Which of these is a suitable birthday present?

Baraza,

This is my second time writing to you, my first question was not responded to, so I hope that I make the cut this time round. I would like to buy my first car (as a birthday gift) after several attempts over the past few years failed due to other priorities cropping up. I’m torn between the 2015, Toyota Allion 1800CC 2WD – rumour has it that the 4WD has issues, and the 2015 Subaru XV.

The car is for daily commuting around Nairobi from work to my rented house and weekly weekend trips to South Rift to see my family, which involves driving through rocks/gravel off-road for approximately 30km. I know that both are very reliable, and that fuel efficiency depends on how you drive the car. As for maintenance, I am informed that minor service on an Allion can cost Sh4,000 compared to at least Sh8,000 for Subaru - this is what makes my decision difficult. I am fully dependent on my salary and seasonal earnings from my small farm.

Kindly advise.

Kipkoech Ng’enoh

Kipkoech,

They say “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. But then again, they also say “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over repeatedly, and expecting a different result each time”. I don’t know who these two lots of “theys” are, but it seems the first group carries the day today. This time you get responded to, so smile and be happy.

I have never heard of the alleged issues with a 4WD Allion, but you mention out of town trips to the South Rift, which is an agriculturally rich corner of the country. These agriculturally rich areas tend to have very good tarmac roads leading up to them from the capital, but once there and you start straying off into the “interior”, the tarmac becomes something of a gamble, but this is entirely dependent on where exactly you want to go.

The choice of vehicle between the XV and the Allion is also entirely dependent on the existence of this tarmac at your final destination and in between, and you say you do 30km of gravel and rocks, which is a lot.

The XV is the better car here, with its rugged build, better ground clearance, plastic cladding and dependable AWD. I said it’s the better car here, but not necessarily the best: 30km of offroad driving is not little, perhaps a crossover along the lines of an Escudo is more up your creek, but you didn’t mention it, so I will not either.

From experience, the Subaru service is a bit more expensive, but that is because my own (former) car swallowed more oil than usual due to the presence of a turbo or two. The XV doesn’t have a turbo, so servicing costs may match that of the Allion after all.

The difference is, once you have replaced the plugs on a Subaru, if you had opted for original Subaru plugs, they will run forever (I sold my Subaru with the same set of plugs I bought it with, having covered more than 70,000km over five years with it. Claims of 100,000km between sets have been made). Do your arithmetic and figure out what is what.

Science does not recognise magic, if you need new piston rings, get them

Hi Baraza, 

I am an ardent follower of your column and I am impressed by your objectivity in handling matters motoring. I own an old car (Toyota Mark 2) and the car has been great over the years, though it has lost a bit of power. Now, I came across this product you endorsed, an oil additive which promises to revitalise the engine, improve power and consumption. I have been very skeptical of these fuel and oil additives. How do you tell a real from a fake as far as these additives are concerned since there as many out there promising great outcomes?

Regards,
Dan.

Ah, finally someone who appreciates my objectivity. Thanks, Dan. I know exactly what you are talking about, and here is an explainer: the manufacturers claim that the stuff cures worn out metal. I believe my co-presenter and I said as much in that epic film we made where we tested the product with measurable and tangible results. I was also careful to point out that the substance is not a miracle cure for a destroyed engine, so if your power loss is from some kind of mechanical failure, then do the requisite repairs. You will need a thorough diagnosis before choosing this path.

That said, the test: we got an old Impreza whose maintenance record was unknown, but the fuel consumption and the engine compression were below standard, which was odd since the odometer claimed a total mileage of only 145,000km or so. This brings to mind a recent article I did about mileage figures being doctored, but that is a whole other discussion.

Anyway, we got the Impreza and started with a compression test which yielded figures in the 8.4 - 8.9 bar range, then we followed it up with a fuel economy test which yielded 8.6km/l, which is terrible for a naturally aspirated sub-2.0 liter four-cylinder that has not been race tuned and was being driven mildly.

I get better figures from a 2.5 liter straight-six with 400,000-km-plus on the clock, and that includes on occasions when I decide those turbocharged passenger shuttles from upcountry need to learn to bow down to German elegance and Teutonic acoustics, when I make the exhaust bellow in a fourth gear pull up a 5 percet gradient such as Kimende before slamming the tranny into fifth and making the shuttle passengers think “Man, I wish I owned a British Racing Green E34 BMW 525i with a five-speed manual and single Vanos valve timing...” as they eat my dust in their speed-limited inconvenience, powering my way to a comfortable abode located in a leafy suburb where I pen these articles and think about life... and I may have digressed a bit here.

So, we added the fancy liquid to the Impreza engine and repeated the test. First observation: the engine compression jumped to around 10 bar, with a low of 9.8 and a high of 10.2 across the horizontally opposed cylinders. Hmmm... interesting. Well, higher compression means higher torque which means less ambitious revving going up the gears (the Impreza was an automatic) which in turn means... fuel consumption improved, considerably so.

