What's up with Hemi hype?

The Japanese have 100hp/liter. And 24 ft/lb torque per liter, too.

Hemi...pure marketing whoo ahh stapled to the ass of an antiquated combustion chamber design.

Plus, it sounds just butch as all heck.

 

yup, pure marketing. especially when those motors are built in mexico and do not have hemisphierical combustion chambers. just calling anything a hemi sells.

 

in the 80's and 90's ..... the big word was "turbo"

I saw "turbo" in big letters plastered on all kinds of cars trying to be cool

Now you can slap the word "hemi" on with some stickers and TRY to be cool

"Magnum" is another word that gets slapped on product to try and make it cool. LOL

 

Agreed. Hemi is purely marketing hype to the ignorant.

The best cylinder designs now (F1 cars and liter bikes) have basically flat cylinder domes.

 

Top Fuel motors have hemi heads. Also have approx. 7500 hp.

 

They also don't have to worry about emissions or fuel economy.

 

Behold, Mr Studious...

The Hemi Magnum Type R Vtec Turbo!

 

You would have had to have been there. I went to high school with a guy who drove a Dodge Hemi to school, complete with racing slicks, skinny front tires, in the snow.

Ah, we were all young, dumb, and stupid once.

Dr "Son, you're gonna drive me to drinking" Who

 

Chrysler has nothing else so they needed to go back to their glory days to find something uniquely theirs and remind us that once upon a time they had something going and maybe, just maybe they still do.

Wrong

The Germans should just shoot that horse and be done with it.

 

What's nice about a Hemi is that you can have minimal complexity (only 2 valves per cylinder) yet have good flow because the valve diameters that can be used are much larger than in a design where the valve face is more parallel to the piston top. If you're going with a 2-valve design, Hemi is not a bad way to go.

24 lb-ft torque per liter is terrible (is that a typo?)

What's an "R6"?

(My first car was a '56 DeSoto with a 330 Hemi )

 

I find it humorous that despite all the hype about hemi this and hemi that, that all Dodge/Chrysler has is a class action lawsuit filed against them for false advertising on the basis that their hemi pickups don't have the towing ability advertised.

Hemi? We don't need no stinking hemi.

 

The Hemi term is a very old fashioned term that comes from the days when it was considered the best combustion chamber.

As you know it stands for hemispherical and refers to the combustion chamber shape. Now many, many really old engines have this design, think Alfa Romeo (30's ...), Ferrari, Maserati and Jaguar but they are all overhead cam engines.

Now everytime somebody created a pushrod engine with a hemi head, well engineers had orgasims and got really excited and thus it was a big deal. Now to be fair to these engineers, it is complicated designing a pushrod engine with a hemi head ... as getting the pushrods across to the farthest valve is tricky. One has to ask ... why do they want to stick with pushrods anyway?

I believe that Riley had a twin cam (but not overhead) that was a hemi ... but an inline pushrod engine, and ofcourse Damiler with their Sp250 v8 and famously Chrysler built their v8.

So this is just marketing hype with Chrysler (like everybody else) pulling an old name out of their @rse and slapping it on a new model.

But ofcourse since the hemi days we have moved forward and learnt that the pent roof combustion chamber is better. Why?, 'cause it is flatter and thus flatter pistons means more efficient combustion to force on crankshaft, and lighter pistons. Almost all modern twin overhead cam 4 valve engines are of this type.

We have also learnt that the wedge head (like the Chev v8, etc.) are pretty damn good to ... better than hemi?, I do not know but they have some advantages over the hemi (like less stupid dome piston top, etc.)

In the end power/ltr and efficiency is what it is all about ... but marketing gets in the way of everything

Just my 2 cents
Pete

 

True, but back in the day, say 1967, when emissions controls were just a gleam in old Ralph's eye. Putting straight pipes on a Roadrunner Hemi. Life was good.

 

Very, very true. 29cents a gallon you bragged that your hot rod passed everything but the gas station.

Would like a 68 Charger 500, even at $2+ a gallon.

 

# One Top Fuel dragster's 500-cubic-inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first four rows at the Daytona 500.

# A stock Dodge Hemi V-8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster's supercharger.

# With 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ig-nition. Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.

# At the stoichiometric 1.7:1 air-fuel mixture for nitromethane, the flame front temperature measures about 7000 degrees Fahrenheit.

# Nitromethane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, separated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing heat of the exhaust gases.

# Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.

