Sunday, Oct 14, 2007 at 15:48
G'day Glenn,
actually the whole twin turbo thing doesn't do much for me. Toyota have yet again showed that they lack the ability to come up with any truly innovative engineering.
Instead of coming up with an advanced engine they've gone back to more cubes and two turbos to create a donk that meets Euro 4 emission standards but has pretty average power and torque figures for its size. Compare the Toyota 190KW, 600NM engine with the TDV8 in the Range Rover that is 200KW and 640NM from an engine that is 900cc smaller! Admittedly, the Rangie engine is also twin turbo, but obviously the engineering is better to achieve these figures.
This has been the story of Toyota for years now. Sure they are tough vehicles and you can't break them with a stick, but pound for pound they have been underpowered , fuel guzzling monsters. For too long they have been poorly accessorised for the money you pay for them and lack design imagination. The kinetic
suspension is bnew, granted, but it's really just a small leap from existing pneumatic suspensions that have been around for years.
They're even raving on about the "first in the world" crawl system that makes crawling over rocks etc easy. First in the world my ass. It's been around for years. There is a setting on the terrain response control of my car called "rock crawl", and that's just what it does, and Disco 3's have been out since 2004!
Like I said, ho hum. Wake me up when they do something really interesting.
Cheers
Russ.
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