How many processors on board?
Drifting
Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 1,837
Likes: 4
Well, I'd take electronics any day for reliability, economy and flexibility. Modern car systems work really well when they're working, which is almost all the time, provide fallback or "limp home" modes when something does break, and make for much easier diagnosis of problems either in the electronics or the mechanical systems.
But the drawbacks to electronic controls are opacity and last-ditch surviverability. Its harder to hack an ECM because its harder to tell what its doing, and if it breaks you're SOL - no way to use paperclips to make a new throttle linkage beside the road!
The last doesn't bother me too much, I'm too old to do that stuff now and anyway I have a cell phone and a credit card so I'll just call for a tow and a ride home. But if World War III comes, it'll be the pre-electronic cars that still run!
The hackability is a problem though, or so it seems to me. Of course its not a problem to most people, who simply want the car to run. But I'm here on a forum with a lot of people who are willing to take a $50-70K car and start modifying it. This makes us nut cases in most people's eyes.
But its not that we can't hack (mod) the electronics, its just that doing so takes new skills and tools. Which is probably a good thing, because there's almost certainly more to come. I'd bet on "real" fuel injection (fuel injected into the cylinders rather than the intake ports) and electronically-actuated valves (no cam at all) becoming available pretty soon.
And then a cam change will be done by tweaking the software, but that'll only work to the limits of the hardware. So there will be high-performance valve solenoids that open faster, and installing those will require changing the physical characteristics model in the ECM. Very much like changing fuel injectors now.
Thinking about all this has made me nostalgic. Excuse me, I need to go re-jet my Webers and change the advance springs on my distributor.
But the drawbacks to electronic controls are opacity and last-ditch surviverability. Its harder to hack an ECM because its harder to tell what its doing, and if it breaks you're SOL - no way to use paperclips to make a new throttle linkage beside the road!
The last doesn't bother me too much, I'm too old to do that stuff now and anyway I have a cell phone and a credit card so I'll just call for a tow and a ride home. But if World War III comes, it'll be the pre-electronic cars that still run!
The hackability is a problem though, or so it seems to me. Of course its not a problem to most people, who simply want the car to run. But I'm here on a forum with a lot of people who are willing to take a $50-70K car and start modifying it. This makes us nut cases in most people's eyes.
But its not that we can't hack (mod) the electronics, its just that doing so takes new skills and tools. Which is probably a good thing, because there's almost certainly more to come. I'd bet on "real" fuel injection (fuel injected into the cylinders rather than the intake ports) and electronically-actuated valves (no cam at all) becoming available pretty soon.
And then a cam change will be done by tweaking the software, but that'll only work to the limits of the hardware. So there will be high-performance valve solenoids that open faster, and installing those will require changing the physical characteristics model in the ECM. Very much like changing fuel injectors now.
Thinking about all this has made me nostalgic. Excuse me, I need to go re-jet my Webers and change the advance springs on my distributor.
Team Owner
Joined: Dec 2002
Posts: 32,074
Likes: 296
From: San Francisco CA
Originally Posted by Buffy
Well, I'd take electronics any day for reliability, economy and flexibility. Modern car systems work really well when they're working, which is almost all the time, provide fallback or "limp home" modes when something does break, and make for much easier diagnosis of problems either in the electronics or the mechanical systems.
But the drawbacks to electronic controls are opacity and last-ditch surviverability. Its harder to hack an ECM because its harder to tell what its doing, and if it breaks you're SOL - no way to use paperclips to make a new throttle linkage beside the road!
The last doesn't bother me too much, I'm too old to do that stuff now and anyway I have a cell phone and a credit card so I'll just call for a tow and a ride home. But if World War III comes, it'll be the pre-electronic cars that still run!
The hackability is a problem though, or so it seems to me. Of course its not a problem to most people, who simply want the car to run. But I'm here on a forum with a lot of people who are willing to take a $50-70K car and start modifying it. This makes us nut cases in most people's eyes.
But its not that we can't hack (mod) the electronics, its just that doing so takes new skills and tools. Which is probably a good thing, because there's almost certainly more to come. I'd bet on "real" fuel injection (fuel injected into the cylinders rather than the intake ports) and electronically-actuated valves (no cam at all) becoming available pretty soon.
And then a cam change will be done by tweaking the software, but that'll only work to the limits of the hardware. So there will be high-performance valve solenoids that open faster, and installing those will require changing the physical characteristics model in the ECM. Very much like changing fuel injectors now.
Thinking about all this has made me nostalgic. Excuse me, I need to go re-jet my Webers and change the advance springs on my distributor.
But the drawbacks to electronic controls are opacity and last-ditch surviverability. Its harder to hack an ECM because its harder to tell what its doing, and if it breaks you're SOL - no way to use paperclips to make a new throttle linkage beside the road!
The last doesn't bother me too much, I'm too old to do that stuff now and anyway I have a cell phone and a credit card so I'll just call for a tow and a ride home. But if World War III comes, it'll be the pre-electronic cars that still run!
The hackability is a problem though, or so it seems to me. Of course its not a problem to most people, who simply want the car to run. But I'm here on a forum with a lot of people who are willing to take a $50-70K car and start modifying it. This makes us nut cases in most people's eyes.
But its not that we can't hack (mod) the electronics, its just that doing so takes new skills and tools. Which is probably a good thing, because there's almost certainly more to come. I'd bet on "real" fuel injection (fuel injected into the cylinders rather than the intake ports) and electronically-actuated valves (no cam at all) becoming available pretty soon.
And then a cam change will be done by tweaking the software, but that'll only work to the limits of the hardware. So there will be high-performance valve solenoids that open faster, and installing those will require changing the physical characteristics model in the ECM. Very much like changing fuel injectors now.
Thinking about all this has made me nostalgic. Excuse me, I need to go re-jet my Webers and change the advance springs on my distributor.
Drifting
Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 1,837
Likes: 4
Originally Posted by tlacroix
OK. So where's the torque management module or the module that controls it?
From what I know about this there are a couple of different algorithms, one is torque managment which provides upper limits and folds back some during shifts, the other is abuse prevention which deals with dynamic situations, mainly to reduce wheel hop.
I believe that the limits can change per gear for the automatic, and during shifts, but the ECM has no direct way of knowing what gear the manual transmission is in (except reverse) so unless it is guessing what gear its in it would just have to set one limit and hope for the best.
