SATURDAY, 4 APRIL, 2015
Putting the motor into the road
Some say the Tiggo (on the right) started out as an imitation of the Toyota Rav4 (on the left), but others, like me, now argue that this little Chinese gem offers more value for less rands than even the first Rav4s did. PHOTOS: ALWYN VILJOEN
What a nice surprise ALWYN VILJOEN toured the West Coast in a Chery Tiggo — and liked it YOU don’t get to buy a lot of car for R229 000 these days — definitely not a lot of SUV. This is the price of the new 1.6 Chery Tiggo VVT and I admit taking the key from the media fleet manager (and former Witness Motoring editor) Dave Fall with a grimace. Could he really not give me the Ford Kuga instead for my business trip up the coast? We have the previous gener ation in the family and I’ve driven it, lots, really, I nagged. But Fall was firm: “Just go push that gofaster pedal as hard as you like and tell people about it,” he ordered. So I did. And my goodness golly, what a nice surprise the Chery Tiggo turned out to be in the strong Cape winds at highway speeds, and belting along over dirt roads. The niggle list For less than R240 k there will, of course, be niggles, so let’s start with those I noted en route in the Tiggo. • The plastics are hard and oldfash ioned — fair enough at these bargain prices — but the edges are also not bevelled, which gives the otherwise neat interior that slightly tacky, unfin ished look. • On paper, the 1 598 cc engine with continuously variable valves makes a respectable 93 kW and 160 Nm, but on tar you need to get the rev needle to about 5 000 to feel any of this with the 1 343 kg weight of the car, exclud ing my luggage. With the fuel price in land at well over R12 a litre, this is not as big an issue as it would have been with cheap fuel. • The power steering to those 16inch wheels gets very light at speed over the rough stuff. And that is it, three niggles that are all forgiven when you bear the
The Tiggo comes with a Parrot Evo system built neatly into the multi function steering wheel which pairs with a phone faster than any other system on the market. price in mind. The wow factors • The Tiggo provides the fastest Blue tooth pairing of all the cars I have yet testdriven, except for my old Bantam bakkie, in which I had an aftermarket Parrot clipped to the sun visor. The Tiggo also uses a Parrot system, in this case the tiny Evo unit, which is built neatly into the multifunction steering wheel. To pair the car’s six speakers to your phone, simply tell your phone to look for devices, punch in 1234 and your are linked. Compare this to the GWM Steed 6, where not even the dealer can figure out how to get the system to work. Note, the Par rot will only link your phone, not your music files. For that you have to use the small USB cable, sold with the car. • While on the GWM, and its “Chin glish” manual we quoted in the Wheels supplement, the manual in the Chery is written in very good English. No “when riding pregnant woman” here,
as is the case in the competitor’s often very funny but also quite dangerous at tempt at translation. • The air conditioner works so well it can cause frostbite, and does not act like an anchor on performance when switched on. • The biggest wow factor comes with the roadholding. And for once, it was not just me who was impressed. Kart ing correspondent Stuart Johnston and KZNbased Gavin Foster also had to go a bit faster than normal over dirt. This was Johnston’s summary on Cars.co.za: “As the ruts turned to sloots, and washaways turned to mini earth banks, this little Chinese de signed and built Tiggo absorbed every thing. I kid you not, obstacles that would have had many a Europeanori entated compact SUV threatening to poke suspension struts through the fenders were dealt with with contemp tuous ease by the Chery. “It’s almost as if it had been specced
as a Dakar support vehicle. I found it much more pleasant on dirt than on tar! “So, prospective Chery Tiggo own ers, rejoice in the fact that while this is in no way a real offroader (it’s front wheel drive), it is superbly competent on those rippled, ungraded dirt roads where you sometimes need to venture over a weekend, either to get away from it all or to see relatives who never joined the rat race in the first place.” To Johnston’s good impressions I can add the lack of 4x4 or AWD systems will not be a problem when you are driving on muddy roads, as lashings of revs will see the front wheels pull the light car through. Note the word “light”, for any bag gage will put the brakes on this type of advanced mud driving. City driving While the Tiggo comes into its own over the rough stuff and can be raced through mud by the average farmer’s wife, most owners who buy in this mar ket will never go off tar and it is for them that the Tiggo will ensure smiley driving for a long time to come. The Chery Tiggo comes standard with a transponder key, the leatherette seats do not heat up like real leather would and the rev counter is on the right, where most cars in the West have the speed. Thus you can drive like a trucker to save fuel — keeping the rev needle at just under 3 000 rpm, or 110 km/h, which is where the Tiggo gives the most torque and uses the least fuel. On my West Coast drive, I used these and the other six tricks we listed in Wheels on Thursday to get over 540 from three quarters of the 57 litre tank. • alwyn.viljoen@witness.co.za
BRITISH firm Texchange announced a digital take on the old rail and ratchet system still used by trams on very steep tracks in Switz erland. Instead of teeth to help power the tram, Texchange’s system marries the power cables in roads that can charge cars by induction to provides an electric motor in the road. The company ultimately hopes to see the technology used for mass rapid transit in developing nations, although its more immediate appli cation could be in mine carts. It’s based around synchronous linear electric motors. Gizmag reports a regular cylindri cal electric motor, a magnet equipped rotor spins within a mag netic fieldgenerating stator (that’s the part with the copper coils in it). A linear electric motor is sort of like a regular one, except it’s “unrolled” to form a slab. The stator is now flat, and the rotor likewise now takes the form of a flat reaction plate. Instead of spinning, the reaction plate shoots across the stator, from one end to the other. By synchronising a series of those motors laid end to end along a track, a reaction plate could be made to “surf” a travelling magnetic wave all the way down that track in the same way as some maglev trains – but without the levitation. Attach that plate to the underside of a mine cart, and you get a motorless moving cart. Additionally, multiple carts could be made to move independently on one track at the same time, going in ei ther direction and at different speeds. According to Texchange, not only should the system be more energy efficient than using heavier motor equipped carts, but it should also be more reliable, more robust, and al low for the climbing of gradients of over 20 percent. It could conceiva bly even be used in cableless eleva tors. Texchange managing director Rupert Cruise tells us that the com pany is currently building a demon stration model with a manufactur ing partner in Leicester. —WR.
A Volvo FH12 truck on an electric highway which may be replaced by a new system announced by a British form that puts the truck’s engine in the road. PHOTO: SUPPLIED