Hi from Down Under
 

Hi guys
I came here because I just bought some 500F capacitors on ebay, and this is the first time I've seriously thought about replacing the battery with capacitors. Mainly because ones this size or bigger would equal quite a few Pb batteries in cost, so the economics didn't make sense. So, via Google, I found myself in the replace-your-car-battery-capacitors forum. Very interesting. Anyway, my car is a Daihatsu Copen, which is not a car that any sort of conventional motorist would buy. It is very small, very nimble, very quick and tons of fun to drive. The engine is a whopping 659cc, 4-cylinder, but it has a turbo, which makes all the difference. The roof folds in half and disappears into the boot (trunk) at the touch of a button. The only drawback to that is, there goes all the storage space. There are only 2 seats, and there is no space behind them. This car is very cramped and somewhat claustrophobic inside with the roof up, so I have it down whenever I can. Fortunately, we have nice weather most of the year here in Australia, so there's only about 3 months when I mostly have the roof up. But even in the middle of winter, there are days quite suited for open motoring. Kind of like California. This car is a grown man's toy, no doubt about it; and it needs more and better servicing than normal cars do, especially as regards oil changes, because the turbo is delicate and needs a nice clean oil supply to keep it humming away. The battery is about as small as car batteries get; when I first got it, I tried fitting one of the 40Ah AGM deep-cycle batteries I've got spare, not doing anything much, might as well use one. But there is no space. I couldn't close the bonnet (hood), the battery was just too big. I don't know how old the existing battery is, I just bought this car in January of this year. I would add that I flew all the way up to Townsville, Queesland to get it, and drove it back 2000 kilometres to where I live, just north of Sydney. No time to get acquainted, just got in and drove. Learned quite a lot of things on that trip.

So, here I am, at the foot of the learning curve, where I've been many times before. Google landed me here in the forum, and I was sufficiently absorbed that I joined up, so I could participate. I will do that soon, because I have bought some capacitors on ebay, and I will be absorbing all the experience from the forum, and probably adding mine to it.

Fuel economy isn't much of an issue with this car; I've never measured it, but it goes 400km on a tankful, which is 30 litres. I don't know how that translates into MPG, but I think it's pretty economical. It's actually a member of the Kei car class in Japan, where the government specifies the maximum size, weight, engine size, and whatnot, and the owner gets the benefit of exemption from some taxes and special parking privileges. None of that applies here, of course, but it sure does turn a lot of heads. The maximum engine size for a Kei car is 660cc, which is why Daihatsu added the turbo, it would have been pretty pokey without it. Although it's a 2003 model, it has a lot of features that are only now becoming mainstream, like ABS. There is no spare wheel, something I didn't realise until I got it home; the reason for this is simple - there isn't anywhere to put one. Instead, they provide a bottle of sealant stuff and an electric compressor.

My background is in Medical Electronics; that was a fortunate career choice for me, as it requires you to be able to do just about anything at one time or another, and that suited my talents and temperament just fine. I'm retired now, and I have adopted this little car as my pet, seems like. I've named it Buzz. I've not yet found any reason why I shouldn't have bought it; actually, I still think up reasons to go somewhere so I can get in it and drive. I feel like a kid with his first car. I remember what that was like.

I think I'm not the only Aussie here, so it'll be fun digging through the other forums. I'm sure there'll be lots to see and talk about. See you later.

Welcome. We see quite a few Copen here but they are usually the 1.3 Litre version, which surprisingly, is supposedly better for economy. They changed the engine here about 2007.
Looking forward to seeing how your project goes.

So you use it basically like some sort of 4-wheel motorcycle...

BTW I always thought the export versions of the Copen had always been fitted with the 1.3L naturally-aspirated engine. Or is it a JDM import?

Ha Ha, 4-wheel motorcycle, indeed. Not really, but there are some similarities. With the 1.3 engine, it no longer qualifies as a Kei car. I never heard of a naturally aspirated version, that's a new one on me. Copens stopped coming into this country in 2003, thanks to Toyota, who now owns Daihatsu outright. There are no more Daihatsu dealers in this country, sadly, so Copen owners have to become proficient at maintaining their vehicle themselves and chasing up spare parts, which can get frighteningly expensive. I bought an A/C compressor from AliExpress for $92 U.S. instead of the $AU650 they wanted for it here. I couldn't even find a new radiator for it over here; if there had been one, it would have cost around $400, so I ended up getting a custom made heavy-duty one from Japan for a fraction of that. It's beautifully hand-made from welded aluminium, not the plastic crap we're usually stuck with these days.

