I’ve said this before: I drive a 2007 Toyota Yaris. It’s a tiny economy car that looks like this:

(Image from RageGarage.net)

The 2007 Yaris has a standard Toyota 4-cylinder engine that can produce about 100 horsepower (74.570 kW) and 100 foot-pounds of torque (135.6 newton-metres). A little leprechaun told me that my particular Yaris can reach 110 mph (177 km/h) for short periods, although the leprechaun was shitting his pants the entire time.

A long time ago, [I computed how fast my Yaris could theoretically go]. But that was before I discovered Motor Trend’s awesome Roadkill YouTube series. Binge-watching that show led to a brief obsession with cars, engines, and drivetrains. There’s something very compelling about watching two men with the skills of veteran mechanics but maturity somewhere around the six-year-old level (they’re half a notch above me). And because of that brief obsession, I learned enough to re-do some of the calculations from my previous post, and say with more authority just how fast my Yaris can go.

Let’s start out with the boring case of an ordinary Yaris with an ordinary Yaris engine driving on an ordinary road in an ordinary Earth atmosphere. As I said, the Yaris can produce 100 HP and 100 ft-lbs of torque. But that’s not what reaches the wheels. What reaches the wheels depends on the drivetrain.

I spent an unholy amount of time trying to figure out just what was in a Yaris drivetrain. I saw some diagrams that made me whimper. But here’s the basics: the Yaris, like most front-wheel drive automatic-transmission cars, transmits power from the engine to the transaxle, which is a weird and complicated hybrid of transmission, differential, and axle. Being a four-speed, my transmission has the following four gear ratios: 1st = 2.847, 2nd = 1.552, 3rd = 1.000, 4th = 0.700. (If you don’t know: a gear ratio is [radius of the gear receiving the power] / [radius of the gear sending the power]. Gear ratio determines how fast the driven gear (that is, gear 2, the one being pushed around) turns relative to the drive gear. It also determines how much torque the driven gear can exert, for a given torque exerted by the drive gear. It sounds more complicated than it is. For simplicity’s sake: If a gear train has a gear ratio greater than 1, its output speed will be lower than its input speed, and its output torque will be higher than its input torque. For a gear ratio of 1, they remain unchanged. For a gear ratio less than one, its output speed will be higher than its input speed, but its output torque will be lower than its input torque.)

But as it turns out, there’s a scarily large number of gears in a modern drivetrain. And there’s other weird shit in there, too. On its way to the wheels, the engine’s power also has to pass through a torque converter. The torque converter transmits power from the engine to the transmission and also allows the transmission to change gears without physically disconnecting from the engine (which is how shifting works in a manual transmission). A torque converter is a bizarre-looking piece of machinery. It’s sort of an oil turbine with a clutch attached, and its operating principles confuse and frighten me. Here’s what it looks like:

(Image from dieselperformance.com)

Because of principles I don’t understand (It has something to do with the design of that impeller in the middle), a torque converter also has what amounts to a gear ratio. In my engine, the ratio is 1.950.

But there’s one last complication: the differential. A differential (for people who don’t know, like my two-months-ago self) takes power from one input shaft and sends it to two output shafts. It’s a beautifully elegant device, and probably one of the coolest mechanical devices ever invented. You see, most cars send power to their wheels via a single driveshaft. Trouble is, there are two wheels. You could just set up a few simple gears to make the driveshaft turn the wheels directly, but there’s a problem with that: cars need to turn once in a while. If they don’t, they rapidly stop being cars and start being scrap metal. But when a car turns, the inside wheel is closer to the center of the turning circle than the outside one. Because of how circular motion works, that means the outside wheel has to spin faster than the inside one to move around the circle. Without a differential, they have to spin at the same speed, meaning turning is going to be hard and you’re going to wear out your tires and your gears in a hurry. A differential allows the inside wheel to slow down and the outside wheel to spin up, all while transmitting the same amount of power. It’s really cool. And it looks cool, too:

(Image from topgear.uk.net)

(Am I the only one who finds metal gears really satisfying to look at?)

