The Covering Up

If you’ve raised the hood of practically any new car – or truck – you have probably seen the same thing, irrespective of the make or model.

A black plastic cover over the engine.

What is the purpose of covering the engine up with these ugly, anonymizing things that make every engine look like the same engine? The engine used to be the defining thing. Raise the hood and see what made this one different from the others. You probably have been to or at least driven past a car show. The cars on show usually have their hoods raised – and it’s not so you can see a plastic cover stamped “Ford” or “Chevy.”

Especially if it was a special Chevy or Ford, which many of them were.

Lots of attention was once paid by car manufacturers to how their engines looked – in order to get people to be interested in looking at them. The idea being to get them interested in the car it powered. Engines were usually at least painted a defining color, so you knew what you were looking at even if you didn’t know much about engines. Ford blue. Chevy red. Gold for Oldsmobile (remember them?) and light blue for Pontiacs (some remember them, too).

The special ones often were dressed up – that was the term used – with chrome-plated valve covers and air cleaner lids. These combinations were of almost infinite variety and some were visually compelling, industrial art at its finest. It is why great attention to the details under the hood is paid to models of these cars. It is why you can buy models of the engines that came in these cars to decorate your desk with.
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Today, almost all engines look almost identical – whether it’s a four or a six or something else. What you can’t see of them, that is. They  are hidden underneath a homogenizing black plastic cover.  Even the special ones, such as the glorious supercharged 5.0 liter V8 underneath the hood of the ’22 Land Rover Defender Carpathia I am test driving this week. If you raised the hood you wouldn’t be able to tell there’s anything special about it – even though there is – because all there is to see is a black plastic cover that looks about the same as the black plastic covers that cover up practically every other new vehicle’s engines.

Intentionally or not, this is making them all look no different than electric cars – and that is a very bad thing if you want to sell something that isn’t one. For what makes a car that isn’t electric different? I mean, other than having to spend  30-50 percent more for it and having to plan your trip (and life) around recharging it?

It is the engine, especially if it is a special one – as in this Land Rover. How many vehicles have supercharged V8 engines – and wouldn’t you want to show people? If you take off that anonymizing-homogenizing plastic cover, you will see a beautiful cast aluminum plenum and – snuggled in the middle of the engine’s “V” – the blower. That is to say, the supercharger. It is something much more interesting to look at than a black plastic cover.

So why is it covered up?

Why are almost all of them covered up?

The main reason is noise abatement. Specifically, to muffle the sound made by direct injection, the form of fuel injection now in common use by practically every car manufacturer still making engines – in order to try to “comply” with increasingly difficult (soon to be impossible) federal regulations requiring ever-higher gas mileage and ever-lower “emissions” of inert and harmless gasses (i.e., carbon dioxide).

Direct Injection (DI) injects the fuel at tremendous pressure – upwards of 2,000 pounds per square inch (vs. the typical 35 or so psi for regular electronic fuel injection) directly into the cylinder in a super-fine mist. This extracts more energy from the fuel (increasing gas mileage) and by burning less gas to produce the same or more power you reduce the volume of  gasses “emitted.”

But DI makes an unpleasant ticking sound that sounds a lot like an engine with bad lifters or maladjusted valves. Enter the acoustic cover, which usually has sound-deadening material on the underside, to silence the sounds no one wants to hear.

But they silence other sounds, too.

As for example the gear-whine sound of a supercharged V8 such as the one that powers the Defender Carpathia. Or the whistle of a turbocharger spooling up under boost.

But you wouldn’t know it to hear it.

And that’s a shame. It is something worse, actually. It is like making a great beer taste like tap water or hiding the face of a beautiful woman behind a Face Diaper. Mark that such doing has one effect, which is to make everything look the same. Which is to suck the life out of everything in pursuit of a covered-up, plasticized homogeneity.

One-size-fits-all.

It is the Mao-suiting of what was once a place that reveled in differences and not the superficial kinds being “celebrated” nowadays.

Historical footnote – or rather, a kind of anticipatory message to future historians picking through the remains of our today: There is one engine left that isn’t hidden under an anonymizing-homogenizing black plastic cover. It is the supercharged V8 engine (not direct-injected) that resides under the hood – for now – of the Dodge Charger and Challenger Hellcats. This one’s also painted Hemi Orange and to see it is to behold the engineering equivalent of a Renaissance master’s sculpture cast in steel and alloy.

Dodge wants you to see it. But the government doesn’t want you to have it. So you won’t be seeing it for much longer, courtesy of the same forces that brought you the black plastic engine cover and are bringing you the  plastic electric car, all of them extruded from the same Hellish orifice, dilating wider with every new homogenizing-anonymizing “mandate” that’s making it so.

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