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What do we ask our car for when we press the accelerator pedal?

Model: (Various brands) Various
Part: Accelerator

Video tutorial

Have we ever wondered what we are asking our car when we press the accelerator pedal? This video clarifies it for us, with particular focus on diesel cars. In older cars it was simple, because the pedal was attached to a wire, and the more you pressed it, the more the wire was pulled and the faster the car went.

In modern cars, the pedal is 100% electronic, so all we do is send a voltage variation to the engine control unit, which considers the first map, the one related to engine torque; based on this, it will consider a series of maps that are needed to produce torque: fuel x injection time, one for phase, one for turbo pressure and one for rail pressure.

It processes all this data and sends it to the engine, which will generate the requested torque, expressed in Nm. How does the engine know that it is generating exactly those Nm? And how does the engine control unit know that the engine is doing what has been requested? The most important component in this case is the RPM sensor, but also the crankshaft position sensor.


Posted on 10 February 2025 by ScegliAuto


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