# Spark plug electrodes can be totally consumed during a single pass. After half-distance, the engine is dieseling from compression plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. The engine is shut down by cutting the fuel flow.

# If a spark plug fails early in the run, un-burned nitro can build up in the affected cylinder and explode with sufficient force to blow the cylinder head off in pieces or split the cylinder block in half.

# In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate at an average of more than 4 g's. In order to reach 200 mph before half-distance, the launch acceleration approaches 8 g's. A Top Fuel dragster reaches more than 300 mph before you have completed reading this sentence.

# With a redline that can be as high as 9500 rpm, Top Fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light. Including the burnout, the engine needs to survive only 900 revolutions under load.

# Assuming that all of the equipment is paid off, the crew works gratis, and nothing breaks, each run costs an estimated $1000 per second.

# The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.441 seconds for the quarter-mile (October 5, 2003, Tony Schumacher). The top-speed record is 333.25 mph as measured over the last 66 feet of the quarter-mile (November 9, 2003, Doug Kalitta).

 

Very informative good job.

 

Uh, I think the mercedes division has trended down this year and the Chrysler division is doing better on a financial basis. The quality of mercedes is going down while chrysler is going up. Maybe the germans should learn a lesson from the new Chrysler! Mercedes ain't was it was 10-15 years ago- they're just another luxury car company that makes disposable cars- lease for 3 years, trade in, lease for 3 years, etc. Give me a mid 1980's s-class over any of the stuff they have today (AMG packaged cars excluded, but keep the damn electronic brakes )

See the following article:

Associated Press
Mercedes Warns of Difficult 2005 Market
Friday February 11, 10:05 am ET
DaimlerChrysler's Troubled Mercedes Division Warns Market Conditions Will Worsen in 2005


STUTTGART, Germany (AP) -- The head of DaimlerChrysler AG's troubled Mercedes division has warned that market conditions will worsen this year, further burdening the luxury car unit.
In an e-mail to employees obtained Friday by The Associated Press, Mercedes Chief Executive Eckhard Cordes said that increasing competition in the premium car sector has resulted in "enormous price pressure."

"Because of higher raw material prices and worse foreign-exchange assumptions, these difficult market conditions will further intensify and burden our business in the current year much more severely than previously," Cordes said.

On Thursday, DaimlerChrysler said its fourth-quarter net profit fell 63 percent to 526 million euros ($712 million) from 1.4 billion euros a year ago as Mercedes, once its star division, struggled with quality problems and the dollar's weakness against the euro, which hurt its results in the key U.S. market.

While once-troubled U.S. unit Chrysler more than doubled its fourth-quarter operating earnings to 386 million euros ($523 million) from 143 million euros a year ago, earnings at Mercedes nearly evaporated -- falling to just 20 million euros ($27 million) from 784 million euros.

DaimlerChrysler CEO Juergen Schrempp called the Mercedes result "unacceptable" and announced a plan to cut costs and boost revenues that he said would improve the division's profit margin to 7 percent by 2007. It currently stands at 3.5 percent.

Details were lacking, but the plan also was to include measures to fix problems at ultra-compact maker Smart, which is part of Mercedes. Smart has been losing money, though the company hasn't said how much.

In his e-mail, Cordes urged employees to support the plan.

"We have to do everything to achieve a competitive cost position as soon as possible," he said, also pledging to take "personal responsibility for bringing Mercedes' quality to the highest level again."

DaimlerChrysler shares fell 1 percent to 35.40 euros ($45.57) in afternoon trading in Frankfurt.

 

I'm no big Chrysler buff, but I think their new Crossfire is a cool looking car. Probably one of the best looking new vehicles on the road. Don't know anything else about it though. But I don't care for nearly any of ANYBODY's new vehicles because everything nowadays is all unibody. No seperate frame to add a solid foundation to the structure. When such a vehicle gets in a wreck, you drag out a can opener and start cutting back the structure until you get to unaffected metal, then start welding in new pieces. Yuck. At least with a seperate frame, most fender bender type accidents will leave the basic structure still intact.

 

All that proves is that P.T. Barnum was a visionary.

 

No offense, I know everyone has different taste but the Crossfire looks like a bad remake of the Airflow.

 

And to think that I turned down the chance to buy TWO Desoto Airflows a few years ago. The owner stripped the spare tire carriers off them for other restorations and wanted to sell the leftovers. I passed because they were 4 doors as well as rust buckets.