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Michael Taylor21 Feb 2014
NEWS

Baby Bimmers get blankies

BMW has discovered what mothers have known for years: if it's cold, wrap it in a blanket!

Remember your mother telling you to wrap up or you’d catch a cold? BMW has taken that lesson to heart and is about to launch a range of heat wrapping for its most sensitive bits, starting with its highest-tech machine.

Yes, the i8 sports car will have its most important bits wrapped up in blankets.

The lightweight thermoplastic blankets will cover the bottom, exhaust, turbo and inlet sides of the hybrid sports car’s three-cylinder engine, as well as its gearbox. Counter-intuitively, BMW says that keeping the engines all wrapped up and toasty warm improves performance – just like mum always told you.

Intelligent Energy Management project leader Felix Schedel was the engineer given the job of suggesting engine blankets (though BMW calls them Capsules) to the board and the concept has now arrived in production.

The problem is, according to BMW, that engines run at their most powerful and economical when they’re hot, yet urban living means too many engines never get hot enough to achieve their peak performance on a typical drive to work. And then, at the end of a working day, the entire process begins again.

“We are trying to wrap the engine to keep it warm,” Mr Schedel insisted. “Of course, if we power off the engine it will cool down but we can delay this process with the thermal capsules.

“If we start the car after work or the next day, the car will normally have a lower thermal state. The warmer the engine is when it starts up, the better the fuel economy will be. The idea behind it is, with 80 per cent of drives being less than 30km, to have the engine at its most economical for the highest possible percentage of every journey.”

The i8 will be just the first BMW-badged car to wear engine blankets, and it will wear seven of them. BMW has designed different styles of blanket for different parts of the engine, depending on the heat intensity and the importance of retaining heat in those areas.

There are thinner blankets with an external heat-reflecting foil for the exhaust side of the engine and the exhaust-side cylinder-head, the thickest, squishiest blanket for the cold side of the engine and something in between for the front engine cover, the rear cover, the oil-sump cover, the inlet-side cylinder-head cover and the gearbox cover.

“Car-makers have spent more than 100 years improving ways to keep engines cool, but that battle has long been won. There is too much cooling today.”

“In winter, if you heat the car faster you use less fuel. The mass increase barely registers and overall the car can become lighter because it doesn’t need some things anymore,” he said.

A side benefit for BMW is that the blankets kill a lot of engine noise and vibration before they are amplified through the car, meaning a reduction in heavy sound and vibration deadening under the floor and inside the bulkhead.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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