Fri Jan 31, 2014 4:37 am by geredis
Killrob - would it then be possible to estimate it? Say, on the engine stand there is an area where you can theoretically mate the engine with the chassis you intend to use it on? Let's say you've got yourself a 1500 pound chassis that you know you want to use, and for this new car you're making, you want an engine that will give you X miles to the gallon.
Are there any plans in the test area (perhaps under a third type of test) to do such rough calculations? It can be a pain to go and build an engine, then have to go all the way out and then create a car model to see if it works, then go back and forth between the two areas constantly. Never mind that I imagine when creating engines, most engineers have a pretty good idea of what chassis it is going on, and thus what sort of benchmarks might be required of them for their finished project. Compared to them, especially with engine creation, it feels like sometimes we are flying blind.
Not to get too off topic but if you do that, aside from the jury-rigged statistics, a simple little something (even if t is just a yes/no thing on that same chassis-engine test page) for whether an engine will even fit in the that chassis with a certain drive configuration (perhaps a toggle between FWD, AWD, and RWD) would be useful too, so that we can more accurately figure out what dimensions we have to work with, because again...I imagine the engineers don't just make an engine and say to the car design people "Do you have anywhere you can put this?"