The Honda V-TEC has been about for decades but its really just two cam lobes with a lever to select which one is used. The Fiat Multiair is a far better idea where there's no throttle body and valve lift (if not duration) is fully controlled from zero to max.

I dont know why Konsegg's Freevalve has not taken off. The manufacturing cost savings must be enormous. 45% more torque and HP along with 15% less fuel that allows a smaller engine that's even more efficient.

DaveMcT said:

The Honda V-TEC has been about for decades but its really just two cam lobes with a lever to select which one is used. The Fiat Multiair is a far better idea where there's no throttle body and valve lift (if not duration) is fully controlled from zero to max.

I dont know why Konsegg's Freevalve has not taken off. The manufacturing cost savings must be enormous. 45% more torque and HP along with 15% less fuel that allows a smaller engine that's even more efficient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3cFfM3r510&t=325s

Click to expand...

Aye, but the Honda is boringly reliable (and the i-vtec is really different in the way it uses the same technology to achieve a kind of an Atkinson cycle). Fiat's hydraulics, whilst I admire the thinking behind it, does seem to leave something to be desired in the reliability department and, so I read, is very critical of the oil used?

I've heard of the engine in your video but know nothing about it. I'm just away to give it a play - thanks.

Pugglt Auld Jock said:

Aye, but the Honda is boringly reliable (and the i-vtec is really different in the way it uses the same technology to achieve a kind of an Atkinson cycle). Fiat's hydraulics, whilst I admire the thinking behind it, does seem to leave something to be desired in the reliability department and, so I read, is very critical of the oil used?

I've heard of the engine in your video but know nothing about it. I'm just away to give it a play - thanks.

Click to expand...

I really enjoyed that Dave. Camless pneumatically operated valves have been around for quite a while but these guys have taken it to a whole new level haven't they. Can't wait to see if it makes it into a mass produced vehicle before electric becomes the norm. Could be expensive to repair compared to a cam and some followers if/when it breaks though?

My Panda is now 10 years old, but there is no rust on the body.

Most of Japanese cars were rusty years ago, but not sure now. Haven't had Japanese cars recently.

Mind you the worst car for rust was Mercedes C230. It just rusted and perished away.

Another good thing about Panda is that Road Tax is £30 per year, and full cover insurance is about £15 per month.

I like the High seating position


crawling into a car looses its appeal.

Theleman said:

Mind you the worst car for rust was Mercedes C230. It just rusted and perished away.

Click to expand...

For the same reason there are no longer any Mk1 Merc Vito vans on the road. They were all two tone by the first MoT.

DaveMcT said:

For the same reason there are no longer any Mk1 Merc Vito vans on the road. They were all two tone by the first MoT.

Click to expand...

I used to love the old diesel Mercs from 1970s - 1980s.

Modern Merc and BMW are no more attractive cars for me in reliability and running cost wise.

Quite simply their simplicity, reliability, high seating position and the ability to carry much stuff.

£30 tax and insurance at under £90 a year means cheap to run and therefore many smiles per gallon.

I've always had a Panda, as a second 'practical' car. This is my 12th consecutive Panda over as many years. They grow on you

My sister in law has just bought a 61 plate Eco active, as she preferred driving mine to her Peugeot 207 and found it a lot more spacious and easier to park.

dac69er said:

6. Fun to drive. its not a rocket but has enough poke to have a bit of fun when you want

Click to expand...

Agreed! My main reason for choosing a Panda is it's light (860kg?) and hilarious to chuck around country lanes. It proves not all small cars are city cars. There are such things as city cars, designed only for urban use and miserable to drive quickly, but the Panda ain't one!

My Panda had been also used for carrying heavy and large stuff in the boot many times.

When the back seat is lowered down, the boot extends into back of front seats converting Panda into a good sized van.

Haha, I keep discovering acres of space behind me when I've reverse parked up against something! I find it's eay to forget just how small the Panda is.