The second test yielded 11.6 km/l, which is close to a 30 percent improvement and there are two things that crossed my mind at this point: one, 11.6km/l is still poor for a sub-2.0 liter four cylinder that hasn't been race-tuned and two, 30 percent??? These are the kind of claims that make me yell "GET THE STRAP!"; come on, don't lie to us by taking liberties with numbers. And yet... and yet, I'm the one who generated those numbers.

Men lie, women lie, numbers don't, I said as much a week ago. I am not a brand ambassador for the stuff, I don't even use it, and I have been known to have a strong negative reaction to claims of miracle cures, and yet there I was seeing one achieving difficult-to-believe results by my own hand. It's all there in our little film (check YouTube, look for the Motoring Press Agency channel and watch all the films, it is somewhere in there).

Previous research indicates that the active ingredient in this additive is a substance called "serpentinite". Mentioning snakes or snake-related terminology automatically brings "snake oil" to mind, which is what we thought this is, but it clearly wasn't. I won't go into the details of the physical and chemical properties of this serpentinite, but apparently it was discovered during a mining operation in Siberia and was shortly thereafter put to use by the Soviet military, and if there is one thing I know about the Russians, it's that they have unusually strange and effective methods of achieving results.

They were the first in space, both manned and unmanned. Everybody knows about the Anglo-French Concorde, a supersonic commercial passenger aircraft, few people know that it was not the only one in operation, there was the Tupolev Tu-144, another supersonic commercial passenger aircraft made by the Russians. This serpentinite stuff? There might be more to it than we can see on the surface, an apt pun because serpentinite rejuvenates (or "revitalises", to quote the marketing blurb) worn out metal surfaces.

That said: find out if your Mark II needs some parts before you feed it magic potion like Asterix at the onset of a skirmish with Roman legionaries. The serpentinite may work wonders but a magical cure it is not. Science does not recognise magic. If you need new piston rings, get new piston rings. If your block needs reboring, then rebore the damn block. If your MAF sensor is dirty, clean it.

Change your air filter and spark plugs and go through the usual "underpowered car" motions before dabbling in alchemy, because, that Impreza we used for the test? Despite having better compression and better economy and generally driving smoother post-medication, it wasn't any faster and didn't feel more powerful (but the response was better), which is a pointer that we should have included a dyno test in our film. Perhaps we will next time...

***

It is hard to tell what's real and what's fake, but there is a method to it. The first and most obvious is to test the product in controlled conditions and compare results like we did with the elixir stuff (not allowed to name names here since it amounts to marketing, and as I said, I am not a brand ambassador).

However, as an end user you can't go about testing everything you find on a supermarket shelf. What if it's poison? The other method is to engage the peddlers directly, and once you do so, expect the immediate reactions to follow this order:

1. Referrals: ignore these. Most come from unknowledgeable people, for example, you'd find someone saying their fuel-saving device works, just ask this stock trader over here, or that housewife over there... err, no. These people more often than not know nothing about engines or scientific experiments with controlled parameters, so they will blab whatever the endorsement fee/placebo effect makes them say.

2. Horse manure: there will be claims using jargon that upon closer inspection, amount to nothing but terminology plucked straight of the glossary section of a science textbook with none of the facts established in the preceding pages. Fuel is not magnetic, so a strong magnet placed along the fuel lines will not split drops of fuel into "smaller molecules" (a gross misunderstanding of what a molecule is) that are easier to burn. That's why we have injectors and carburettors. The 12V socket/cigarette lighter is not connected to the engine management computer in any way, so a device plugged into the cigarette lighter is not going to "reprogram" your car to burn less fuel.

3. Secrecy: when looked askance upon, charlatans will quote intellectual property rights as a defense against why they should tell you how their product works. Legitimate sellers of improvement products are very clear about what their products contain and how they work: V Power and Excellium have cleaning agents which decarbonise your engine around the valves, with V Power having a higher octane rating making it usable in high compression applications.

The stuff we tested has the serpentinite that somehow improved the compression. A lot of product technology out there is well known in both operation and composition, but liars will claim theirs is a "secret" that they are "protecting" against "being stolen" by "greedy people" and as such they won't say what's in the product nor how it works. What, have they never heard of a "patent" or what it entails? The only secret here is the contents are "nonsensical" and the operation is "fictional".

I have encountered all three types of reactions in my line of work because every twice or thrice a year, a small bottle of coloured liquid or a device with flashing LEDs and random wires sticking out of it hits my desk with claims of "It works! my bank manager uses it and she swears it works!" Upon requesting a thorough test of the product, the answer is invariably “You have to buy it first”.