Two Cylinder Change Over

[gaffer1986]

Does anyone know when the 1.4 TSI in the Leon will get the two cylinder shut down system. My car is due to be built third week of Jan and was wondering if they switch the engines mid order like they did with the Ibiza when it went from 1.9 TDI to 1.6 TDI. (People who bought the 1.9 ended up with the 1.6).

However, looking at Honest John real mpg, the two cylinder shut down engine in the golf actually appears less economical than the permanent four cylinder engine.

 

[skidpan]

Its just another piece of modern technology that gives better results on the official tests but not in the real world, a bit like stop/start. But at least stop/start lowers the RFL by a substantial amount, the cylinder switch off nonsense save the Golf owners £10 a year, I bet they are all shouting yippeeee.

When you read about it you have to be doing a certain speed at a certain number of revs with a certain throttle setting. Any change and the other 2 cylinders will rejoin the part. How many times can you honestly hold a steady speed with no change to the throttle except perhaps in a lab.

To do 70 mph on the motorway you need to be producing a certain amount of BHP, lets say 25. In a Leon it makes no difference if that BHP is being produced by 2 or 4 cylinders, it will use the same amount of fuel to produce it. The 2 spare pistons etc will still be moving thus the friction levels will not change.

Its just another load of parts waiting to go wrong.

Complete nonsense.

 

[gaffer1986]

Its just another piece of modern technology that gives better results on the official tests but not in the real world, a bit like stop/start. But at least stop/start lowers the RFL by a substantial amount, the cylinder switch off nonsense save the Golf owners £10 a year, I bet they are all shouting yippeeee.

When you read about it you have to be doing a certain speed at a certain number of revs with a certain throttle setting. Any change and the other 2 cylinders will rejoin the part. How many times can you honestly hold a steady speed with no change to the throttle except perhaps in a lab.

To do 70 mph on the motorway you need to be producing a certain amount of BHP, lets say 25. In a Leon it makes no difference if that BHP is being produced by 2 or 4 cylinders, it will use the same amount of fuel to produce it. The 2 spare pistons etc will still be moving thus the friction levels will not change.

Its just another load of parts waiting to go wrong.

Complete nonsense.

This was exactly my thought, with modern fuel injected engines, the cylinders are only using as much fuel as needed, so when you turn two of them off the other two would surely have to work harder? But it seems to work on the big V8 engines.

However, I believe stop start can save certain drivers money. For example, I'm stopping at the side of the road regularly to talk to a customer (learner driver) and if it's for less than a minute I rarely ask them to turn the engine off. Combine that with traffic lights and any other time I'm not moving it could save me around an hour of idle a day with the convenience of not having to shut the engine off manually for the longer stops.

 

[skidpan]

When I bought my previous car, BMW 118D, it was the first I had bought fitted with stop/start. The difference it made to the official EU figures over the previous spec were big, dropped it from the mid 140's to 119 CO2's with a large saving in RFL. At that time there was very little if any real world info on the affect it had so once summer arrived and daytime temps stabilised I did a couple of fill ups using both stop/start and no stop/start. My commute is about 15 miles each way and takes 30 minutes on an average trip. My stationary time is not great, there are 4 sets of traffic lights and I normally get through 3 sets with 1 or 2 changes, the other set takes probably 3 on average, sometimes 4. About 7 miles of the journey is on 70 mph dual carriageway, the rest is typical village roads (30 mph) with a 3 mile stretch of 50 mph road thrown in.

Using the car with stop/start active over 2 fill ups my records show it averaged 47.8 mpg. With stop/start deactivated it averaged 47.7 mpg. Theses are calculated figures and I accept that they were not obtained in a strict test but since I did about 600 miles in each mode any peaks and troughs would have been averaged out. At that average over a year stop/start would have saved me 0.33 gallons or £1.84 at todays prices. To save a meaningful amount of fuel, say 10 gallons the car would have needed to do nearly 51 mpg.

