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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-02-2019, 03:18 PM
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These are not entry level vehicles. You are attempting to move the goal posts. You may as well quit while you are behind on this point.
What you see as important or unimportant really has no bearing, as it is not germane to the topic at hand.
I’ll make sure I stop and pull your Audi out of the snowdrift you’ve parked it in if I see you.
---------- Post added 02-02-19 at 04:20 PM ----------
That’s not bad for picking up a full stop in speed
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-02-2019, 11:24 AM
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Emission restrictions have come into play on diesels. Newer trucks have a couple of different systems on them now that work in conjunction with better engine management.
One thing manufacturers are doing is increasing rail pressure to the injectors. I think my truck is something like 20K PSI at the rails. This gives finer atomization of the fuel, resulting in cleaner burning and allowing for less fuel to be injected.
Less unburned fuel means less smoke.
Now, moving on to active emission controls, there is the DPF and DEF systems.
DPF stands for diesel particulate filter. There is a 1000 micron filter in the exhaust system that catches soot particles and is supposed to hold them until they get burned off by the heat of the exhaust. This is fine if the truck is working, but if the vehicle is a daily driver, then the soot builds up, potentially clogging the filter.
Consequently, when backpressure builds up sufficiently, the computer calls for a reservation cycle and starts to dump raw fuel into the exhaust cycle where it ignites and heats up the filter until the soot is burned off. It’s really smelly when it happens and uses significant fuel, upwards of 10% of my fuel goes into regenerations.
The other system that comes into play, the DEF or diesel exhaust fluid system injects a small amount of a water based urea solution into the exhaust. This fluid catalyze with the exhaust gasses and converts the nitrogen dioxide, which is what gives diesels their characteristic lovely odor, into nitrogen gas and water.
As the DEF freezes at around -14C, the tank requires an internal heat source to ensure there is a supply of fluid to the exhaust system during cold weather.
All this makes diesels much cleaner than they have ever been, but also compromises their reliability.
A lot of owners will, once their warranty is off, do a tune and delete where the DPF is removed and replaced with a plain pipe and the DEF is turned off, with the truck retuned to not be looking for these systems. This is one of those things that is tempting, but not something I would do unless the systems started giving real problems as it means the truck will be a rolling coal factory with stinky exhaust.
The only operational downside that I have noted is that in order to keep gegenerations to a minimum, the engine is fuel starved on cold starts to keep the DPF from clogging up too fast (it’s already every 250km on my truck). The result of this is that the modern diesel is not a reliable cold start vehicle below around -18C and must have a working block heater plugged in when the temperature is colder than that.
My truck has two block heaters as it is common for us to get temperatures well under -30C, with -40 not terribly unusual.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-01-2019, 05:19 PM
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The thing is, all that has to happen is for enough of the people who would normally be the entry level customer to be satisfied with what their phone can do for them. Hollow out the market segment enough and it will collapse. Look what happened to the P&S market. I’m sure there are still people who would prefer one, but enough people were satisfied with their phones that sales in that market (which was at the time the real entry level) dwindled until it wasn’t financially viable for manufacturers to keep producing.
Entry level is volume dependent. The manufacturer is trading unit profit for volume sales, and gambling that the entry level user will go upscale at some point, as that is where the real margins are. Take away enough unit sales and the market collapses simply because the margins aren’t there to support the lower volume.
Here’s an example. Let’s use sedans as an example, since automobile metaphors seem popular. I’m going to use North America as the marketplace because this is where the trend is.
Treat the compact sedan as the entry level market, the mid sized sport utility as the next tier up, and from there luxury cars and light trucks as the upscale market.
In North America, Ford is out of the entry level market entirely. They have stopped producing sedans in North America. I believe that GM hs shuttered the plant that makes their small sedan, the Cruz, as well. Why is this? Partly because they can’t compete on quality and price with the Japanese and Korean makers, but primarily because the market for small cars has shrunk to the point that making them in North America is no longer viable. People here seem attracted to larger vehicles, and this is sport utility and larger.
Where I am, fully half the vehicles on the road are half ton or larger trucks. The Ford F-150 is the best selling vehicle in the USA and Canada, with the Dodge Ram and GM trucks in second and third place, though not necessarily in the order I mentioned.
Sport utes and minivans make up a very large proportion of vehicles, while sedans and coupes are on the road, though generally hidden behind larger vehicles.
As an aside:
My boss drives a Hyundai Elantra. Today he was parked beside my truck (a Nissan Titan Diesel). I noted as I climbed up into my truck that my floorboard is taller than his wheels.
Anyway, what’s my point you might ask? To which I would reply that I’ve kind of forgotten.
Oh yes, my point is that demand doesn’t have to dry up completely, it just has to dry up enough to make the product, whatever it is, financially unviable.
It also pushes a market upscale. Bigger vehicles, for example, command a higher price tag. A fully equipped F150 series truck will run 75K or more. It doesn’t matter how much lipstick you apply to an entry level sedan chassis, it would be pretty hard to get people to pay 75K for it.’
As always, the used market can provide very good value across a broad range of products, cars and cameras included. Some stuff holds it’s value fairly well, some doesn’t, and how depreciation affects things differs. For example, I am totally shocked at how fast my truck has devalued. Well over 50% in two years, and I expect at the moment that I am somewhat underwater on it. Cameras depreciate the same way for the most part, lenses seem to do somewhat better.
I’m babbling.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-01-2019, 04:07 PM
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The entry level is sort of dying. There is a slow, creeping cancer called cell phones that is eating away at the entry level, killing it by degrees with every new release from Samsung, Huawei and Apple.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-31-2019, 04:28 PM
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The more we have, the more we complain. Imagine if Ricoh had 40 lenses in the line up. We would never hear the end of it.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-31-2019, 04:25 PM
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That's ok. I thought they looked significantly different. To me the new lens looks almost like a throwback to the A series.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-31-2019, 09:50 AM
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The only thing I don't like about the FA 35/2 is the build quality. It feels cheap. This new lens looks like it should have a more solid feel to it.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-30-2019, 08:05 PM
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-29-2019, 05:54 PM
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Am I the only one who thinks that the rumoured HD PENTAX-FA 35 mm F 2 looks a lot like the AF NIKKOR 35mm f/2D?
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-29-2019, 11:34 AM
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Internal combustion engines are 80s tech as well, but every car being made nowadays still comes equipped with one.
That's 1880s tech, btw.
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