- What makes a car really fun to drive?
Is it the engine?
Is it the suspension?
The chassis,?
The transmission?
The truth is, it's like all of them.
Like baking a cake,
It takes a good mix of key ingredients.
You gotta have your sugar.
You gotta have your milk.
Gotta have your butter.
Gotta have a couple of eggs in there.
Gotta have your flour.
Gotta have your baking powder.
Gotta have some splash of vanilla extract.
I'm freaking cake boss over here.
You guys ready for a Jerry cake?
Get ready.
But you guys, you get the picture, right?
You need a good balance,
otherwise the cake won't rise.
And just like a cake,
you can't rely on one aspect of the car too much
otherwise it all gets thrown out of balance.
And an excellent and I mean,
eggcelent example of this
is the Volkswagen golf GTI.
But the real heroes are
an electronic limited slip differential,
the 7 speed DSG dual clutch transmission,
and the dynamic chassis control system.
Join me as we go bumper to bumper
to properly explain why the golf GTI
is one of the best, most fun cars ever made.
Let's go.
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Let's get back to the episode.
Now, I introduced to you Mr. Alex
and this is his front wheel drive car.
He's in a parking lot.
He's got his hands off the wheel
and he puts the pedal to the floor
and you can see the wheels
in his front wheel drive car shifts.
They go one direction
and that's because it's experiencing torque steer.
So what causes all of this?
Well, it's a couple of different things going on
but it all leads back to the transversely mounted engine
in the front of the car.
Now see, in a rear wheel drive car,
there's a drive shaft that sends the power
to the rear of the car.
And the differential transfers that power
to equal length half shafts that go to each rear wheel.
But, in a front wheel drive car,
there is no drive shaft.
Instead,
the engine, the transmission and the differential
have to share the space of that engine bay.
And that leads to half shafts of unequal length
connected to each of the front wheels.
And this unequal length
leads to a different level of reaction
to the torque from the engine,
which leads to different levels of grip from each wheel,
and therefore leads to unpredictable veering.
Also known as torque steer.
You guys got it.
And the part where the GTI is special
is how it puts that power down effectively.
And that my friends is accomplished using its VAQ
limited slip differential lock.
Also, it's important to note that this is the first
front wheel drive car to ever be offered
with a differential lock.
That's pretty crazy.
If you think of all the front wheel drive cars out there,
this is the first one ever made to have a locking diff.
Thank you Germany.
What is a differential?
Well, that is the part of the drive train that transfers the
engines power to the wheels.
And the differential also allows the wheels to turn
at different speeds,
giving the car the ability to make tighter turns.
Now, if you watch the High Low episode
where Nolan welded his diff in low car,
you notice how it couldn't do a reasonable U-turn
after they did that.
And that is because
he intentionally stopped the differential
from doing what it was originally designed
and engineered to do.
Now, before we play this clip,
pay close attention to the wheels on low car.
You can hear them dragging when he turns
and that's because one wheel can't turn at a different speed
than the other wheel,
you know, if you turn it on the inside,
that inside wheel is gotta go slower
and the outside wheel is got to go faster.
But when you weld the diff together,
they're rotating at the same speed.
And if you try to do that when you're going in a circle,
you know, doesn't work that way.
- Ha ha Yeah. There it goes!
- Now moving on,
what does VAQ mean?
Now that is an abbreviation for another German word
more specifically this one
and this word in German is vorder achsquer sperre.
Nailed it.
Now to my English buddies
that translates to front axle crossbar.
Okay, great.
Now we know how to say it in German and English,
but how does it work?
Well on the passenger side of the transmission
is the VAQ module
and that's connected to the differential
through a drive shaft and a hydraulic pump.
And when you're driving the GTI,
the VAQ system will decide whether or not
to lock the differential by activating the hydraulic pump,
sending fluid into the clutch pack to lock it.
Now the differential lock isn't an only on or only off
type of situation.
It's constantly being changed
based on the needs of the vehicle.
So the diff can be disengaged to fully engaged
and back to disengaged again inside of 3/10 of a second.
Now where this proves to be very helpful,
is shown through a feature called yaw control.
And that's a form of torque vectoring.
Torque vectoring is the act of the differential
varying the amount of torque being sent to each wheel
to maximize grip.
And yaw, by the way, is the twisting motion
the car experiences on a vertical axis.
Let's say you're driving the GTI on a track
and you're turning a corner.
Mid corner VAQ systems will read multiple sensors,
including the traction control module and the ABS sensors.
And then it will turn on the electronic hydraulic pump.
The hydraulic pump rapidly builds pressure
and stops the differentials ability
to send equal power to the wheels
experiencing less load.
And usually this is the inside wheel.
