Ha, that's where I saw that!

Savagegeese review of the 6MT Accord Sport has a segment where he shows the car on a lift and how Honda designed the tips into the rear bumper to work around the same issue. There was soot dripping down the tailpipe onto the muffler, but the tips were clean.

Really wish more cars would use dual injection to get around the carbon buildup issue.

 

The tips don't bother me too much because when you produce a lot of power, those tips are going to get dirty. But people who wash their cars, but the wheels look awful and the insides of the spokes are brown drive me nuts. Maybe that will be a thing of the past if Porsche's Tungsten-Carbide coated rotors become cheaper and more common and brake dust is no longer an issue. The only thing I don't understand in the following article is that they claim the dust comes from the rotors and not the pads. What? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a1...coated-brakes/

 

The appearance of exhaust tips is a big thing for me. IDK why, but it is.

Back when I was strangely jonesing for a Stelvio, I had decided their chromed plastic exhaust tip trim was actually kind of cool. I'm not proud.

That said, I've never seen one on the road where the tips weren't blackened with soot. You need to clean them all the time.

 

Those chrome tips look like a disaster to try to keep clean. Fortunately the tips on my car stay pretty clean. The inside is another story, but the outside of the tips usually stay decent. Probably from all of the extra power blowing the soot straight out so it doesn't have time to stick to anything.

 

The tips on my Fast Intentions exhaust are made by a company called Sebring Tuning. Love these things.

You can see here why I kind of liked the fake tips on the Stelvio.

 

Well, they Porsche engineers claim:

Porsche found that discs are responsible for the majority of brake dust and that pads, commonly thought to be the biggest contributor to dust, only account for 30 percent. The reason is that while pads and rotors both lose thickness over their life cycles, rotors have far greater surface area than pads. All that material has to go somewhere, and on Porsches, that schmutz—scientifically speaking, it’s ferric oxide—ends up dirtying pretty wheels.

IDK, that I'm in any position to try and dispute that. So...... (Edit: people aren't buying it in the comments to that article either)

But, 10 piston calipers on 16.4" rotors

And at them bringing up the 370Z from a decade ago that had total brake failure due to Nissan fitting 'comfort' (low dust/noise) pads to the Akebono calipers.

And finally, my exhaust tips have a ton of soot on them, and my wheels are covered in brake dust. I feel bad. I'll tell my wife I need punished

 

That does make sense about your liking the Stelvio tips. Are yours fairly easy to keep clean? The design does not look that bad for maintenance.

Well, those Porsche engineers are pretty solid. The surface area point about the rotors makes sense, it just logically seems odd as the pads are softer and wear so much quicker. You would think the ratio is more like 50/50, but 70% of dust is from the rotors. Crazy!

 

We're both assuming they are Porsche engineers and not Akebono engineers who just managed to help get a major contract with Porsche to sell brakes at $3500 a pop

 

Every Spring and Fall I put the back end up on ramps and try and do a thorough cleaning of the tips and cans. In between, I just wipe them with the wash mitt as the last step in the wash. So yeah, very easy to maintain. Granted, I've got 20k miles and 4+ years on them, including Upstate NY winters, so they're no longer perfect. But nothing is perfect forever.

 

Ford is doing exactly this with their new Explorer ST. Pretty cool design too... they direct the exhaust out the bottom of the exhaust outlet before the tips to help keep them clean yet keep the look of real polished quad tips to help keep Rochester happy. LOL

 

Well this is a bit disappointing news for the next gen STI. It sounds like the car will get a new body and maybe a new engine (unclear in the article), but it will have roughly the same horsepower it has had for the last 15+ years. If this is true, this is completely unacceptable for a performance car. I can now buy a Camry with about the same horsepower. I will wait to hear the official release from Subaru, but this is pretty lame and if true I will cross the car off my list of candidates for G37 replacement. I really had high hopes for this car as my first 3 cars were all Subarus and all drastically different in terms of performance. It looks like once the STI came out in '04 that is as far as their engineers could take the power. Can you imagine if Corvette engineers did the same thing? https://carbuzz.com/news/big-changes...subaru-wrx-sti

 

Here is the article I posted earlier today about the Explorer ST

 

Yikes! IDK how to feel about that. No wait, I don't like it. Still fake.

I don't like fake hood scoops. I don't like fake fender vents. And I don't like fake exhaust tips.

Makes me wonder what's "fake" on my car that I wouldn't like if I thought about it hard enough.

I suppose my Parking Brake masquerading as a proper hand-brake, which it isn't.

 

I wouldn't get too caught up on the horsepower--nobody keeps these stock anyways. Cobb will have OTS maps within 6 months putting down more power. It's not like a V6 Camry has a 6MT. Or 3 limited slip differentials. Or Brembo 6 piston brakes. Or Recaro seats.

This 2.0-2.4L class of subcompact economy car based hot rods tops out at 315-330 horsepower. Anything more than that is going to push these cars out of their current price range and position them unfavorably to more upscale competition. Nobody is going to buy a $50K+ STi when the same coin puts you in a BWM 340.

I'm most disappointed to see the initial transmission offering in the WRX will be a CVT paired to a 1.8T

 

I did Cobb tunes on all of my Subarus and that was really cool back in 2002-2009. But the fact is that the competition moved on a long time ago from 300 hp cars. Look at the Camaro and Mustang now. The next Golf R, Focus RS, and Nissan Z are all supposed to have 400-ish hp. Sure you can tune an STI, but when you start out 100 hp down on your competitors you've already lost.

The last track day I was at had a tuned STI in my group and I flew past him like he was standing still. And I was definitely not the fastest car in my run group. The STI might be enough for some people who just want a newer version of the same car they have made since 2004, but I want my next car to be faster with more power, not the opposite. Hopefully, everything I read is wrong and the new STI is a giant killer like it used to be, but it is not looking good at this point.