I'm intrigued by the whole idea of replacing the battery with a bank of capacitors; not long ago this would have been science-fiction. I'm looking at a LiFePo4 battery to go with it; trying to find out what kind of terminals it has. It's 7.6 Ah, $99 delivered. I've already got a small booster box which contains a ridiculously small battery that starts the car effortlessly. Yesterday I was looking at some sort of capacitor starting box at my local Aldi, but they want $170 for it, which seems a little steep to me. I wouldn't mind taking one apart to see what's inside it, though...

The 1.3L was always aspirated. Maybe a turbocharged one at that displacement wouldn't even fit inside its engine bay anyways...

BTW I didn't think Jap car parts were so expensive there in Australia

Sorry, my mistake, I was thinking of carburetor version; but, no, there wasn't a turbo version of that one. I've never seen one, except in pictures, but it seems that, although the 1.3 engine has no turbo to go wrong, some of the spirit has gone out of it by so doing. The whole buzz of the Copen was to have produced such an amazing car while keeping within kei car rules. Turbo was the only answer.

Everything is expensive here. A modest house in Sydney will cost you a million dollars nowadays. There is no justification for this; prices of everything have just skyrocketed. Copen parts are expensive because they are so scarce. Less so for other Daihatsu models, but it's still a problem. My last car was a 2003 Daihatsu Sirion. I found it impossible to find any information about this car no matter how hard I looked. Later I found that it was known in Europe as the Daihatsu Storia, or Toyota Duet. Still difficult to find parts or info. I finally tracked down a workshop manual, but it was in Russian. Car before that was a Daihatsu Charade 1991. No problem with parts or info for that one, because Toyota hadn't meddled yet. It's hard to forgive Toyota for what they've done to Daihatsu. Probably the best maker of small cars on the planet, and they ruined it, just to keep the competition down.

Welcome to the forum. Lots of good info here. I really don't know how you folks afford to live in such expensive cities. Canada has its crazy expensive cities as well.
Really cute little car, I've never heard of it before. Probably never came to north america. Kind of disappointing mileage for such a small car, but I'm sure you could improve that substantially if you wanted to try. Interested to hear how your capacitor project turns out.

Australia went metric in 1972. After all these years, I still can't extract any useful information out of a measurement of litres per 100 km. I have to convert it to miles per gallon, or even kilometres per litre before I can use it.

The odd thing about this car, and many other Daihatsus, as far as I can tell, is that although it has an OBDII connector under the dash, I have never found any reader that can communicate with it. Also, even though it has the usual MIL in the instrument cluster, it has never come on, except when the ignition is on with the motor stopped. There is a problem with the engine, which I first thought was a broken wire, because it would start missing and spluttering, and black smoke would be coming out the exhaust until I finally found that pulling on a bundle of wires in the main engine loom corrected it. And tying the wires to a fixed object seemed to cure it for awhile. But now I think it's a bad plug connection between the engine and the ECU, which is inside the passenger cabin behind the glove box. I don't have enough dexterity to find this plug, but in a desperate attempt to get to the bottom of the problem, I unwrapped about 8" of the bundle and pulled pretty hard on each individual wire. After that, there was no sign of the trouble for quite a long time. That's why I think it's a plug problem rather than a broken wire. But I think the engine is running at less than optimal tuning, and may be misfiring more often than I know about. And the Check Engine light has not lit up once since I've owned the car. So, it looks like Daihatsu has disabled the OBDII function in all Australian cars up until 2006, even though the same model has OBDII in other parts of the world. Why would they do that?

I will look through the forums here and see if there's any threads dealing with OBDII. Seems like there ought to be. Not such an easy topic to find good info on.

Litres per 100km is the ONLY measurement. You know how far you drive regularly, this number tells you how much fuel you will use per trip/week. The km/l or mpg is only directly usable as a range calculation. Admittedly in Australia (hi from Cairns btw) single tank range is actually a concern...

But now that I've got my trigger over and done with...

You *should* be getting much better mileage than that. My Suzuki Mighty Boy got 6l/100km (350-400km from the 20L tank) and my 2013 Swift got 6.5 or so. Your car is the combination of the lightweight small engine mighty boy and the much more modern swift, so you should be using far less fuel than what you actually use.

If your car has OBDII plugs but not OBDII function it's the same as EF Falcons, you need specific programs to do it properly. But if you can find a Daihatsu reader and choose a similar vehicle (same engine family and year, but probably any 3-pot daihatsu from around 2000 will do) it should work. That's how I read my JDM VTEC Honda Prelude codes when I was in NZ, with ADM Civic communication stuff.