I'm always aware of not taking up much space on the road, which makes it great on country lanes, but it does feel really spacious & light inside (from the front seats anyway).

I regularly chuck a bike in the back, and it is amazing how much you can get in them. Here's mine on the way back from Belgium fully laden with my girlfriend's worldly & otherworldly possessions (plus a bottle or thirty of the local tipple). Getting that lowrider style I've always wanted.

The Panda is ideal down in the SouthWest where I live. Narrow lanes and narrow roads generally are so much easier in a small car. My wife and I both have Pandas.

I parked next to a 2015 Panda Cross this morning. We know it's based on the same floorpan as the 169 but the Cross look much bigger. Nice though. I'm not mad about the later Pandas with their blobby styling, but I'd have a Cross.

Once I put the back seat down making boot space into van space, and loaded a 200kg blacksmith anvil in Panda. Drove home 30 miles, and it was no problem, Panda worked treat as a small van.

It's a shame the back seat base won't lift up or quickly remove from the car.

Aye Dave. We had a Citroen Dyane for a few years. You could take the back seat right out for picnics etc which then left you with, literally, a van. Considerable thought had gone into the design with flat capping pieces on the end of the seat legs to stop them sinking into turf or soft surfaces.

Cruising, if you could call it that, on the motorway - and we went all over Britain in it - was always entertaining. Foot flat on the floor would see you, after what seemed like forever, approaching the legal national limit. Hills, Shap especially, were a disaster with all the HGV's happily overtaking you until you got to go down the other side when you might get past one or two until settling back to the same sort of speed they were doing! I can't remember what the fuel consumption was but, even after hours with the throttle pedal buried on the floor, she got better MPG than my old Anglia used to! Never the slightest sign that she was seizing/tightening up with this abuse either! It only took about an hour longer to get down into the west country than it does today in our Ibiza but, of course, not the same level of traffic and jams as today (and, come to think of it, we used to do overnighters in those days to maximise holiday time)

Never can recall Citroen Dyane car, but I do recall the 2CV.

One of my acquaintance in the university had bought a brand new 2CV in 1986 or 87. I went his house and he was showing me around the 2CV, and I was not impressed with it at the time. The car looked flimsy and engine sounded like motor bike. I think he said he paid £3500 for it. At the time it was worth a lot more than now I think.

Anyhow, now I wish I went for cars like that. Simple and easy to maintain. They are cars I am after. Not these non sensical computers and engine management lights on the dashboard carry on.

Now, it seems difficult to find simply made cars like that even I tried hard trying to find them in everywhere.

My wife's family were farmers. They had a Renault 4 along with the Type II Landrover for trailer towing.

That Renault was a little bit more complicated than the Citroen (it had 4 cylinders and water cooling) But the mechanics were as basic as possible (it did not even have a water pump) and the gear shift a simple rod with a walking stick handle.

On the back lanes it rolled all over the place but could corner at surprisingly good speeds and floated over the bumps. Like the Citroens, it was so gently tuned it could be driven flat out all day and still gave excellent fuel consumption.

Theleman said:

Never can recall Citroen Dyane car, but I do recall the 2CV.

One of my acquaintance in the university had bought a brand new 2CV in 1986 or 87. I went his house and he was showing me around the 2CV, and I was not impressed with it at the time. The car looked flimsy and engine sounded like motor bike. I think he said he paid £3500 for it. At the time it was worth a lot more than now I think.

Anyhow, now I wish I went for cars like that. Simple and easy to maintain. They are cars I am after. Not these non sensical computers and engine management lights on the dashboard carry on.

Now, it seems difficult to find simply made cars like that even I tried hard trying to find them in everywhere.

Click to expand...

The Dyane was basically the same vehicle but with, in my opinion, a more attractive body. There was also a van version, the Acadiane - I have a "fetish" for vans. I have been keen on drag racing and hot rodding since the '60's and, even now, fantasize about a hot rodded Acadiane - great big rear wheels/tyres, little skinny front ones, Jag independant rear end (chromed of course) a 2.5 litre Daimler V8 in front (in my opinion the "prettiest" engine ever produced!)

