- You'll sometimes see your enthusiasts
described their car as a driver's car,
and it's tempting to think that's just an excuse
for not having enough power.
But what they mean is that the car
lets you experience driving.
A driver's car doesn't isolate you from the road,
it amplifies your connection to it.
It makes driving engaging.
So that got me thinking,
maybe there are some particular characteristics
that make something a driver's car.
Greatness doesn't happen by accident.
And today, we're gonna figure out how to engineer car
to give you a great driving experience.
It driver's car might feel like a work of art,
but it turns out it's built by science.
Art, science.
Jerr Vinci.
(dramatic music)
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(soft music)
Let's set aside all the emotions and flowery language
used to sell enthusiast cars and start thinking rationally
about what makes a driver's car.
If you say your car is visceral
or that it's not about speed,
it's about the way it feels.
That's all fine and good.
I'm happy for you that you use that kind of language,
but I'm a math boy, okay?
And if you want to convince me that driving purity
is more than just talk,
you're gonna need to throw in some numbers behind that.
What makes a car rewarding, visceral,
just plain feel good to drive comes down to one key factor.
Communication.
That's the number one thing in relationships too, fellows.
When you communicate, just loves gonna blossom.
A driver's car has to be able to quickly
and precisely transmit information to the driver.
And that all starts with the driver's butt.
A performance seat has thick, stiff bolsters
on the bottom and the back of the seat
to hold the driver in position, locks you in.
Because the driver doesn't have to work as hard
to keep themselves in place,
that frees up their arms and legs to better control the car
to pick up more information
through the steering wheel and the pedals.
With car seats, we want comfort and a good driving position,
but we also want them to hold our body securely in place
so we don't fall out going around a corner.
The last feature is also what separates a communicative seat
from one that insulates the driver
from important information.
That information isn't actually picked up by your butt.
It's from your ears, but it's not sound.
The vestibular system and our own bodies
detect lateral acceleration when a car is turning.
Direction changes, they slosh a fluid around
on the inner ear and that's detected by hair-like sensors
swaying in the current.
Those sensors transmit information to the brain
about acceleration, balance, and spatial orientation.
Like any of our senses,
the vestibular system can get overloaded causing dizziness,
loss of balance, and motion sickness.
So our bodies, they dampen some of those forces
that would otherwise cause sloshing in the inner ear.
So imagine you're on a boat, right?
You're holding a glass of adult liquid.
Your body, it's gonna compensate for the movement
of the rocking ship to prevent said liquid
from sloshing out of the glass.
It does the same thing for your inner ear,
insulating it against information
that could overload the system.
In a car, that's valuable information being muted.
The inner ear can detect micro accelerations produced
when a vehicle starts to slide, for example.
The sooner and clearer that message is received,
the faster the driver can respond to control that slide.
Changing the seat to one which provides greater support
has been shown to improve lap times.
And one theory is that by holding the body steady,
preventing it from compensating,
more of the cars movement is picked up by the inner ear
and turned into information that the driver can use.
A lot of drivers describe those sensations
as something they feel through their butt,
but it's actually their inner ear.
Funny, I can also hear things through my butthole.
That's my superpower.
It's not usually the drivers body insulating them
from a car's movement,
it's often the car's body doing this
in something called body flex.
No, put the guns down, people.
Body flex in the car,
that's when the forces acting on a car
cause the chassis itself to bend or twist.
Preventing that requires torsional rigidity.
A modern car's chassis is the unibody structure
that multiple parts attach to.
You can think about that structure as a bit like the frame
of a simple box or even the base of a chair.
Lots of chairs have crossed members that connect the legs
to each other.
If you've ever sat in a chair where those were broken
or disconnected, you probably felt the chair
twisting underneath you.
Those cross members increase the torsional rigidity
of the chair preventing that twisting.
Torsional rigidity can be improved
by reinforcing that structure.
Engineers can add diagonal braces between the firewall
and the sub frame that hold the engine,
or they can add more support to the structure
that joins the shock towers with the floor of the car.
Those increases in torsional rigidity
often require adding more material to a car's chassis
and that adds weight.
Convertibles often weigh more than coops
because chopping the top of the box means reinforcement
has to be added somewhere else.
Adding weight makes a car slower to accelerate,
slower to initiate turning, and slower to change direction.
