How to Choose the Right Vehicle For You

Buying a new vehicle is very exciting, but it can also be overwhelming. There are so many options for car buyers today that the whirlwind of makes, models, trims, and options(like advanced turbochargers and superchargers) can be dizzying. Fortunately, taking a few things into consideration can help narrow your choices and help you make the right decision.

The first and most important thing to define is the purpose of your new vehicle. Are you shopping for a vehicle to take your three kids to practice, or just to take you going as fast as possible through dangerous mountain curves? Is it to get you to work every day, or to haul you and your friends to the beach to surf? Carefully thinking and making a decision about this alone will help tremendously in narrowing your choices, and to make you satisfied with your new purchase.

 Next is to decide a price range. This should be fairly easy – decide how much of a car payment you can afford each month, then find out the lowest car loan interest rate you qualify for. Your credit score will determine the interest rate and loan amount you are able to take out. Then put the numbers into an online loan calculator to determine a maximum amount you can get a loan for. Now that you know an absolute maximum, it’s always wise to try to find a vehicle under that maximum that still meets your needs.

 

 You should be down to just a few select makes and models. At this point you get to weigh all of the different options available in each model – the fun stuff! Do you want a car with a more luxurious interior, or a vehicle that is more technology-capable? Do you want a modern body-style, or something aggressive? This is where you get to match your car to your personality. Most of us have to drive our cars every day, so it’s best to pick one you’re going to enjoy!

After you’ve indentified your main needs, you can also employ the help of online car matching services. This free one from Edmunds.com can help suggest vehicles that will work for you.

We hope you find just the vehicle you’re looking for. Happy driving!

Is That Smoke Coming From My Tailpipe

It can be a scary experience…not to mention nerve racking. Making that daily commute to work and BOOM a huge cloud of smoke starts to for behind your car. The mind starts to race with all the problems that could be causing this situation is my motor dead, has my turbo gone bad and if so how will it cost to fix my turbocharger. Or the even worse situation, I just replaced the turbo…please not again! The worst part is the install cost like $1000+ and your car will be down again for who knows how long.

When this happens there is always a silver lining to this cloud of smoke, smoke is not always associated with a thousand dollar repair, it can be something much easier. The first step to understanding the issue is to look at the color of the smoke itself. When the smoke is black it is fuel not being burnt correctly, white means that the coolant is burning off and blue means oil is burning.

Now that the color of the smoke can be understood it can be worked out and fixed. When it comes to a newly installed turbo it may be residual oil left from the old turbo’s failure. Oil from a bad turbo will build up in the lowest point in the system and in a turbo intake system that is the intercooler. The intercooler is the unit at the front area of the car where the air travels across to disperse the heat created by the turbocharging process.  When the old oil has pooled in the intercooler the extremely high pressure air can push it into the intake of the car and it will burn off in the engine. Oil smoke is very potent and just one drop can fill up a room with enough smoke to choke someone. It is easy to imagine that a quart of oil would take a long time to burn and will also coat oxygen sensors and valves cause in future issues. The main thing to remember when there is an issue with your car is to take a breath and remember that it is not the end of the world. Even though it may feel that way, if you step back and think it may be something as easy as a coolant hose that has a crack. 

Why is an Intercooler so Important to a Turbocharged Car

The internal combustion engine found in today’s cars is basically the world’s most mass produced heat pump. It converts what are basically the remains of dinosaurs into heat through the process of combustion. The combustion is used to force the pistons in the motor downward creating a torqueing motion on the crankshaft. This motion is converted by the transmission into usable power at the wheels of the car. A car equipped with a turbocharger or usually referred to as turbos for short uses an external device that is considered a power adder. A turbo is basically an air pump that forces more air into the cylinders of a vehicle.

When a turbo begins to build “boost” which is the slang term for the pressure that the turbo build in the engine a large amount of heat is created.  This heat can be damaging to a motor is not removed from the system and it robs horsepower from the motor as well. The more heat the air carries the more space the air will need to occupy. The device used to cool the air that is compressed by the turbo is referred to as the intercooler, this unit is basically a radiator that cools air.

The basic idea of the intercooler is that compressed hot air is spread out across a larger area than the pipes in the intake system. Once spread across this larger area the air will deposit its heat on the surface of the intercooler where it is released into the air. To add to the cooling ability fins are placed on the channels where the air travels, these fins allow the heat to be transferred more efficiently out of the system.

Once the air has been super cooled it is returned to the normal pipe size and it continues to the motor. The cooler air also needs less space which means that even more air can be forced into the cylinders of the vehicle. The more air, the more fuel that can be added to the cylinder and a more powerful combustion stroke can be achieved. A more powerful explosion in the cylinder means more power to the crank shaft and thus more horsepower at the wheels of the car. 

What is an Electronic Actuator for a Turbo Wastegate

Many cars, trucks and SUVs on the market today are going with more fuel efficient small engines. There are many theories of how to make these motors more efficient, some use a supercharger and others use a turbocharger. With a turbo come many different options of how to control the boost levels and what the most efficient boost levels will be for the vehicle.

The wastegate is the unit on the turbo which reacts to the boost levels and releases excess pressure to control the amount of pressure or PSI (pounds per square inch) also referred to as “boost”. When the boost levels hit a certain point the spring on the manual actuator is over powered and the wastegate door opens to the exhaust and the built up boost escapes the turbo system. An electronic wastegate is a unit that controls the wastegate door with a sensor which reads the boost and then opens the wastegate door electronically when the boost needs to be controlled.

Many times when a vehicle with a turbocharger is said to be faulty it is actually the actuator that has gone bad and needs to be replaced. Many a vehicle owner has ended up spending their hard earned money to buy a turbo only to find out it was not the issue. Many a person has had to spend time on the phone trying to get their money back for a $1000 part that they ended up not needing. The issue here is that most companies will not take a part back once it is installed…in fact none of them will. The other issue is most electronic actuators cannot be purchased alone and can only be acquired with the OEM new turbo unit. Just be sure that before you buy just the turbo to fix your vehicle that there is not another issue that will keep your car on the lift for a whole lot longer.