Episode 1. We basically built a street legal go kart by installing a $99.00 6.5 HP engine in our Honda Insight. How fast will it go? the answer might surprise you.
Well at this point you’re probably wondering what’s going on why don’t we start from the beginning i’m gonna go ahead and answer the question nobody asked and that is how fast can you make a car go with a 99 lawnmower engine i don’t know let’s find out now back in the day honda made this stupid looking car but from what i can gather this car was cutting edge
Technology for its time now obviously they put a lot of attention in the aerodynamics and that pretty much accounts for the goofy looks but there’s also something else interesting about this car let’s take a closer look when i put this perfectly good magnet up to the side of the car well it just falls to the ground turns out the car is made entirely out of
Aluminum and plastic i did the math and it takes over 35 000 beer cans to make one of these cars that’s a lot of beer anyway honda probably built one of the lightest cars in our modern time but we can make it lighter by getting rid of a lot of useless stuff all right well that should give our lawnmower engine a fighting chance now let’s go ahead and take a look
At what makes this car move this is kind of a unique setup it’s a combination 5-speed transmission and cvt drive for those who don’t know the cvt stands for continuous variable transmission so basically the car has two transmissions i’m using the cvt drive to connect the engine to the five-speed transmission and this gives the little engine a huge mechanical
Advantage the cvt drive is also known as a torque converter and it’s a popular drive system on go karts and mini bikes the cbt system is actually a comet 44 magnum with a 7 inch driven pulley what the hello yeah speaking shh everybody it’s the internet calling yeah i’m still here i i see uh-huh oh yeah i already fixed that yeah okay well thanks bye well that
Was awkward apparently the seven inch driven pulley is on backwards in this picture and like i said i already fixed that so uh let me uh give me a second here and let me fix this okay and uh here we go now in this picture you can get a better view of the chain and sprocket that goes to the input chapter of the transmission and here we can see the full chain and
Sprocket system the sprockets provide an additional 3.1 reduction ratio to the input of the transmission the compounding transmission system is what makes it possible to use a 212 cc engine to power this car in today’s video we’ll be using the stock 99 predator engine to get some baseline performance data once we’ve gathered the data we can then make plans of
Modifying the engine for more power ultimately the goal is to get the car to go 50 miles per hour we’ll talk more about that in a few minutes but first let’s see how fast this car will go so now let’s get some performance data wow zero to 30 miles an hour and 25 seconds holy cow that slow now let’s find top speed um this might take a while hmm
So well there it is top speed with a stock predator engine is 39 miles an hour now all things considered that really isn’t too bad keep in mind there was a lot more driving done that afternoon but we only showed a few minutes worth but don’t worry there’ll be plenty of future videos i have to admit this car is a real hoot to drive basically when you’re
Behind the wheel you have to give the car everything you got and then some this is definitely the coolest go-kart i ever built and it’s street legal too the compound transmission is the key to what makes this car special as a matter of fact the car easily takes off in third gear and you can run it all the way up to 30 miles an hour before shifting the fourth
Gear now first gear is equally impressive as it gives the car a lot of low end pulling power if the car was equipped with a hitch i’m pretty sure it could pull a trailer no problem but unfortunately there’s no hitch on the car so i did a little experiment now we do have a driver sitting in the jeep for safety reasons but the jeep is in neutral so yeah i can
Pull the jeep and the trailer and probably a lot more is this a joke no it’s for real this is actually a serious project and a lot of engineering went into the car now look the simple answer is all we really did was put a small engine into a lightweight aerodynamic car the unique transmission helps the little engine accelerate the total mass but it has its
Limits trust me no laws of physics were broken the car is basically just a big go-kart in this video series our goal is to get the car to go 50 miles per hour obviously the box stock 212 cc engine just ain’t gonna cut it so join us as we take this project to the next level by modifying the engine for more power the good news is there is a huge aftermarket of
Performance parts for this little engine we will be modifying both the standard 212 cc engine and the hemi version and then to top it off we’ll be dropping in the big block 420 cc engine next time on robot cantina we’ll dyno test the box stock 212 cc engine and find out how much power it really makes you’re not going to want to miss any of this hey if you’re
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Transcribed from video
Episode 1. We put a $99.00 Predator engine in our Honda Insight. By Robot Cantina