Top Gear‘s ambitious Sipster project, in which an old Golf was customized to get 70mpg, was a success:
With a probably overambitious goal of building a car that can achieve 70 mpg, scoot to 60 mph in less than 7 seconds and cost only $7K to build, Project Sipster was born. Lots of cuts, cussing and sleepless nights later, a Reagan-era Volkswagen Rabbit was transformed from a cute beater into an eco-friendly tire burner; a modern turbodiesel engine and aerodynamic modifications brought the heat to this Cold War relic. Through (too many) trials and (frequent) tribulation, Project Sipster took shape, but could we nail our targets? Find out below with exclusive Project Sipster videos, stories and photography.
Catch up at their project page. [Top Gear]
no airbags, antislip and ABS crap.
In short we’re all too spoiled to drive an eco friendly car.
I have to seriously dispute the $7000 price tag. You can hardly replace the stock engine in a car with a new identical one for that, much less carry out the costly and time consuming engineering required for a conversion. Used parts and donated labor, maybe, but that’s not a relevant example.
@2 It depends entirely on the car. That being said, you’re wrong. Not all swaps are expensive and difficult to do. I know a shop in Denver that can swap your Subaru engine, wiring harness included in less than 4 hours for way less than $7k.
Details of their swap are here: http://www.topgear.com/us/features/more/diesel-geekery-101/
Looks like less than $7k of work to me. Stock tranny rebuilt with a LSD. Not much custom fab going on.
Engine swaps do not have to be expensive affairs. But yes, they are using used parts; the car itself is over 20 years old. The definitely could build the car for under $7,000 – hell, look at the cars that are built for the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge each year. For under the dollar amount of the year (i.e. $2009 this year) people manage all manner of insane swaps and upgrades, with the winners frequently hitting the 10.x mark in the quarter mile. (Which, in case you don’t know, is better than pretty much any factory produced car outside the Bugatti Veyron.)
That said, the Top Gear project is not world changing as they claim it to be. It’s not even that noteworthy except that it’s being done by a mainstream entertainment publication. They’ve taken a thoroughly obsolete* used car and updated the drive train, suspension, and done some aerodynamic work. [* obsolete in comparison to new car standards, not usefulness] The results may be surprising to the layman, but they’re not useful in a “taking on big oil” (their words) way. Of course if you shave 1,000+ pounds off of a modern car it’s going to be faster and get better gas mileage. That’s just physics. The question is how do you get that performance while retaining modern safety standards and conveniences?
I don’t mean to be a downer – the project is a lot of fun. My beef is with how self righteous they are about it. “Where’s our nobel?” What the fuck? They’ve done something that hundreds of other people have done before. They haven’t proven anything new or broken any new ground – other than having professional grade marketing tied to their project and having an aerodynamics professor help them out. Half the people in the GRM challenge (again, just naming one such event) have done the same or better year after year for the last ten years. Old light car + powerful drivetrain = fast and efficient. It’s just a proven formula that they followed, again.
If they did it and said “look how cool this is, it’s a ton of fun, isn’t it?!” then I would 100% love it. But they need to drop the self-fellating hyperbole before I’ll take them seriously.
I’m the guy who slaved on the car. We’re posting an article tomorrow that explains the specifics of replicating the 84 mpg and 0-60 in 7 secs bits for yes, ~$7K.
We have our anti-slip in the form of a Peloquin limited-slip differential, although that isn’t included in the $7K total. We dealt with lack of airbags with a plastic Virgin Mary, higly-caffeinated sympathetic nervous system, and kick-ass H&R coil-overs, anti-roll bars, Eurosport braces and performance brakes. If you can avoid the accident in the first place…
Does that total include labor? Of course not– It’s called doing it yourself. How does that impact relevancy? Did we use junkyard and used parts? Of course, why wouldn’t we? Reuse is orders of magnitude more ecologically responsible than using even rebuilt or parts made from recycled materials.
Don’t know if y’all caught the vid below (just seeing Sipster slide sideways through the desert at sunrise made 7 sleepless weeks worth it).
http://www.topgear.com/us/videos/more/topgear.coms-project-sipster/
Cheers, Jared
I just did a rough back of the envelope calculation. Raising a Rabbit’s fuel mileage from 35 MPG to 70 MPG at $2.50/gallon saves $3,500 over 100,000 miles. This is an optimistic estimate for their TD conversion and a very pessimistic estimate for the stock car’s mileage. As usual, the payback period for a complex piece of engineering doesn’t look as good as “70 MPG!” does.