Weight can ruin the driving experience of a car
because a heavy car is less responsive
to the driver's inputs.
A flexi chassis deprives the driver
of crucial information about what the car is doing
and makes the car slow to respond to driver inputs.
And most of those essential driver inputs
are transmitted through the steering system.
On cars they typically use a rack
and pinion steering system.
The pinion, that's a gear attached to the end
of the steering column, and the rack,
that's the bar that connects the left and the right wheels.
That bar is a flattened gear containing a row of teeth
that mesh with pinion gear.
So when the driver turns the wheel,
the pinion rotates, and this moves the raft right or left.
If a car has unassisted steering,
there's not much more to it.
Long ago, unassisted or unpowered steering
was preferred in performance cars
because it's solid mechanical connection
between the wheels and the driver's hands
provided a ton of information.
But steering, it's a two way communication.
It's also how the driver tells the car what to do.
Unpowered steering is really good for that.
It responds instantaneously to driver inputs
because of that solid mechanical connection.
The big downside to unpowered steering
is that it takes a lot of effort to use,
and that can wear driver out,
especially on a track.
In extreme conditions like those,
resistance from the tires can even be strong enough
that the driver can't hang on to the steering wheel,
or if he's holding on too tight, it can snap your wrist off.
Almost all cars, even race cars,
now have power steering.
That power usually comes from a hydraulic system
that uses fluid pressure to assist the driver,
making it easier to turn the wheel.
Manufacturers are increasingly using electric power steering
or EPS because it's easier to integrate advanced features
like lane keep assist, automatic parking, or self-driving.
But there's a problem with electric power steering.
Because it uses sensors and electric motors
to control the steering system,
there's little direct connection
between the driver and the front wheels.
The resistance you feel from EPS
is programmed into the system.
It's not the direct mechanical resistance
found in an unpowered or hydraulic steering system.
When BMW and Porsche started using power steering
a few years ago, enthusiastic, they were all up in arms.
They would describe these systems as numb
or even unpredictable.
But the programming and equipment used with EPS,
they've come a long, long way.
Just like modern computer controlled suspensions,
which can respond and changing conditions in microseconds,
modern EPS can get fast feedback to the driver
and respond very quickly to give the kind of feedback
enthusiast drivers want.
Steering isn't the only way you communicate with your car.
You scream at it.
Hey, what are you doing?
You just punch it.
You just like, listen to me car!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Communicating with your car is a lot like relationships.
When you're hearing something
you don't wanna freaking listen to,
you just turn up the radio, just drown out that sound.
Oh my God.
Steering isn't the only way you communicate with your car.
The loud pedal is pretty important and a whole lot of fun.
Nothing ruins a driver's car
like having no power available when you ask for it.
Throttle response is especially important
as you roll on the throttle exiting a corner.
It can be frustrating to drive a car with an engine
that isn't producing consistent power
across a wide range of RPMs.
The car simply isn't doing what you say when you tell it to.
There also shouldn't be any delay in that response
and power should come on smoothly and predictably.
That creates a bit of a problem for some cars
that are turbo-charged for example,
which can have a power delay while the turbs spin up,
and may not make boosts gradually.
For a lot of enthusiasts,
a naturally aspirated engine is the only choice
in a driver's car because they have
the most rapid throttle response.
Simpler, produce less heat under the hood
and they weigh less.
So a driver's car needs to have power that's immediate,
steering that's direct, and a stiff chassis
that leads to sharper turn-in and instantaneous feedback.
These are what make a car a great communicator.
Sadly, the driver's car is a dying breed.
The average consumer isn't interested in driving
and views it as a chore.
The systems that allow cars and drivers to communicate
with each other have become increasingly automated,
and most modern cars are designed to insulate us
from the experience of driving.
Every year, more cars are implementing
self-driving technology and it seems the goal
is to remove the driver input altogether.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of B2B.
Hit that like and subscribe button.
That really helps us out and appreciate it.
In your opinion,
what's the best driver's car out there?
Leave a comment down below.
I personally think it's a Porsche GT3 RS,
just because that's really the only
quote driver's car I've driven.
And I got to drive around a track,
and I got to beat Gordon Ramsey's time around that track.
So I liked that car.
BUt let me know in the comments what you think.
Follow us here at Donut on Instagram @DonutMedia.
Follow me @JeremiahBurton and until next week,
bye for now.