Welcome folks to another fresh episode of Simplified. This time the technology
on hand is one that you must have heard of a gazillion times before. Honda's iVTEC,
a mechanical system that enhances efficiency, power and has nearly zero possibilities of
mechanical failure incidents. Now before we start off with iVTEC, let's understand VTEC first.
VTEC, is variable timing electronically control and let's skip to the good part.
Combustion chamber's where all your money goes kaboom sending
power to those wheels via that drive shaft. Now,
the kaboom is directly proportional to how much air and fuel is being introduced into
the chamber. The less the mixture, the lesser the power usually, which is why it results in higher fuel
economy, more of the mixture and more the power and slightly more fuel consumption but a lot more fun.
And until a certain point in time engines only had a fixed geometry camshaft, the lobes that
rotate with the camshafts move the valves up and down, what do these valves do? Well, they're like
dam gates, only when they're open is where things can pass through into the combustion chamber, into
your engine's block, basically, when the valves are open fuel and air mixture which is the kaboom
bomb can enter inside your combustion chamber. What VTEC did was employ bigger lobes to push
down the valves for longer, thus opening longer thus sending in more fuel and more air into that
chamber, which means a higher power output. So for example, when the engine spins under 4000rpm or so
roughly, the standard eco friendly lobes are in function as the revs increase they send out a
signal to electromagnetically controlled solenoids that lock the position of the bigger and smaller
lobes together, thus forcing the valves to stay open for a lot longer. Now quick trivia for all
of you guys, Honda engines actually deployed this technology only on the intake side of things,
because they reckon adding the same system to the exhaust does not make much of a performance
difference. Now if that's VTEC, what is iVTEC? To understand the working of the iVTEC engine better
we have the 1.5-litre iVTEC from the City, what is it? It is a four cylinder engine that uses
dual overhead cams and this is for the first time ever, till now it was all single overhead cams,
it's a step up. The new engine uses the VTEC on the intake side of the camshaft to enhance
the engine outputs and to also alter them a lot better, as a result, this engine is a lot more
better in terms of torque delivery, responses are better, but you still get a lot of fuel economy
as it can revert to the smaller valve openings whenever it actually wants to, these new iVTEC
engines comply with every single emission norm set globally and Honda is proud to introduce their
exhaust gas aftertreatment systems for the Indian customer as well. These systems which are adapted
to BS6 cooperate, the DPF and the NSC, the best technologies for greener tail pipe emissions.
But being greener isn't the only takeaway from these new age iVTEC engines, the added
performance and involvement has been channelled out well too with the use of a new six-speed
manual transmission instead of the five-speed that we used to get earlier with the Honda City
and this also results in smoother operation of the engine at lesser rpms, making the entire driving
experience comparable to see European sedans of the time. It truly brings out an evolution
that results in a bit of a revolution because of iVTEC, your engine tends to have heard of
two behaviours in one. One is this friendly, fuel saving friend or a cab driver of yours that moves
along with a light foot on the gas and the other one is like me, he's a bit of a screamer who gets
turned on by the sight of any JDM car. Now this is a technology that Honda has pioneered, remember,
many of the rivals have got VVT or variable valve timing but VVT doesn't really change cam profiles
or valve lift. What Ikuo Kajitani, the founder of VTEC or the father of VTEC invented with Honda was
gold and what Honda has developed into more intelligent vision of the same,
the iVTEC or literally, intelligent VTEC is even cooler.