Nano's engine

Look ma, just two cylinders but lots of brains!

Alright, imagine that you are in a good mood and want to test whether the Nano will flip over when you do a ‘reverse J test’. For this, in normal cars, you carry a certain degree of speed in reverse gear before yanking the steering to right or left.

The erstwhile Daewoo Matiz failed this test rather spectacularly, if you remember. Well, you just cannot do that with the Nano (no, we are not challenging anyone here!). This is because the speed in reverse gear as well as the top speed in fourth gear is controlled by a little mistress whose name is EMS or Engine Management System.

Go too fast in reverse and the fuel injection will be cut-off! High engine temperature, misfire of the engine, injector failure and over speeding will also enable the chime of a buzzer and will flash a warning light on the dashboard. Before you dismiss this off as a Nanny inside the Nano, please do know that the EMS controller is the best in the business as we speak. The electronic control unit for the same, sensors and actuators are imported from Bosch, Germany. As you read this, the EMS is tuned for BS II and BS III variants and the tuning for BS IV is now in progress.

All that a service guy needs to read small faults in the car is a 2 cm cable. The ‘blink code’ method (self explanatory, right?) is extremely useful in remote places where diagnostic tools that depend on laptops are not available. And you cannot cheat on your dad when it comes to fuel efficiency. If you have been driving fast, you can be caught, since the average vehicle speed for the last five drive cycles can be seen on the diagnostic tool! Now beat that.

And in case the sensors fail on the Nano, you can still rely on the ‘reduced performance’ or limp-home mode based on redundant sensors.