Turbo Nerdz

Since it is still the season of love, I will be talking about a vehicle that has recently won my heart. For a while now, I have been taking the school bus and she has been trying to get my attention. First off, she always keeps me waiting at the junction in the mornings but as a gentleman, I exercise some patience and soon enough I see her from a distance adorned in white with blue stripes on both sides outlining the school's logo. My classmates and I all jump in and she is filled to capacity but she is still able to haul every single one of us to school without breaking a sweat. A Queen indeed, purr! The Toyota Coaster (My New Found Love) The question now is, what gives my school bus the ability to carry such amount of load and why can't a normal car do the same, irrespective of size? The answer to this question falls under two words, TORQUE AND HORSEPOWER. Let's discuss... TORQUE Simply put, torque is a measurement of your car's ability to do work. So, the more torque...

On the previous episode, we learned about the automobile twins, explaining how Lexus is basically Toyota, Acura is Honda and so on. Although, I concluded the episode by noting that in the case of cars like the Toyota 86 and Subaru BRZ, they are not automobile twins but rather automobile collaborations between two different car companies, as in this case Toyota and Subaru. This would form the basis of todays discussion. Same car but from two different companies What is Automobile Collaboration?  A collaboration simply means the action of working with someone to produce something. Hence, automobile collaboration involves the coming together of two or more car companies to produce one usually awesome car, which is then sold by the two companies under different badges. Automobile collaboration usually occurs so car companies can compliment each other and make up for their individual shortcomings. Companies also collaborate in order to share parts and expertise, thereby reducing th...

I have heard girls say, “I can never date a guy who drives a Toyota, but I can manage one who drives a Lexus”. Turbo Nerds’, should we tell them? (Inserts laughing emoji!) The English people would call this phenomenon “twinning” but where I’m from, na Èjìmá dem dey call am. Èjìmá meaning twins in the Igbo language of Nigeria. Just like a mother gives birth to two kids concurrently and they are called twins, so it is in the automotive world where there is a parent company with two or more offshoots like in the case of Toyota and Lexus. Toyota is Lexus, Lexus is Toyota So why do we have these automobile twins? To understand this we would need to take a trip back to the US gas crisis of 1973. America is known for muscle cars and these were the cars of the 1900's with large V6 and V8 engines guzzling gallons of petrol. So when the gas crisis hit and petrol became so expensive, Americans began abandoning their muscle cars for more fuel efficient Japanese cars. Now this was the problem, ...