Dissecting Miss Daisy Mighty Car Mods Subaru powered VW Beetle

Hi there, today we're here with this Volkswagen Beetle. Now some of you that watch the Mighty Car Mods episodes on YouTube will know a fair bit about this car by now, but we're going to go over it today in a little bit more detail. The VW Beetle is one of the most manufactured cars in the world. The 1970 was probably the most common model. It was fitted with a 1.6 litre aspirated, horizontally opposed, air-cooled engine. It produced around 40 horsepower at the engine at the time they were manufactured. Now, 40 to 50 years later, probably more like 20-ish horsepower at the wheels. This particular project for this Beetle, the Mighty Car Mods guys didn't want 40 horsepower, they wanted 400 horsepower. Now in order to achieve that, we needed to get rid of the air-cooled engine, we needed to add a modern quad cam, preferably turbocharged motor, in order to achieve that power level. Now from the outside, you could certainly be excused from thinking this is a dead standard Beetle. The only thing that gives it away is it's got a really nice set of Bridgestone tyres on it, but then as soon as we open the hood, you can see that things aren't exactly normal. Now in here, we've got shoehorned in an EJ25 out of a 2008 model Subaru WRX. Now the Haltech in this car is controlling the whole engine, obviously, the variable cam control, the electronic boost control, as well as the water-to-air intercooler. So the boost control is all done versus gear and versus road speed, so as the car accelerates, we put more boost into it in order to get more power when the tyre and when the car can handle it. The water-to-air intercooler uses water that's chilled at the front of the car, it then comes through lines down the back to this water-to-air intercooler that sits up the top. It's got a bunch of pumps to pump that water around that are controlled through the ECU, so when the inlet air temperature gets too hot, the pumps will turn on to cool the inlet charge down. The variable cam control is also done through the Haltech ECU. Now it's probably the only 1970 VW Beetle with true variable cam control. Now this one allows us to adjust the inlet cams up to 30 degrees of advance, so what that means is that down low in the rev range, we can advance the cams right up to get the most power out of the engine, then as we start making a lot of RPM and a lot of engine load, we retard off the inlet camshafts to get the best of both worlds. One of the best things about these VWs is it's almost like they knew that we're going to need a place in the future to fit an engine management system. So if we just pull the rear seat out, if we have a bit of a look underneath here, you'll see that we've got two huge compartments. One of them's got a battery and the other side now has a full engine management system. Now when we look in the front of this bug, one thing that you'll notice is the absolute lack of any gauges or basically any instrumentation. We've got the factory speedo and we've got an oil warning light that's connected to the factory oil pressure sensor on the Subaru. Now because we don't really have any gauges, we need a way for the Elite ECU just to warn us if anything's up with the engine so we know when to pull over. The way that we do that is with a three-stage engine protection strategy. So if the coolant temperature goes up over 100 degrees Celsius, there'll be a light rev limiter at 4000 RPM. As soon as we go to 105 degrees Celsius, where things are going to start to get dangerous, it'll have a 2000 RPM limiter. So the driver will certainly get a warning that something's happening without having to use the gauge system. As we look closer at the controls here, we've got a Jean Berg shifter that Mike has fitted so that we've got the short shifting. It's also got a reverse lockout mechanism that we have to hold down this button here so we can actually get into reverse. So in a car like this, that's going to help a lot to avoid going first to reverse and damaging the gearbox. It's also got a bit of a different accelerator pedal mechanism. So instead of having your traditional cable that's just straight off the pedal, we've actually got a mechanical connection that comes across to here and then on this side is normally where the throttle cable would go. This car has actually been converted to electronic throttle, which means that we don't have to have the long throttle cable that would go all the way back into the engine. Instead, we've got this throttle translator. So what happens up here is the factory mechanism goes straight into this component, which then changes the signal into an electrical signal. Now we've got some wiring that comes from the pedal position sensor into the Elite ECU. From the Elite ECU, there's some wiring that goes out to the electronic throttle body that's mounted to the engine. Now, what's nice about this setup is that we don't have any long throttle cables that give you a bit of resistance in the pedal, especially when you're running something from the front to the back of the car. The other thing that's really nice, this allows us to do some advanced traction strategies. So we can do things like if we're pressing the pedal flat to the floor, we might only give the engine 70 or 80 percent actual throttle movement, depending on what the car can handle. The last awesome thing about the VW Beetle is that being a rear-engined car, it's got the turbocharger in the back, the exhaust system is only about a meter long and it sounds absolutely incredible. I really hope you've enjoyed having a good look around the Mighty Car Mods Beetle. As always, don't forget to rate, comment and subscribe. My name's Scott and I'll see you next time.