With the BMW any more than 4 stops in a short stretch of road and the stop/start would fail until the battery again had sufficient charge. If the outside temp was below 4 degrees C the stop/start would be automatically deactivated.

Over the years many more people posted their finding on the BMW website, 99% agreed with my findings that in the real world it did 1/2 of bugger all but all agreed that the saving of over £100 in RFL was worth having.

 

[gaffer1986]

I guess it all comes down to how much actual stop start driving you do for stop start to make a difference.

 

[Fred99]

All of these fancy systems are designed to do only one thing - to get the EU official emission figures down - even if in the real world they make no actual difference.

The target for emissions is an average of 130gms of CO2 across the whole range of a particular manufacturers cars and this has to be achieved by 2015. This target is being decreased to 95gm by 2020.

The penalties for not complying are dire - I quote:-

If the average CO2 emissions of a manufacturer's fleet exceed its limit value in any year from 2012, the manufacturer has to pay an excess emissions premium for each car registered. This premium amounts to €5 for the first g/km of exceedance, €15 for the second g/km, €25 for the third g/km, and €95 for each subsequent g/km. From 2019, the cost will be €95 from the first gram of exceedance onwards.



This could potentially add thousands of pounds to the cost of a vehicle. That is why there are so many, apparently crazy, solutions being installed now which have little actual benefit to the user.

It also explains why some of the most advancd technology is coming from the premium manufacturers such as BMW and Mercedes because they have the biggest cars.

Start Stop, ACT and the KERS type energy recovery systems that you now see on the lowly Seat Lean are an example of this. Those awful, expensive hybrid systems are another good example.

 

[Nath.]

Not sure I fancy the idea of 2 cylinders pounding up and down with no fuel being squirted in.

Half the engine up to temp and half not firing and cooling down doesn't sound good to me either.

 

[gaffer1986]

Well it sounds like a good idea when the dealer can say your engine is only 750cc when little power is needed.

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[Fred99]

Not sure I fancy the idea of 2 cylinders pounding up and down with no fuel being squirted in.

Half the engine up to temp and half not firing and cooling down doesn't sound good to me either.

Don't you think that there is the slightest possibility that a company the size of VAG might just have tested the viability of such a system and found that it is perfectly safe and won't affect potentially a million warranty claims if they are wrong?

Or perhaps they should accept your idea that it won't work and just re-engineer their engines on the basis of your "fancy".

 

[gaffer1986]

Don't you think that there is the slightest possibility that a company the size of VAG might just have tested the viability of such a system and found that it is perfectly safe and won't affect potentially a million warranty claims if they are wrong?

Or perhaps they should accept your idea that it won't work and just re-engineer their engines on the basis of your "fancy".

Could you say the same thing about dpfs and all the trouble they have caused the many people who were sold cars (including myself) without being told the car had a dpf.

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[skidpan]

Don't you think that there is the slightest possibility that a company the size of VAG might just have tested the viability of such a system and found that it is perfectly safe and won't affect potentially a million warranty claims if they are wrong?

Remember all the issues VAG owners have had with cars fitted with the Dual Charged engines.

What about the ongoing issues owners are having with the DSG gearboxes.

What about cam chain issues on the dual charged engines particularly.

Manufacturers tend to live in hope that they go wrong after the warranty expires.

That's why I took the 5 year warranty out on mine and guess how long I keep a car.

 

[Nath.]

Don't you think that there is the slightest possibility that a company the size of VAG might just have tested the viability of such a system and found that it is perfectly safe and won't affect potentially a million warranty claims if they are wrong?

Or perhaps they should accept your idea that it won't work and just re-engineer their engines on the basis of your "fancy".

NOPE!


VAG thought that the 1.4 twin charger engine was a good idea. I Have lost count of the amount of people on here that have had mega problems and new engines fitted.

Then as said, there was the DPF fitted to the PD170 engine that turned out to be a total pile of toss.

Then there's the rattly DSG gearbox.

Then there's the cam chain tensioner issues on various engines

I could go on.


