drive by wire/steer by wire

Look into what the Corvette has. I know the throttle control has been 'drive by wire' for some time now.

Cheers

wrote

It's not really "steer by wire"...it's just electrically assisted. Steer by wire means (to me anyway) that the driver has no direct mechanical link to the wheels. This isn't the case in the system in Malibu.

If you are interested, here is a picture of the steering column out of a new Malibu. It went belly up and has to be replaced as a unit.

And for those folks that think American cars are made in the States, notice the label on this Delphi electric motor.

Other parts of the column are made in Mexico (as are millions of other items that happen to be in GM vehicles)

Ian

"Martin Riddle" wrote

From what I'm seeing, it looks like the majority of 2004 model engines are coming with "drive by wire" throttle controls.

It's actually quite irritating when you are working on the engines and you need to rev the engine for whatever reason. You cannot do it from the engine compartment. Some guys will say, "yeah, but you can use the scan tool to control the throttle".....but try to "blip" the throttle with the scan too, it doesn't work that well.

It would have been nice if GM had still left a mechanical linkage out at the throttle bodies.

Ian

Damn that looks expensive.

Hot damn, you got a good one. Be thankful it doesn't say "Made in China" yet...

Hey Ian, is there anything you don't have a picture of?

Adair

The throttle on the 8.1L in the 2500HDs is electronic. Talk about something odd to get used to. Picture this, you are using cruise control at 65 MPH. You decide to pass someone and gas it. There is NO change until you get the pedal to the point of turning the electronic pot past the point of where it thinks it already is. In other words, there is NO response for the first second or two! Very weird sensation.

"Adair Winter" wrote

Oh...I think there are plenty of things that I still need to add to my collection. It's not difficult to describe things using words, but it certainly is easier when you have pictures.

I take my camera to work and keep it handy in case something cool or odd happens to come in the shop.

Ian

sounds like they should put a small motor in the throttle pedal to keep in in sync with the throttle body, kind of like those force feedback joysticks the hard core gamers use.

My cousin has worked as a mechanic for years. He told me that Mitsubishi has a "sports car" where the steering is drive by wire. He said they fail often and fail hard right when they do fail. Sounds kind of scary. Maybe because I work with servers all day long so all the buzzwords are in my head like redundant power supplies, redundant fans, RAID controllers, etc I wouldn't feel comfortable with steer by wire unless there was a redundant system in there with two pots on the steering wheel with two sets of wires going to the redundant engine computers through two separate holes in the firewall and then two separate wires from the engine computers to two motors on the steering box.

A potenciometer isn't considered electronic but electric, just so you know.

~TLGM

I might just grab my camera and run by my friends shop and snap a picture or two of an electric cooling fan that got so hot it melted the fan blades and the motor mounts that it all just slid to the bottom of the housing..

Adair