Boy, they sure went out of their way not to mention the make or model of the reverse car they were testing. Does anyone know what it was?
A Porsche 928.
My dad used to have one of those; sold it about a year ago. And it was red. I wonder if there’s a chance that might have been his actual car.
They did a myth on the 11-17 episode about a car that suppsoedly was so poorly designed it was more aerodynamic running backwards than forwards (and busted that myth).
But in keeping with their policy of never mentioning brand names they wouldn’t name the car on air. I’m not a car guy so I don’t recognize cars by sight. What kind of car was it?
It looked to me like a mid 80’s Porsche 944.
Nope, after I did a bit of searching I’m wrong - but close.
It’s a Porsche 928.
Merged two threads about the car from the reverse engineering episode.
I remember reading this shortcoming about another car: the Ford Pinto. It would have been in the early '70’s - Midteen-year-old guys with no license or money to buy a car tended to be fanatic gearheads.
Ya see, they made funny car bodies to resemble a car that a consumer might buy. Ford wanted to sell more Pintos, but the funny car guys discovered that it would have been more aerodynamic to reverse the body.
At least that’s how I remember it…
This thread reads better backwards.
I’d have thought the AMC Pacer would be a better candidate.
Promoting ignorance until 1973. (It’s going pretty well, actually.)
Something about this episode bothered me. At the end, when they raced the two cars, I thought it was pretty clever. Get them both up to 100 and put them in neutral. The idea being that this would test only the wind resistance. While I’ll admit, that was probably the main difference, they seemed to ignore…resistance in the wheel bearings, rolling resistance from the tires, resistance from the brakes touching the discs/drums, basically resistance found anywhere between the road and wherever the engine and drive train break their connection while in neutral (I’d think different ‘freshness’ of fluids in the transmission/torque converter and differing wear amounts and quality of grease in the axles and wheel bearings would make the biggest difference).
I wasn’t watching too closely, but it looked like they left the side mirrors as they were when they turned the body around. I think that would hurt the aerodynamics a little bit, but obviously if the designers had created the car the other way around, the mirrors would have been usable.
It was mentioned in the episode that wind resistance at high speeds would overpower all the other factors by many orders of magnitude. So that’s why they ignored those. If you really want to get pedantic you could also point out that the cars are different colors and photon absorption / reflection rates are different. So why not also calculate the impulse imparted by sunlight against the paint? Answer: Because it’s also negligible.
Are you trying to say that painting flames on the side of my car won’t make it go faster? :dubious:
Nope. That’s why they had to invent the “Go Faster Stripe”.
I suppose in theory they could have obtained ten or twelve cars. Cut half of them up and reverse the bodies and then run a group test. This larger group would presumedly randomize the internal factors you mentioned. So if all the forward cars traveled further than all the backwards cars, we’d have established that the facing is the dominant factor.