Gadgetory

now most cars including very likely yours have what's called a wet sump something the old german dutch word for a muddy wet bog or marsh which is actually a pretty good analogy for what happens down here at the bottom of your engine is what's known as the oil pan or the crankcase also known as the sump the heart of the lubrication system is the oil pumped the two revolving gears create a subject as the teeth move apart this suction draws oil from the storage reservoir or oil bath when this is a wet sump that means basically all your oil lives down here except when it's being pumped out circulate it around the engine through little passages where it gets all the things that need lubrication lubricated and then it drips back down here to do the cycle over again the problems with that design are actually many first of all look at this pan down here or on this v8 to my right they're both big and tall that means the engine has to sit higher in the car to not scrape the ground or bump in the suspension that means a higher center of gravity a higher hood knows what have you the auto makers don't like that secondly the oil keeps coming back to this same hot place so it's hard to cool the oil third because this can only be a given size to fit in the engine bay you can only have so much oil any terms would like to have more oil pressure oil and cooler void and fourth you get oil starvation in a design like this the oil is just kind of down there by luck and by gravity in hard cornering sometimes it moves to one side and the pickup where the oil is sucked up goes dry once in a while when that happens the bearings goes wrong not high-performance in a dry sump seeks to cure all that if the first high-performance sports car with dry sump lubrication for a lower center of gravity a dry sump engine still has a pan at the bottom of the engine but it's much smaller it catches oil and it's immediately then pumped out to a reservoir somewhere else on the car where typically another pump then moves it back to the engine it's all very controlled and done under positive pressure you end up getting a lower engine and lower center of gravity because you don't have a great big pan to protect down at the bottom you have no oil starvation and hard cornering because everything is done under positive pressure and you end up likely with cooler oil because it gets a vacation from being in the engine all the time and you can have a lot more of it because the oil reservoir can be as big as you have room to fit the downside of a dry sump design is basically cost and complexity you've got a pump or two that are external to the engine you've got some very critical plumbing and you've got that reservoir to hold all that oil has to go somewhere else in the car so they're only justified in high performance situations today but if you look at a high performance car look at our reviews of them you're going to increasingly see the dry sump design making its way into vehicles that are not just trapped cars that are high performance Road cars more car tech demystified right now at CNET on cars comm click on car tech 101