The little twin cylinder engine was just about unburstable but, with no oil filter, needed very regular oil changes. It also had it's points hidden behind the cooling fan on the front of the engine. The points (most of the "technicians" now working in garages wouldn't know what to do with them!) needed to be changed every service if you wanted reliability but you had to get the fan off! Unfortunately it was mounted on a taper (like a ball joint so it locked on in the same way) and it is very easy to just snap the tapered nose off the crankshaft. What a lot of people used to do was to cut two of the blades off the fan (one on each side to maintain balance) then you could work through the resulting gap without needing to remove it. There was a special factory puller you could buy, I did, but it didn't really work if the fan was extra tight on it's taper. Now-a-days you can buy an electronic module and just "fit and forget" it!

Another peculiarity was that the front brakes were inboard mounted on the gearbox casing, braking the driveshafts. Earlier cars, mine was one, had drum brakes with the fixed end of the shoes mounted on eccentric pivots (like early Land Rovers - if there are any Landy enthusiasts reading?) not free floating like just about all other brake shoes I've worked with. So, when fitting new shoes, you had to "center" the shoe in relation to the drum by turning the eccentric pivot. It would have been challenging to do on a brake mounted outboard at the at the wheel hub but deep in the engine bay, on the side of the gearbox? Well, the air used to get quite blue at times! If you got it wrong the brakes would squeal horribly! Later models had discs which got over this "problem" all together

These cars also had a very interesting outer driveshaft joint. Instead of a Birfield type CV they had two prop shaft type U/J's back to back in the same boot linked so that each joint shared exactly half of the angular displacement. they were also, very cleverly arranged so that the angular velocity oscillations of the one joint cancelled out the other. (You may know that one of the unwanted properties of a singe U/J is that, it produces a fluctuation - speeding up and slowing down - of the output side of the shaft. This doesn't matter much on a conventional RWD propshaft as the angles involved are slight but on a FWD, where angles can become extreme it can lead to vibration problems and premature wear).

These cars were born in the days when "Citroen" was another way of saying "Different" and nearly everything, from the things talked about above to the suspension, gear change lever (which emerged from the dashboard and was a push/pull and twist device - Renault had one like it on the R4) Ultra thin section 135 tyres! and 3.5 mm brake pipes (with no flex hoses!). You needed a completely different mindset to work on them, but I loved mine dearly.

The BL Mini rear drums were a pain in the bits to setup. They might have been floating shoes but the only way you could ever get the handbrake right was to tighten the adjusters almost to binding then pull on the handbrake and reverse the car. One wheel would skid so adjust the brakes until they both locked up.

That would pass the mot but 2 weeks later, the handbrake would be as bad as ever.

One of my car regrets is selling my Citroen CX - 1985 1.9 GT. It had the original "satellite" column switches and a twin choke carb. The facelifted CX GTi had boring stalk controls and fuel injection. The road handling was amazing with very little body roll and being a lightweight car it was quick. Steering and brakes were feather light but I soon got to prefer it that way.

Here's the BX GTI
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Citroen-BX-Gti-16-Valve/183666658802?hash=item2ac362cdf2:g:hbgAAOSwgadcVfU0:rk:1f:0

DaveMcT said:

The BL Mini rear drums were a pain in the bits to setup. They might have been floating but the only way you could ever get the handbrake right was to tighten the adjusters almost to binding then pull on the handbrake and reverse the car. One wheel would skid so adjust the brakes until they both lock up.

That would pass the mot but 2 weeks later, the handbrake would be as bad as ever.

Click to expand...

Yup, and the fulcrum guides at the front of the swing arm which seized up about 5 minutes after you'd spent fifteen minutes working them with plus gas and grease to free them up!