I just hope that stop/start and 2 cylinder options can be disabled by the owner/driver. It just sounds like a nightmare.

 

[skidpan]

I just hope that stop/start and 2 cylinder options can be disabled by the owner/driver. It just sounds like a nightmare.

It is impossible to permanently disable any feature that affects the emissions, if you could the car would have to be reclassified and your RFL and company car tax would increase greatly.

Some manufacturers made identical models with and without stop/start in the past, we had 2Volvo V50 Drive e's in the office, one with it and one without, they were leased in about 2009. The user of the one with stop/start paid a fair bit less tax than the user of the other and the RFL was about £80 less. Even though the one with stop/start had an official combined about 15mpg higher both cars did virtually the same over the 3 years we had them.

But there is always the button on the dash that will disable stop/start until the next time you start the car if you cannot be bothered to keep your foot on the clutch pedal.

As for the 2 cylinder feature I am only too happy that my Leon does not have it.

 

[Nath.]

It is impossible to permanently disable any feature that affects the emissions, if you could the car would have to be reclassified and your RFL and company car tax would increase greatly.

Some manufacturers made identical models with and without stop/start in the past, we had 2Volvo V50 Drive e's in the office, one with it and one without, they were leased in about 2009. The user of the one with stop/start paid a fair bit less tax than the user of the other and the RFL was about £80 less. Even though the one with stop/start had an official combined about 15mpg higher both cars did virtually the same over the 3 years we had them.

But there is always the button on the dash that will disable stop/start until the next time you start the car if you cannot be bothered to keep your foot on the clutch pedal.

As for the 2 cylinder feature I am only too happy that my Leon does not have it.

Yeah, I was aware that start/stop could be disabled until the next time it's started. I just hope that the 2 cylinder thing is the same.

 

[skidpan]

Yeah, I was aware that start/stop could be disabled until the next time it's started. I just hope that the 2 cylinder thing is the same.

Stop worrying about it. Our 1.4 TSi does not have it and I have not read anywhere in the press that Seat and Skoda are going to be allowed to use it. VW and Audi are keeping it to themselves at present (and hopefully for ever).

 

[gaffer1986]

Stop worrying about it. Our 1.4 TSi does not have it and I have not read anywhere in the press that Seat and Skoda are going to be allowed to use it. VW and Audi are keeping it to themselves at present (and hopefully for ever).

I think you'll find its coming to the Leon next year, I started this post as I was interested in how early next year as my car is being built beginning of next year.

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[G.P]

It is impossible to permanently disable any feature that affects the emissions, if you could the car would have to be reclassified and your RFL and company car tax would increase greatly.

It's not impossible, pointless maybe, but can be done..

 

[Suicida1 Zombie]

In a Leon it makes no difference if that BHP is being produced by 2 or 4 cylinders, it will use the same amount of fuel to produce it. The 2 spare pistons etc will still be moving thus the friction levels will not change.

Its just another load of parts waiting to go wrong.

Complete nonsense.

My opinion entirely, Instead of 25% of the force being generated in each cylinder surely it just means that the engine has to generate 50% in two cylinders while two do naff all.....

It's not impossible, pointless maybe, but can be done..

I can see this being a possibility, if things like traction control and cruise control can be activated/de-activated through wiring and or VCDS I can't see how perminently removing stop/start would be an impossibilty.

 

[Fusster]

ACT will be fitted to ibiza FR 1/4 2014 and Leon later in 2014 so it is happening.
As for how it works see here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBg4pUUnpck

As the valves are not opened then cyl 2 and 3 will have no compresion so although there will be a small amount of resistance it will be no where near as much as you may think.

All manufacurers have to meet tough emision standards and this is why this technology is being introduced,it clearly costs alot to develop and build these seemingly "stupid/worthless" emision related modifications,I,m sure VW Group could think of better things to spend thier money on !
Blame the EU not the manufacturer !

 

[Nath.]

^^^^^^^I can see that mechanism causing nothing but trouble.

DO NOT WANT!