I had an 84 Rabbit and an 85 Golf back in the day. Awesome economy cars that were great to drive. As usual with a highly competitive consumer product that was engineered by a big corporation to sell at a tough price point, there’s not a whole lot you can do to improve it without blowing the economy aspect. Consumer products are what they are. You can make them something different, but beat a major automaker at their own game, in your own garage, probably not.
Last summer we had the engine changed on my wife’s Toyota. If a shop had said “yeah, it takes us 4 hours to do that” I’d have been out the door. It takes most of a day just to hook up and properly test the electrical and control systems. Not sure about Subarus. A friend is coming over today with the WRX rally car that he built for the Press On Regardless and I’ll ask him how long his engine changes take.
@5– We’re a Brit brand, and couldn’t take ourselves less seriously. Hyperbole.
Honestly, we had no idea whether we’d hit our targets, but those of us who worked on this project have built enough beaters, low-buck racecars and jalopies held together with zip ties and self-tapping screws to know we’d be close– the 84 mpg was a pleasant surprise. And the car is a ball to drive. Of course we didn’t break any new ground, but the record, much as I love the GRM $200X Challenge cars (and the mag), none of them even begin to approach that kind of mpg.
Jared, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come off sounding so negative. It’s probably all the Clarkson ego rubbing off on the rest of the Top Gear brand making me read phrases like “where’s our nobel?” as being semi-serious. (And yes, I know Clarkson is an entertainer, likely playing a character, and I like watching him. But he – or his character – is still an insufferable ass.)
Ross, keep in mind that the original Rabbit Diesel is a horrifically underpowered machine. It’s the only car I’ve ever driven that felt dangerously slow.
I spent most of the summer of 2007 in a 300SD that was just about slow enough to have its own street address. I passed the car on to my dad with the driving advice ‘Put your right foot down early and hard. Keep it there unless you absolutely cannot avoid stopping.”
Performance is a very good reason to upgrade and older car. I doubt that modern US drivers would accept the performance of an original diesel Rabbit. Modern diesels have made great advances in power, flexibility and driving dynamics.
The people who built this converted Rabbit have done a commendable job in showing what can be done to update various aspects of an older car’s performance. The media aspect of it has been rather over sold, however.
I’ve seen a similar modded out Rabbit before, maybe 5 years ago or so. I’m trying to search it up. All I remember is it was stupidly fast and could stop on a dime (they installed 4 wheel discs and ABS), and was a fun video.
I wonder how far a good thorough soundproofing would go on a Rabbit? I loved my old ’84 Rabbit but it was a heap; tons of wind and road noise, rattly, etc. Do the turbodiesel swap, or a modern 1.8t gas swap, thoroughly coat the inside with sound absorption paint, new weather stripping… Hmm, I’m talking myself into a project I don’t need.
Naah, my current Frankenstein’s monster needs attention. (CRX HF with a GM Quad4 engine hard mounted.. 190hp in 1750lbs. Ugly noisy swap but it’s going to be a 24hrs of lemons car, so smoothness is not a target.)
I liked the CRX conversion that Car and Driver did with an Accord engine and trans in each end. 8 cylinders and 4wd.
The stock CRX HF scored in the mid 50s on the EPA highway cycle, a number that would delight a lot of people today.
ROSSINDETROIT @ No. 2:
What sort of cars are you thinking about? A brand new engine for mine costs Euro 300, and I can swap it in before lunch.
Toyota Matrix. I think its last set of tires cost the equivalent of 300 Euro. A low miles used engine was $2400 and labor ran the bill up another thou or so. I’m glad your car has such a cheap engine that’s easy to change but around here that’s unheard of. And luckily it’s also largely unnecessary.
How I miss my rabbit diesel and its loud, soul shaking engine. Getting onto the highway required good strategy and bit of bravado. More dangerous was that truck stations were the only places that sold diesel and you had to pray that those guys were looking down as they manouvered around the pumps.
Anyway, I think Top Gear tone was pretty much tongue in cheek – a very refreshing sentiment in our holier-than-thou-prius culture. To each his own…