The Waterboy: BMW Debuts M4 MotoGP Pace Vehicle with Production-Intent Water Injection

If you’re into racing and you are not watching MotoGP, stop reading this and set your DVR—or VHS machine if you are like our father-in-law—as the racing is wonderful. Even though we have an undying allegiance to 4-wheeled machines, the wheel-to-wheel action of a MotoGP race is unparalleled in motorsports. Plus, come March 29 and the season-opener in Qatar, you’ll get a glimpse of the most recent BMW M4 MotoGP safety auto, which, aside from the M-tastic graphics, has one rather notable deviation from its production brethren: water injection.

So even though the car is awesome—you require only to scope the photos to collect that—we’re very interested in the underhood addition. Injecting H2O into an engine’s intake plenum or directly into the cylinder cools the intake charge via the evaporative properties of water it is the same principle that makes air feel like ice when you get out of a pool on a windy day. Aircraft engines and racers have been employing water injection for years to cool the intake charge, which reduces knock. By reducing knock, the engine’s timing can be advanced and the engine cylinders can run at a slightly greater pressure, whether that be with a compression-ratio change or more increase in a forced-induction engine. Additional side effects of cooling the intake charge are lowered emissions and marginal gains in fuel consumption.

This all sounds great, correct? Effectively, not genuinely. Operating larger cylinder pressures typically indicates a stouter and heavier engine, as the possible for perforating a piston, block, or head is larger. Plus, if you get the injection quantity wrong and all the water doesn’t vaporize, the engine runs the threat of grenading due to the fact liquids do not compress. It is for these reliability reasons that we banned water injection from our series of Supertuner challenges we ran in the previous.

BMW begs to differ and says H2O will be pumped into the cylinders of a factory-constructed, production M automobile in the close to future, and this MotoGP pacer is demonstrating just that. Water is stored in a 1.3-gallon tank in the trunk and an electric pump sends it to 3 injectors in the intake plenum, downstream of the air-to-liquid intercooler. When the engine is operating at full load for extended periods of time, minimizing the intercooler’s effectiveness, these injectors start adding atomized water to the mix and by the time it gets to the combustion chamber—and we’re speaking fractions of a second—all that’s left is hydrogen and oxygen. Boost goes up, timing is advanced, and more power and torque result. BMW hasn’t released specific gains, nonetheless.

There’s a lot to perform out just before water injection is in showrooms. Aside from finding an H2O additive that’ll avoid freezing and not interfere with combustion, there’s a whole lot of programing, validation, and durability testing that demands to take place. If BMW water injection is indeed billed as an “emissions play” (we’re pondering “M Wasser Power” has a nice ring to it), the EPA will have concerns about how usually H2O should be added to the technique. For now, BMW says the method would have to be refilled with each and every tank of fuel and that if the trunk effectively runs dry, provisions are put in location to hold the engine operating. In other words, this pace automobile would run the typical programing that we currently get pleasure from from the 430-hp twin-turbo inline-6 of typical M4s.

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How long will it be till we can see this in a production automobile? That’s entirely up to BMW. The upcoming M2 is close sufficient to reality that it may possibly be a stretch, but whether or not it has water onboard, it is absolutely going to slake our thirst for a tidily proportioned M vehicle.

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The Waterboy: BMW Debuts M4 MotoGP Pace Vehicle with Production-Intent Water Injection

Dire BMW Isetta: Taken to River, Dropped in Water for Decades, Pulled from Water, Now Humorously on eBay

We’ve all seen optimistic “project cars” listed for sale online—worthless, rundown husks whose owners nonetheless believe there’s worth hidden somewhere in between the rust and the missing components. That is why you need to study this eBay listing for a BMW Isetta “for parts or EZ* restoration!” in Evanston, Illinois. It will restore your chuckling faith in internet vehicle sellers.

If the photographs do not explain the asterisk disclaimer (“EZ = not easy”), the listing does. “This automobile was stored in a climate-controlled environment,” seller isetta300 writes. “It sat submerged in the Des Plaines River for that time and the nearby climate controlled almost everything.” Attributes? We’ve got a lot: “Ran when new! No useable components! Flat-Pack storage! The ideal present!” Oh, and the present storage solution—a garden cart with a sheet of plywood on top—comes with the sale. Bargain of the century.

What fate befell this poor, corroded, mainly theoretical Isetta? It’s challenging to say. The seller explains that it was found semi-submerged in the Des Plaines River, a 133-mile waterway that traverses southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. The crumpled shell was hauled up to shore by volunteers with the Illinois Water TrailKeepers cleanup crew.

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From there, the seller says “with no expense spared or spent, it was removed from the muck and transported in an enclosed trailer,” and the car now awaits “some fool other than me to say ‘I gotta have that.’ ” Clearly, some unavoidable harm occurred en route among the riverbank and the seller’s backyard.

