New Defender

On Wed, 1 Mar 2006 18:46:09 +1100, "Adam Bryce" scribbled the following nonsense:

"unofficially", I have heard from a friend who does a lot of work on G Deck that it has been pushed back to sometime between 2008 and

2010....

Officially unoficially: In 2009 the situation of the defender will be evaluated. A friend of mine had the opportunity to take a picture of the strategic model plan of Land Rover for the years till 2009

:-)

Raoul

Bugger wrong button, Adam you may get this as an e mail.....

One of the LR mags reported in a recent editorial that the new Defender was being tested, but the spy shot people stood no chance of getting a shot of it!. I've seen the new Freelander being thrashed about round here but nowt else.

Dom J

New Ford engine by the end of this year to replace the TD5 which apparently does not meet EuroIV emission regulations.

Huw

"> I've seen the new Freelander being thrashed about round here but nowt

The latest LRW has a special section on the Defender. In it is a time line showing the Defender from birth onwards. The 2 artists impresions that show a Disco styled defender look amazingly like something i saw drive past me 2 years ago on the Chelt to Swindon bypass. What was even more uncany was the shot of the Challenger. Combine these 2 vehicles and you have *exactly* what i saw....which was a Discovery shaped, pick up bodied LWB vehicle.

Dom J

On or around Thu, 2 Mar 2006 17:53:48 -0000, "Huw" enlightened us thusly:

for "doesn't" I suspect you may read "we CBA to make it".

Ford are not likely to continue production of what is basically a single-use engine which has no commonality with the rest of their engines.

I hope they put a decent one in it...

Look - a whole squadron of porcine aviators. :-)

They'll have landed before the engine launches. Ford make very decent diesels and it will be a four cylinder unit similar to that just out in the new square-nosed Transit.

New Durable and Economical Engines

The new high-tech TDCi diesel engines are the first dedicated commercial vehicle powertrains to be developed as part of the partnership between Ford Motor Company and PSA Peugeot Citroen and will be built at Ford's Dagenham Diesel Centre.

The new Transit range will offer six diesel engines and one LPG-compatible petrol engine. The diesel options include new 2.2-litre and 2.4-litre Duratorq TDCi diesel engines, matched with either five-speed or six-speed Durashift manual transmissions.

All Transit diesel power units are compliant with Euro IV emissions standards and feature latest generation common-rail technology. They have been designed to accommodate forthcoming emissions legislation and to deliver improved performance with reduced fuel consumption, while the engine layout has been revised for ease of maintenance

The most likely variant for the Land Rover is the 2.4TDCi with 135hp or more.

Huw

Spot-on, that man. I agree with you wholeheartedly re. size Austin, it's all very well having more power-efficient modern diesels, but they come at a price, that of economy. It'd be better IMO to have, say, a 3-litre low-pressure boosted unit with better inherent torque characteristics and it would likely be more economical as well! My bmw 330d that I had was a fantastic piece of disiesel engineering, but unless you drove it really gently it was hard to achieve over 34mpg (ish), hardly anything to write home about for a disiesel engine economy figure. Best I ever saw was 44mpg, sitting on cruise for 150 miles at 60mph.

Nope, as I understand it, it appears to allow the overboost whilst accelerating hard then trims the boost back down as your rate of acceleration decreases at higher rpm. Should be a simple electronic "fix" (tuning box or suchlike, no doubt) to make the full boost available at all times, but what of engine life....?

FFS Ford, fit a decent bloody sized engine in the first place and be done with it!

Badger.

At what RPM?

Richard

On or around Sat, 4 Mar 2006 09:44:46 +0000 (UTC), "Badger" enlightened us thusly:

quite, not much good for a not-very-large saloon. By contrast, the 2-litre TDi perkins in the Montego can return 50 mpg without trouble and you really have to go for it to get it to return much less. and that'll sit at 90 on the motorway without appearing stressed... I daresay that when driven "keenly" it's not gonna touch the BMW for acceleration, but get the turbo on boost and it's not exactly tardy off the mark in traffic, in the same way as the 300 TDi disco is - my main objection to the 300 TDi disco for take-off is that the gearing's all wrong - second is too high to take off in without bogging the engine down again, and it can be bloody difficult to get rolling with a heavy trailer behind on a slope in 1st. A lower 1st and 2nd would let you pull off in 2nd (like I can in the Convoy) under normal conditions, and have a lower 1st to pull away in difficult conditions. The high first doesn't even make for all that good a take-off when booting it, 'cos it runs out of revs too fast.

Granted, you can use low range. But the number of people who have the necessary ability to pull off in low range and then change up to high on the move once it's rolling is rather small.

[duratorq]

point being that if you were towing hard up Shap or something heading into a gale, would the electronics let you have full power and torque for half an hour? Or does it have something that says "ey up, we've been at overboost for 5 minutes, now we have to go back to normal"

Granted it can probably be "tuned" ...

the other thing is that by having a small powerful engine it will run at maximum output more often and for longer in a working vehicle. something around 3.5 or 4 litres will be more relaxed for much of the time and will last a lot longer, in principle.

On or around Sat, 4 Mar 2006 09:55:43 +0000 (UTC), beamendsltd enlightened us thusly:

2000, IIRC. though what the torque graph looks like I don't know - it's not about what RPM the peak torque is, but how wide the plateau where say 90% of peak is available. This was I think the problem with the M16 in the disco - too peaky.

I'd disagree there - for off-road, and to an extent towing, max torque needs to be as low as possible.

Richard

What matters is having lots of torque low down. The RPM of max torque is completely irrelevant.

If you could choose between an engine with 300 lbft at 1800rpm and

320 lbft at 3600 rpm OR 200 lbft at 1800 and 180 lbft at 3600rpm, which do you go for? The latter has its max torque much lower down...

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er, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I said? Ok, so I missed the word "down" out ...... ;-)

Richard

On or around Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:57:35 +0000, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:

which was my point. An engine giving you 300 ft lb at 2000 rpm but only 100 at 1800 rpm is not much use for practical purposes. The best engines are those where the torque curve climbs steeply at low revs, hits say 90% of maximum by maybe 1300 rpm and then has a nice flat plateau up to about 4000.

speaking of smallish diesels, here, of course.

I much prefer engines that have a high torque rise. Torque rise [or 'reserve' expressed as a percentage] is the difference between torque at rated maximum speed and the higher maximum torque at lower revs. The higher the torque rise, the greater the resistance to engine load and, if you like, the greater the lugging power of the engine for a given power. Higher torque rise engines of the same maximum power at the same revs as other engines have a higher power at lower revs. A flat torque curve is fine for an engine with revvy performance but for a flexible lugging engine you need a high torque rise from high revs down to low. And yes, a torque curve is properly read from right to left in the same way that it is physically measured by a dynamometer. The figures are then mathematically converted to power.

Huw