motorcycles and vehicles including being lead exterior designer for Aston Martin for a period in the 80s and being one of the exterior designers for the Porsche 959. He went on to became a successful independent designer, working on a wide variety of projects and also lecturing in vehicle design. In the late nineties he decided to redefine the Lotus 7 concept in a way that incorporated the superbike experience and in 1999 the original Ariel Atom was born with 120 BHP of Rover power. In late 2003 the Atom was significantly updated including Honda powerplants and Ariel have built vehicles at their manufacturing capacity since this time - around 80 vehicles per annum. In early 2006 Ariel will be moving into a new factory premises which we trust will have capacity sufficient for the Australian market.

As for the Atom itself, it's an all-new production vehicle built to customer order from a large variety of options to allow you to create a vehicle that suits your needs. The major option is, of course, your choice of powerplant and the car that Matt Shirvington drove was a 160 BHP car with a Honda Civic Type S engine which gives a similar power to weight to a Porsche 911 Turbo. There is also a naturally aspirated Civic Type R engined car producing 245 BHP and a supercharged version of the same engine producing 300 BHP in which Matt experienced hot laps at the track.

As the Australian and New Zealand distributor for Ariel, we are undertaking Australian compliance for the Atom and expect to have this completed by mid-2006. Those of you familiar with the Australian Design Rules and the compliance process will know that nothing is simple or guaranteed but we will complete it as soon as possible and are making a serious investment in the process over the coming months. On obtaining our import approval we will be intially limited to supplying 25 vehicles per annum across Australia under the DOTARS Low Volume Scheme.

On the pricing of the Atom, Beyond Tomorrow's policy of giving the local pricing for products may have been misleading for you. The 160 BHP Atom does start at £20,000 in the UK and this does correlate to 46,000 Australian dollars for a UK resident wanting to own an Atom and use it in the UK. It does not, however, cover vehicle modifications required to meet the Australian Design Rules, containered shipping to Australia nor Duty, GST and Luxury Car Tax on landing the vehicle locally. With these expenses factored in we expect the landed cost of the base specification 160 BHP Atom to be between $66,000 and $71,000 but the reality is that it's too soon to offer anything that resembles firm pricing. Perhaps the most important aspect is that our sales model is fair and will allow you to take advantages of any improvements in the exchange rate should they arise.

Unquote:-

ok yes, i've done a search and a few people have posted know of this car and know how it performs...

Runs a super charged honda type-r motor

here's a video

clicky mah linky :)

side.jpg

fornt.jpg

:P ...holy F**K! I'm in lust! :P It's that light I could build extra space in the form of a rack so I could store it near the GT-R,LOL! (please note:GT-R takes priority over even the undeniable talent of the lustful Ariel...!)

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Latest Posts

    • First up, I wouldn't use PID straight up for boost control. There's also other control techniques that can be implemented. And as I said, and you keep missing the point. It's not the ONE thing, it's the wrapping it up together with everything else in the one system that starts to unravel the problem. It's why there are people who can work in a certain field as a generalist, IE a IT person, and then there are specialists. IE, an SQL database specialist. Sure the IT person can build and run a database, and it'll work, however theyll likely never be as good as a specialist.   So, as said, it's not as simple as you're thinking. And yes, there's a limit to the number of everything's in MCUs, and they run out far to freaking fast when you're designing a complex system, which means you have to make compromises. Add to that, you'll have a limited team working on it, so fixing / tweaking some features means some features are a higher priority than others. Add to that, someone might fix a problem around a certain unrelated feature, and that change due to other complexities in the system design, can now cause a new, unforseen bug in something else.   The whole thing is, as said, sometimes split systems can work as good, and if not better. Plus when there's no need to spend $4k on an all in one solution, to meet the needs of a $200 system, maybe don't just spout off things others have said / you've read. There's a lot of misinformation on the internet, including in translated service manuals, and data sheets. Going and doing, so that you know, is better than stating something you read. Stating something that has been read, is about as useful as an engineering graduate, as all they know is what they've read. And trust me, nearly every engineering graduate is useless in the real world. And add to that, if you don't know this stuff, and just have an opinion, maybe accept what people with experience are telling you as information, and don't keep reciting the exact same thing over and over in response.
    • How complicated is PID boost control? To me it really doesn't seem that difficult. I'm not disputing the core assertion (specialization can be better than general purpose solutions), I'm just saying we're 30+ years removed from the days when transistor budgets were in the thousands and we had to hem and haw about whether there's enough ECC DRAM or enough clock cycles or the interrupt handler can respond fast enough to handle another task. I really struggle to see how a Greddy Profec or an HKS EVC7 or whatever else is somehow a far superior solution to what you get in a Haltech Nexus/Elite ECU. I don't see OEMs spending time on dedicated boost control modules in any car I've ever touched. Is there value to separating out a motor controller or engine controller vs an infotainment module? Of course, those are two completely different tasks with highly divergent requirements. The reason why I cite data sheets, service manuals, etc is because as you have clearly suggested I don't know what I'm doing, can't learn how to do anything correctly, and have never actually done anything myself. So when I do offer advice to people I like to use sources that are not just based off of taking my word for it and can be independently verified by others so it's not just my misinterpretation of a primary source.
    • That's awesome, well done! Love all these older Datsun / Nissans so rare now
    • As I said, there's trade offs to jamming EVERYTHING in. Timing, resources etc, being the huge ones. Calling out the factory ECU has nothing to do with it, as it doesn't do any form of fancy boost control. It's all open loop boost control. You mention the Haltech Nexus, that's effectively two separate devices jammed into one box. What you quote about it, is proof for that. So now you've lost flexibility as a product too...   A product designed to do one thing really well, will always beat other products doing multiple things. Also, I wouldn't knock COTS stuff, you'd be surprised how many things are using it, that you're probably totally in love with As for the SpaceX comment that we're working directly with them, it's about the type of stuff we're doing. We're doing design work, and breaking world firsts. If you can't understand that I have real world hands on experience, including in very modern tech, and actually understand this stuff, then to avoid useless debates where you just won't accept fact and experience, from here on, it seems you'd be be happy I (and possibly anyone with knowledge really) not reply to your questions, or input, no matter how much help you could be given to help you, or let you learn. It seems you're happy reading your data sheets, factory service manuals, and only want people to reinforce your thoughts and points of view. 
    • I don't really understand because clearly it's possible. The factory ECU is running on like a 4 MHz 16-bit processor. Modern GDI ECUs have like 200 MHz superscalar cores with floating point units too. The Haltech Nexus has two 240 MHz CPU cores. The Elite 2500 is a single 80 MHz core. Surely 20x the compute means adding some PID boost control logic isn't that complicated. I'm not saying clock speed is everything, but the requirements to add boost control to a port injection 6 cylinder ECU are really not that difficult. More I/O, more interrupt handlers, more working memory, etc isn't that crazy to figure out. SpaceX if anything shows just how far you can get arguably doing things the "wrong" way, ie x86 COTS running C++ on Linux. That is about as far away from the "correct" architecture as it gets for a real time system, but it works anyways. 
×
×
  • Create New...