Power Steering Parts

In the beginning, there was only one kind of steering. You want to move the car in a different direction, you grab the steering wheel and put your shoulder into it. Power steering was either unheard of or very elite. Using a heavy ve We huffed and heaved and sweated be And then for 50 years, power steering didn't really change a lot. Hydraulic was hydraulic, You basically have your steering rack that is very classic and just for that every car of the era. But to help you move that, you've got t It is told how much and what direction by this control valve up here and all this connects to your steering col Where does it get all the pressure is what's interesting. If you look up in there, you see that p That's one of the big problems with these systems. It's constantly putting drag on the engine, creating a bunch of pressure even if you're not using it to steer. That's called a parasitic loss, that concept MPG and power. But these days, power steering has changed dramatically. Welcome to the era of E-Pass, electric power assisted steering. Now underneath t Electric power steering is here. If you look up in t Another model is to take that motor and move it further up and put it on the actual steering col The effect is the same. The electric motor and its electronics sense your effort on the wheel and add their own in kind in of course the same direction. The efficiency, the compactness, the cleanliness and the accuracy of t Note, there are also hybrid systems that remain hydraulic but replace the belt driven p The bigger trend however is to go fully electric. Okay, so as you've picked up on there are four major benefits to electric power steering. Let's run them down. First off is efficiency. ZF, w For another way, Chevy says their 2013 Malibu gets 2. 5% better MPG solely because it has electric power steering. They ballparked that at 120 gallons of gas or about 500 bucks saved across 10 years of owners Next up is addressability. Because it's an electric component, it can be harnessed to the vehicles control systems to automate things It can also be used in the background for cornering improvement and cornering control. Now we have accuracy. Because it's driven largely by software, changing its behavior and keeping it accurate with a feedback loop that a computer can monitor is quite easy. That's not the case with hydraulic systems. If you want to change their behavior, you largely have to go engineer new physical components for them. And then there's compactness, a big deal with automotive packaging designers. After having a p That allows a lot of space to be freed up and for t So it's a win-win-win-win. Then why do so many driving purists kind of push back on electric power steering? Well, part of it is because it's not what we've always had. It's not hydraulic and let's face it, we've all gotten used to hydraulic steering and automakers have dialed in quite nicely. And early electric power steering systems did have some n That's been largely corrected in my experience. I have a very hard time telling a good electric system from a refined hydraulic system until I look under the hood. The future? When electric power steering, That means the steering wheel basically becomes a game controller and has no mechanical connection to the front end at all. That's down the road a few years and that's a separate CarTec 101.