Water Cooled
 

Replaced the water pump on my 2003 Chevy Tahoe today... I wonder when an auto manufacturer is going to come-up with a motor that is air cooled? :dance:

In a case like Shanghai, hot and humid, the car is likely to be more air cooled. Those 3 fans goes so wild on the 986 it make the water looks as if it's only a feature ;)

Unless you drive it into a lake, every car is air cooled.

Yes they are... Now if we can just get rid of that liquid loop in between.

Water has 4x the heat carrying capacity and 30x the conductivity of air. So it can carry more heat and it can pull it away much faster than air can. This means it does a much better job of reducing hot spots and takes much less energy to reduce temperatures than localized airflow would. Once the heat is in the front of the car, it's easy to move it to the air efficiently. Engines would have to be heavier and physically larger than they are to air cool them directly.

It's better this way.

Now if water pump housings were not part of the engine block and easy to get to like they were before the 80s, that would be nice.

Your Tahoe probably IS air cooled under certain conditions. GM is pretty smart about basic functional stuff and the V8 motors have an emergency cooling mode that functions even if the car looses all the coolant. They turn off the fuel injectors to half the cylinders and the air movement through the motor provides a cooling effect. I think you can drive the car 100 miles without any coolant.

I bet you probably already knew this.

No, I did not know that... That is very interesting. I would not want to test that though.

I changed the water pump because it started leaking a little through the weep hole, I can't stand any kind of drip on my garage floor!

The pump was not too difficult to get to and replace but the job is just so darn messy.

So what if I throw a turbine engine in there... How much liquid coolant do those need? :) I saw a program on car designs and someone is working on an electric car with two small gas turbines turning generators.