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Okay, so if you do bid on this project (presently hovering at $ 250), you won’t end up with a lot of something of value—”all you require is a frame, a body, door, engine, chaincase, and some other bits that can be bought with cash,” the seller assures us. But with 100 percent of the final selling price going to Donors Pick, a Disney-sponsored charity that funds books, classroom supplies, and field trips for teachers at needy schools, this is the uncommon basket-case project whose purchaser isn’t just throwing great income right after negative.

But we have to agree with the seller’s suggestions about getting an up-to-date tetanus shot ahead of collecting your microcar.

This story initially appeared on roadandtrack.com by way of bringatrailer.

Dire BMW Isetta: Taken to River, Dropped in Water for Decades, Pulled from Water, Now Humorously on eBay

2015 Porsche Cayenne Revealed: The Company’s Buoy Sits Higher in the Water

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Thinner appear, fatter costs.

Porsche’s guilty pleasure, the Cayenne SUV, is back and prepared to hold cash billowing into business coffers. Of course, the Cayenne never left, but for 2015 Porsche has offered its purist-infuriating higher-overall performance crossover a modest refresh and swapped in a few new powertrains for excellent measure. Let’s take a look.

The 2015 Cayenne’s modifications are about as serious as the 2014 Panamera sedan/hatchback’s tweaks . . . in that they aren’t really severe at all. The front fenders and fascia are new, the latter possessing turn into far sleeker and sexier than the existing Cayenne’s reduce maw. Porsche also sprinkled 918 Spyder–inspired touches over the SUV, like the now-normal 4-dot LED running lights embedded in every single headlight, far more-horizontal taillights, and even the steering wheel, which appears to have been snatched straight out of the hybrid supercar.

In what’s becoming some thing of a trend for Porsche, not each and every Cayenne iteration we know today is being relaunched as a 2015 model—at least, not initially. To start off, only the Cayenne S, Diesel, Turbo, and the all-new S E-Hybrid plug-in variation will be available. We anticipate the base (non-S), high-functionality GTS, even-greater-efficiency Turbo S, and possibly much more versions will trickle out over the next year or 2.

The Diesel carries over its 240-hp, turbocharged 3.-liter V-6 diesel engine, as does the Turbo with its twin-turbocharged 4.8-liter V-8, though that engine gains an added 20 horsepower, for a total of 520. The S, however, ditches its naturally aspirated 4.8-liter V-8 for Porsche’s new twin-turbocharged 3.6-liter V-6, which puts out 420 horsepower and 406 lb-ft of torque, the identical twist and 20 a lot more horsepower than it does in the smaller Macan Turbo. The S E-Hybrid, which replaces the old S Hybrid, characteristics the very same plug-in-hybrid powertrain employed in the Panamera S E-Hybrid. The new method also gets a much more effective electric motor—95 horsepower versus the S Hybrid’s 47-hp unit—but pairs it with the same 333-hp supercharged 3.-liter V-6. Total technique output rises to 416 horsepower and 435 lb-ft of torque, increases of 36 and 7. Final fuel-economy figures for all 4 models haven’t been finalized, but Porsche says improvements to its engine cease-begin function (normal on all new Cayennes), “optimized thermal management,” and new active grille shutters need to slightly lessen the SUV’s thirst

.On the more-enjoyable topic of overall performance, Porsche claims that the new twin-turbocharged S and the Turbo models are slightly quicker to 60 mph than the old versions, but we’ll wait for a suitable test to establish the veracity of those boasts. Each 2015 Cayenne once more gets an 8-speed automatic and all-wheel drive as standard, though we’re holding out hope that the base model returns and revives the manual-transmission choice that had been available final year.

Absent any standard- or optional-feature specifics, Porsche has released pricing for the 4 2015 Cayenne models. Prepare yourself—it’s a bitter pill to swallow. The Diesel’s cost jumps $ 5100 to $ 62,695, although the S’s bottom line balloons $ 7300 to $ 75,095. Provided its enormous infusion of plug-in technologies, the $ 77,395 S E-Hybrid’s $ 5500 improve more than the 2014 S Hybrid appears justified, whilst the $ 3200 bump for the $ 114,595 2015 Turbo is practically demure.

From our perspective, the Cayenne’s steep price hikes most likely have far more to do with the birth of the smaller Macan SUV than any genuine gains in standard equipment. When the Macan hit the marketplace, we noted that its splendiferous pricing fell appropriate on prime of the bigger and in some circumstances a lot more effective Cayenne. Porsche has apparently solved that issue. The Cayenne MSRP’s added fat must mean more profits for Porsche, so sports-vehicle purists need to quit their cries of “conflagration!” Soon after all, this updated behemoth is maintaining the lights on in Stuttgart.

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2015 Porsche Cayenne Revealed: The Company’s Buoy Sits Higher in the Water