So therefore more power and torque
is sent to the outside wheel
pushing the GTI around the corner more effectively.
A VAQ also uses a preemptive diff lock system
for launching off the line as quickly as possible,
as well as neutralizing that pesky torque steer
that front wheel drive cars can be plagued by.
So it is safe to say that the VAQ limited slip differential
is a pretty key piece to applying the GTIs power
down to the road properly.
However, a locking LSD is not the only thing necessary
to transfer power from the engine to the wheels effectively.
You also need pretty nifty transmission.
The so-called driving purists might say
that you can only achieve a pure driving experience
with a manual transmission,
which the GTI can be optioned with
but the GTI also has an optional 7 speed DSG,
dual clutch automated manual transmission.
Now let me tell you.
This transmission is sublime.
♪ I'm on a shift from two to three ♪
♪ I'm on a shift from three four ♪
♪ If I had a couple more gears then ♪
♪ I'd shift some more ♪
Now you may ask, why is that the case?
Well, look at it this way.
A single clutch manual transmission requires the car
to engage the clutch, switch gears and get back on the gas.
Now you can be a really, really great driver
and you could shift as fast as possible,
but there is still that tiny little itsy bitsy,
very small space,
you see it right there?
That's, I'm equating this distance into space.
There's that tiny space where you aren't on the gas
because you need to shift.
But a dual clutch transmission,
it solves that tiny bit of time it takes
for you to lay off the gas.
Now dual clutch has two clutches,
one outer clutch and one inner clutch.
So one clutch will handle first, third, fifth, and seventh
while the other will handle second, fourth and sixth.
Now imagine that the GTI is moving along in first gear
and it's about to shift.
So, as soon as you hit the shift paddle,
the GTI uses a synchronizer to engage the other clutch
that is already in place and engaging the next gear
at the exact same time the other clutch is being disengaged.
But you might be thinking,
hey, Jerry what if I wanna to downshift?
Well, there's an actuator shift fork
that decides whether or not the car
will be downshifting or up shifting.
And this all means that there's not going to be any delay
when you shift between gears.
And in fact, the shift speed are so fast
that a human couldn't possibly do it.
The average human blinks at a speed of 400 milliseconds.
A Ferrari Enzo up shifts using a sequential manual
transmission in 150 milliseconds.
The GTI DSG transmission,
it up shifts in eight milliseconds.
Yeah, you heard that correctly.
Eight. That's the number of kids I'm gonna have.
Now this family friendly hatchback
can shift gears 18.75 times faster than the Ferrari Enzo
and 50 times faster than you can blink your (beep) eyes.
If you don't think that's fast
you're on the wrong side of history grandpa.
Now that icing on the GTIs cake
is it's adaptable suspension.
Now, structurally it has a pretty standard
MacPherson strut set up in the front,
which you'd find in multiples S wagons and in the rear,
you'll find a multi link independent suspension setup.
And like the name implies,
the movement of one wheel won't affect the grip
or traction of the other.
Hence they are acting independently.
Meaning the GTI won't get as unsettled as often
when driving over uneven surfaces.
So on paper, this is great to see.
And at the same time, however,
all of that stuff is solid improving technology
seen in many other cars out on the road.
So what did VW do that's unique?
They decided to add some special sauce to it,
and that special sauce is dynamic chassis control.
Also known as DCC.
It's an adaptive chassis control
allowing it to improve the suspensions performance
in real time.
Now using wheel and acceleration sensors,
the GTI analyzes the road surface,
the speed of the car
and the amount of lateral G-forces the car is experiencing.
And with this constant stream of information,
the GTI can actively control the damper valves,
allowing the car to selectively choose
the ideal damping force for each of the four wheels
within milliseconds.
You guys know how fast milliseconds are?
We already talked about it.
In other words, DCC allows this suspension set up
to realize it's full potential.
Not only will the car actively manage
the damping on its own,
the driver can change between several driving modes
to fully customize their driving experience.
So whether you'd like stiffen dampers in sport mode,
all the way to the least aggressive setting in comfort,
the suspension will constantly adjust the dampers
individually according to the mode that you're in.
So you can see the golf GTI is similar to the cake
that we talked about at the beginning of this,
I'm sure you remember that cake.
You've been drooling the whole time
thinking about that sucker.
Takes a bunch of ingredients, right?
It takes adaptive suspension,
takes a DSG dual clutch transmission
and it takes a VAQ limited slip differential,
put them all together
and they make one of the most fun cars to drive ever.
And aesthetically it has a very mature
and restrained design
that won't turned too many heads.
Okay. You're not going to find huge fender flares
or massive wings here,
but in their place are subtle red line accents in the grill
and on the sides and in the interior.
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Bye for now.