By: Megalen Govender
Durban - We live in a world where our carbon footprint on the planet is akin to a person smoking. As time progresses, the planet suffers and becomes polluted.
Our earth is dying and this has led to innovations, especially in the motor industry. Hybrid technology is now reliable and extremely efficient as displayed by Nissan in a motor that was showcased in 2014 aboard the Nissan ZEOD RC concept car.
Jumping straight into the engine specs, it’s a DIG-TR 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbo engine combined with an electric motor. Most car enthusiasts will chuckle at these statistics as it is deemed a tiny engine and there are the 'old-school' car enthusiasts always dropping the line “There is no replacement for displacement”.
Now for the fun bits. This little engine weighs just 40kg and, size wise, is small enough to fit into an airline luggage bag. This little monster churns out 294kW at a high-revving 7500rpm and is capable of producing 380nm - that gives it a power-to-weight ratio of 7.35kW per kilogram. It made its racing debut at Le Mans in 2014 - but what happened to this pristine example of efficiency after that?
According to Nissan SA media relations manager Veralda Schmidt, “The engine was used in the ZEOD RC project car at Le Mans in 2014. Continuous research is being done but at this point I don’t have further information on this specific engine and in which form we will see it in future Nissan products.”
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Very often, we note that motor racing technology filters down to production vehicles, with the McLaren SLR 722 and the Ferrari FXX being prime examples of Formula One technology used in production vehicles, yet these supercars are extremely exclusive and extremely expensive.
Often, the reason that we do not see production engines pushing the same amounts of horsepower as racing engines is the reliability factor. Where a race angine may only be used for a specific race and limited mileage, production engines are designed to travel hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
Limitations are placed on production engines to ensure constant reliability. It is not realistic to assume that we can take the 600+kW 1600cc turbocharged engines from Formula One and apply them for use in a production car. Such engines run under extremely high stresses and thus have a severely limited lifetime.
However, Nissan showcasing such a tiny engine with so much clout gives car enthusiasts a glimmer of hope that perhaps the DIG-TR 1.5 will make its way onto the market someday, in some form, providing technology that has maximum potency without requiring a notion of a bottomless fuel tank.
This glimmer of hope is further fueled by the fact that in newer production cars, extremely high volumes of power are being squeezed from smaller engines meant to run turbocharging technology for optimum efficiency. The era of the small engines which pack a punch is fast approaching.
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