Has anyone here ever looked into/heard/remember anything about Smokey Yunick and his 50 MPG Fiero? This is the best write up I can find on it
I ask because the motors are still around, and I can't figure out if it's real or BS.
Has anyone here ever looked into/heard/remember anything about Smokey Yunick and his 50 MPG Fiero? This is the best write up I can find on it
I ask because the motors are still around, and I can't figure out if it's real or BS.
If it were real it would be on production vehicles. If not in his design, then something reverse engineered from the patents.
No manufacturer is going to give up the market share that doubling HP and MPG would get them
found this with some googling. I remember reading a few articles over the years about it.
https://www.hotrod.com/articles/hrdp-1009-what-ever-happened-to-smokeys-hot-vapor-engine/
Yup. BS. By the time fuel gets to the combustion chamber, it's hot vapor anyway. Any additional benefits of pre-vaporizing the fuel would amount to tenths of an MPG.
Not to mention, who wants hot fuel vapor hanging around? :)
This ranks right up there with running your car on water. 
I believe Hot Rod had a write up on that back in the day.
Yup.
So I did. Whups
You guys all keep linking the same article :)
Not BS. (Smokey)
The article makes some points regarding timing (within the industry), and politics, besides a couple other issues.
getting it past the critical temp
the need for a safety or fallback ability due to the critical levels of operation
materials and MFG processes at the time needed improvement for the temps. (Ceramics were very young then).
I'd expect to see it in production, however the MoCo's are probably struggling to figure out how to make a public domain thing their own.
I don't think it was BS, though I'd love to see more of it in Smokey's own words. I don't recall whether it was Hot Rod or Circle Track that I originally read it in, when it was more contemporary.
I do think that it's probably been leapfrogged by what's effectively "simpler" answers now, with modern computers, sensors, direct injection, turbo tech, etc. Also getting 50mpg out of a Fiero isn't that hard, relatively speaking. Getting 50mpg out of a 2020-sized vehicle is a harder problem. Some of the other numbers tossed around are impressive, but we could easily be in fish story territory.
With other answers well established, why try to reverse engineer public domain tech that your competitors can get the basics of from patent docs once you invest in proving its value?
Of course, I don't know one way or the other. Maybe it's BS. Maybe it's overblown. Maybe it's outdated. Smokey was a very sharp guy technically, but he also had a little P.T. Barnum about him, so I'm not, to be melodramatic, going to play poker with his ghost over it.
In reply to bentwrench :
Any patents on this expired a long time ago. Let alone, all OEMs would all pay a major premium to anyone who had the magic power-mpg bullet. GM is playing a company called Tula a fee for every modern variable displacement they sell, and the benefit is relatively minor.
If it were real, someone by now would have it in production, and happily paying the Yunick estate a fortune.
If "public domain" tech would allow a manufacturer to get this kind of gains, they'd be all over it. Otherwise, they'd be the only one on the market NOT taking advantage.
Sounds like GM had their chance to see it and decided it was not viable.
This reminded me of a guy peddling a similar thing in the mid 90's. We were working on some sub-micro car for India, which was allowing carbs still. So some manager called me to look into it, and I did. Contacted him, read his stuff, watched the videos, didn't exactly believe his claims (he claimed to turn carbon atoms into hydrogen), but I still asked him to bring the car to Dearborn. He even backed up his claims because his credit cards were erased (I suspected they were cut off due to reasons).
He claimed that some plant manager laughed at him, and then thought I would too because the car was apparently a POS. But I tried and tried to tell him we would not. And that if it was real, and valuable, we would happily invest. Guy never showed up.
The funny part of the video was that he was able to run a diesel motor w/o spark plugs. yowza. And got 15hp from a chevy 350 running a tiny throttle plate. winner.
Jesse Ransom said:I don't think it was BS, though I'd love to see more of it in Smokey's own words.
I have a copy of Smokey's biography, and even in his own words it's difficult to figure out. 
I agree that he was a pretty brilliant guy but he he did have a little huckster in him as well.
The hot vapour thing was nothing new, even in Smokey's time.
You could get vapour carbs for Model T fords.
IIRC a lot of the problem was that Smokey didn't really believe in/trust EFI. In the 1980s, that would be like saying that direct injection and variable cam timing are fads today.
I know there is actually one of the Fieros still in existence with that engine that the guy had running and he said it did make about 250hp and got 50mpg on an Iron Duke. I believe he tried to sell the idea to GM and they listed (but never sold) a retrofit kit for S-10s, but they had serious concerns about longevity in the hands of the average buyer. The article said that even today, making things hold up to an OEM-level of durability would be difficult without some crazy materials that would price it out of contention.
While I figure it's quite possible this was BS - I wouldn't put it past Smokey to do something like this to see how gullible the general public is - another possibility is that this was a HCCI engine, one of those things that's supposedly been the engine of the future for the past 30 years or so. It shares a lot of the characteristics of those engines:
So, I suspect if it wasn't a hoax, it was a crude effort at an HCCI, one not really up for use in a production car.
I thought the problem with this engine was the insanely hot combustion temps, which even if you didn't melt through the pistons, would produce so much NOx even VAG execs would raise a red flag.
Why go through all that trouble, just use an HHO generator!
In reply to maschinenbau (I live here) :
I recall your comment too- like it was so hot, folks on the outside didn't know how to run AC and were worried it could set grass on fire where it was parked.
Preportedly, until his death you could call Smokey at home and just ask him about it. I read a forum thread about that once.
GIRTHQUAKE said:Preportedly, until his death you could call Smokey at home and just ask him about it. I read a forum thread about that once.
Wouldn't surprise me. Reminds me of that ridiculous Edelbrock SY-1 intake manifold. Smokey brought a small block Chevy with the prototype intake on it and they ran it on Edelbrock's dyno and it made crazy power, so Edelbrock bought the design and put it into production as the SY-1 (SY for Smokey Yunick). They started selling them and customers started calling up complaining the car wouldn't cold start, misfired, wouldn't make it to redline without breaking up, losing power on the dyno, etc. Vic throws one on one of their test mules, and sure enough, it runs like garbage, so he calls Smokey up and says "Hey, what's the dead?" and Smokey then reveals "Oh, the engine has to have this much compression, a camshaft with exactly these specs, this exact model carburetor with this exact jetting, headers of this size and design and length, this much base timing and this timing curve, or it doesn't work." Reportedly Edelbrock started including Smokey's business card with his phone number in the box with each of those manifolds and sending every customer call about that manifold to him. He got all peeved off about the phones ringing all day and told Edelbrock to stop selling those manifolds. I saw one at a swap meet last year for $150 and I really wanted to grab it just to hang on the wall. They're wacky looking.
In reply to MadScientistMatt :
Yes.. I agree with you. HCCI maybe. HCCI is easy(kinda) to run under known coniditons, but out in the real world with changing temperatures and air densities and then you gulp.. have to make run at different speeds and get transient response...
is there a website with smokey yurich content ?
I would like to see his "tricks" with drum brakes and early (small) disc brakes ,
He was not afraid to try things that no one else even thought about !
californiamilleghia said:is there a website with smokey yurich content ?
I would like to see his "tricks" with drum brakes and early (small) disc brakes ,
He was not afraid to try things that no one else even thought about !
There's some information at his official website, although I think it's mostly about selling books. http://www.smokeyyunick.com/news.php
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