Quote:
Originally Posted by Uprev
Not yet, it's far simpler than it seems in that video, but there are going to be issues. First off this is a totally new thing for piston motors. The functionality of it is far more complicated than just lift, it changes the entire dynamics of the motor itself. It's not a simple as VTEC or cam adjustments. Also the way it is used by the ecu vs throttle. Nissan has millions of dollars spent on this technology and there isn't anything currently available to reference it against.
I'm sure some company will jump out there and add software controls for it, and customers will suffer with poorly running cars because of it. Or the customer will have to come out of pocket when parts of the VVEL system start failing. Thats just not how we want to do business.
So once we have a bit better understanding of what controls we can find, along with physical limits of the system (endurance testing) we'll start to create software to control it. You probably won't see anything like that for a while though. The engineers at Nissan really have gotten so much out of it so far, we're not sure of what gains may even be capable if any.
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BMW, Toyota, and soon honda will all have continuously variable valve lift systems out in the next year. BMW had it first a year before NISSAN but the BMW system is limited by it's crappy and huge design to 6,500 RPM. The NISSAN version is good to over 8,000 and while it is still brand new the new toyota version looks to be equal to the nissan system. the new honda version I don't know to much about yet but it looks promising as well. All of these systems achieve the same basic end result with differences in max rpm, max lift, min lift, and complexity. Our system works great with good lift a large range and high rpm's but at the sacrifice of lubrication and friction. The toyota system uses a traditional camshaft but uses a special rocker shaft that his a lifter arm and pusher arm arranged like < that can change the angle between the 2 to transfer more or less of the cams motion to the valve. This only changes lift and not duration but it should be possible to replace the main cam for more power which you can't do with our VVEL. Food for thought it's out there and it's big shouldn't be more than a year or two before the american companies copy toyota again so there will be more demand for tuning these systems.