'Go-fast` buses — and trucks
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With reference to the article entitled "Go-fast bus" (CM August 23 Bird's Eye View), I would suggest that the Comments contained therein are equally applicable to goods vehicles of most types. What an indictment on our commercial vehicle producers when the DoE have to erect signs like those reading "Slow lorries for n miles" on the Ml, The gradients are not particularly severe, (although somewhat long), and vehicles are able to make a run at it, yet still they are barely crawling along when only half way up, and how many times have other drivers cursed, sweated, and been engulfed in fumes while being forced by the nature of the road to crawl along behind lorries which just haven't the guts to climb hills on other roads at anything like a reasonable speed?
I am sure that incidents of this nature help to create much of the present ill-feeling which supposedly surrounds commercial vehicles and their operation, so it must surely be high time that they were made more powerful.
Also, I do not understand why engine makers will persist in churning out huge motors (say 12, 13 or 14 litres) with feeble power outputs, when smaller, turbocharged units would give much more efficient (therefore clean) combustion, saving on expensive fuel, and higher power outputs without necessarily sacrificing much low
speed torque. The Government is not helping either by legislating for a ludicrously low power/weight ratio, which most trucks meet anyway, with results like those aforementioned.
I cannot see why the 2-stroke turbocharged diesel is not used very much for commercial vehicles, since the Army specify it for its ultra-reliability and performance, and it has an enviable service record on British Rail. If I remember correctly the Foden FD6 was only 4.5 litres capacity, but it gave as much horsepower if not more than (say) an 11-litre 4-stroke naturally aspirated diesel of that era, yet it seems to have faded c.,
In the sphere of diesel engine development we seem to have gone backwards, not forwards -is there a logical explanation!
D. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Leicester