Anyway, differentials usually have a gear ratio different than 1.000. In the case of my Yaris, the ratio is 4.237.

So let’s say I’m in first gear. The engine produces 100 ft-lbs of torque. Passing through the torque converter converts that (so that’s why they call it that) into 195 ft-lbs, simultaneously reducing the rotation speed by a factor of 1.950. For reference, 195 ft-lbs of torque is what a bolt would feel if Clancy Brown was sitting on the end of a horizontal wrench 1 foot (30 cm) long. There’s an image for you. Passing through the transmissions first gear multiplies that torque by 2.847, for 555 ft-lbs of torque. (Equivalent to Clancy Brown, Keith David, and a small child all standing on the end of a foot-long wrench.) The differential multiplies the torque by 4.237 (and further reduces the rotation speed), for a final torque at the wheel-hubs of 2,352 ft-lbs (equivalent to hanging two of my car from the end of that one-foot wrench, or sitting Clancy Brown and Peter Dinklage at the end of a 10-foot wrench. This is a weird party…)

By this point, you’d be well within your rights to say “Why the hell are you babbling about gear ratios?” Believe it or not, there’s a reason. I need to know how much torque reaches the wheels to know how much drag force my car can resist when it’s in its highest gear (4th). That tells you, to much higher certainty, how fast my car can go.

In 4th gear, my car produces (100 * 1.950 * 0.700 * 4.237), or 578 ft-lbs of torque. I know from previous research that my car has a drag coefficient of about 0.29 and a cross-sectional area of 1.96 square meters. My wheels have a radius of 14 inches (36 cm), so, from the torque equation (which is beautifully simple), the force they exert on the road in 4th gear is: 495 pounds, or 2,204 Newtons. Now, unfortunately, I have to do some algebra with the drag-force equation:

2,204 Newtons = (1/2) * [density of air] * [speed]^2 * [drag coefficient] * [cross-sectional area]

Which gives my car’s maximum speed (at sea level on Earth) as 174 mph (281 km/h). As I made sure to point out in the previous post, my tires are only rated for 115 mph, so it would be unwise to test this.

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. Charlotte’s pretty close to sea level. What if I lived in Denver, Colorado, the famous mile-high city? The lower density of air at that altitude would allow me to reach 197 mph (317 km/h). Of course, the thinner air would also mean my engine would produce less power and less torque, but I’m ignoring those extra complications for the moment.

And what about on Mars? The atmosphere there is fifty times less dense than Earth’s (although it varies a lot). On Mars, I could break Mach 1 (well, I could break the speed equivalent to Mach 1 at sea level on Earth; sorry, people will yell at me if I don’t specify that). I could theoretically reach 1,393 mph (2,242 km/h). That’s almost Mach 2. I made sure to specify theoretically, because at that speed, I’m pretty sure my tires would fling themselves apart, the oil in my transmission and differential would flash-boil, and the gears would chew themselves into a very fine metal paste. And I would die.

Now, we’ve already established that a submarine car, while possible, isn’t terribly useful for most applications. But it’s Sublime Curiosity tradition now, so how fast could I drive on the seafloor? Well, if we provide compressed air for my engine, oxygen tanks for me, dive weights to keep the car from floating, reinforcement to keep the car from imploding, and paddle-wheel tires to let the car bite into the silty bottom, I could reach a whole 6.22 mph (10.01 km/h). On land, I can run faster than that, even as out-of-shape as I am. So I guess the submarine car is still dead.

But wait! What if I wasn’t cursed with this low-power (and pleasantly fuel-efficient) economy engine? How fast could I go then? For that, tune in to Part 2. That’s where the fun begins, and where I start slapping crazy shit like V12 Bugatti engines into my hatchback.