Chinese Qoros car with camless technology

[Barry]

Chinese car maker Qoros have unveiled their Qamfree concept car at the Beijing motor show.

This camless system has been developed by the Swedish company FreeValve AB who are part of the Koeningsegg group. Rather than using a camshaft and follower system to open and close the engine valves, it uses pneumatic hydraulic electric actuator technology (PHEA). This is a fantastic design, especially for tuners because rather than having to change mechanical parts to change valve lift, timing and duration, you will simply have to adjust a few parameters in the vehicles ECU. In theory, it's possible to have a button on the dashboard to push that can turn a vehicle from an economical town car to a full on race car in under a second rather than spends days or weeks rebuilding the engine. FreeValve are also claiming a 12-17% reduction in fuel consumption under laboratory conditions compared to the latest 2.0 litre direct injection engine with variable camshaft timing. They aren't the first company to have such an idea though, BMW, Fiat and Lotus have experimented with camless technology in the past but rather than PHEA, they used electromagnetic solenoids which can be heavy and slow. FreeValve are the first company to take such technology and make it viable.

[ethan]

This definitely sounds like an awesome breakthrough from the marketing point they have captured to turn eco car to race car in seconds. However why not Germans have adopted this yet raises more suspicious of the downside on life of engine or running cost. As Germans and all other Europeans car manufacturer have better experience of dealing in advance mechanics and they should be the first to bring these new awesome technologies to the surface.

If it is, what it is w/o any caveats then hats off Chinese guys to really think out of the box and this will actually revolutionize the whole car industry than the autonomous crap as people still love driving cars. I do.

[Barry]

Koeningsegg/ValveFree are European companies but I think the reason you don't see it on mainstream road cars like VW, Audi etc. is that because the technology is still relatively new and therefore expensive, it would make it cost prohibitive to start fitting it to ordinary road cars although, I can see it becoming more commonplace in the next 10-15 years.

A lot of people diss the Chinese but they forget that they're one of the fastest developing nations in the world and I don't doubt their ability to take this technology to the next level. I don't know why there aren't more Chinese cars on the road here. I see a few Great Wall pickups and Geely cars and they all seem perfectly fine to me. I think people don't trust stuff sometimes because it is 'Chinese', good old fashioned racism, but these days everything is made in China. Even my iPhone says Assembled in China on the back.

[gautam]

PHEA technology might sound like a good idea now, but it  has a long way to go yet. Let's just hope it does not go the same way that rotary engines went, which was a long way south.

 

 

[Barry]

Rotarys are one of those engines that you either love or hate. I think they're great in theory, you can get crazy amounts of horsepower from something the size of a large shoebox. I looked at RX-8s as a cheap track car a while back, you can pick them up for as little as 1000 DHS in the UK but it didn't take me long to figure out why the cheap ones were all cheap! 

In the UK, we had a couple of rotary engined bikes in the late 80s early 90s. The Norton Classic which was air cooled then later the Norton Commander which was liquid cooled. The police ran the Commanders for a while. Cool old bikes but you don't see them on the road anymore, maybe only very rarely at a show.