Brazilian expats in Japan usually complain about the turbocharged Kei cars in general being quite too thirstier compared to the naturally-aspirated ones.


I'm more familiarized with km/l measurements. When it comes to MPG, the Imperial and American gallons might lead it to become quite confusing.


I don't know why, but Toyota still makes vehicles that are supposed to be compliant to OBD-II but are actually listed to not be compliant. They're stockpiled in Gibraltar and then shipped to NGOs and government agencies throughout the under-developed world. Surprisingly enough, even though OBD-II compliance started to be enforced in Europe when Euro-3 emission standards went into effect, here in Brazil the local equivalent to Euro-3 didn't call for that and there were even some mechanically-governed Diesels certified as conforming to Euro-3 standard. I don't know how Tatra managed to keep their mechanically-governed Diesels compliant to Euro-3 and if they provided some sort of OBD.

A lot of Australian Toyota's aren't OBDII compliant, no idea why. You can no doubt find more advice on an Aussie Toyota forum. My Prius is OBDII though.

But I have a 2010 Proton that isn't OBDII. :eek:

@BLSTIC The thing is, all the Copens in UK and Europe that are the same year as mine, they all have OBDII. There is a procedure I found for programming new keys, which involves shorting two pins on the OBD plug. I was fascinated by this idea, as my car came with only one key. But when I tried it, nothing happened. I have no doubt that the Australian copens have had the OBD functions cut out of them, but like I said, I have no idea why. I have wondered what would happen if I got an engine ECU from the UK and put it in my car, if it would suddenly acquire OBD. Not sure, because this car has little computers all over the place; for the roof, windows, ABS, immobiliser, and others, besides the engine one, and I believe they all talk to each other.

I always wanted a Mighty Boy. Or perhaps a Honda 'Z'. I've got a sort of fascination with minimalistic sorts of transportation. I had a 1984 Suzuki Carry, which I really liked, but I got tired of putting engines in it. My last car was an '03 Sirion, and a 1991 Charade before that. Loved them both. I've also got a self-balancing unicycle, and a two-wheel "hoverboard". The latter threw me off a year and a half ago and gave me a shredded rotator cuff, so I haven't been back on it since. I've now got about 80% function back in the shoulder. No surgery. They wanted to do a total shoulder joint replacement. Eek!

Anyway, I agree I should be getting better economy than I am, if I were to drive it somewhat sedately; although this is fairly well impossible, because the little thing just wants to go. I wondered how it would drive without the turbo, and one day a piece of the air filter got sucked in and jammed the turbo. The car drove like it was powered by 600cc - no power. Gave me a fright, I thought the turbo had failed. Fished out the piece of debris and it was fine again. I could try driving it like a granny for a tankful, but I don't think that's possible. Especially with the roof down.

@cRiPpLe_rOoStEr Maybe the turbo kei cars are thirstier because it's hard to rein them in, as I've found.

And yes, the two kinds of gallon do muddy things quite a bit. Km/L I can live with. Since the tank holds exactly 30L, and I get near enough to 400km on a tankful, it's easy to work out. But it's when the numbers aren't nice and round that I lose the plot.

I find the doings of the Europeans rather mystifying. They seem to be obsessed with Diesels. I suppose it's good, because there's been a lot of development, and diesels aren't belching black smoke like they used to. I can see a diesel making sense if the fuel is half the price, but here diesel is the same price as petrol, or even more.

In the UK diesel used to be cheaper than petrol, deliberately so by taxation. Add to that the far better mpg (or should that be Km/L) and it was very attractive. Then, once the suckered people in, they removed the tax incentive. Now it is dearer than petrol. But forget about the clean exhausts. I followed a 5 year old Passat diesel the other day and it was belching out black reek.
I enjoy minimalist cars as well. My favourite car I ever owned was a FIAT 126,594 cc, air cooled twin. 23 bhp. Huge fun to drive. You had to work it like a big truck.
https://i.imgur.com/7YN9NxU.jpg

Here's a picture of me and Buzz.
http://i682.photobucket.com/albums/v...psnb3jj2ec.jpg

@JockoT They did that here with LPG. The government took the excise off it so it was about 1/3 the price of petrol. All the taxis were using it. Then, a few years ago, the gov't phased the excise back in, and now it's not worth it anymore to get your car converted. Taxis now are Prius or hybrid Camrys. LPG is very clean fuel, that's why they took the excise off. I don't know why they put it back on. Maybe it's not clean anymore. Or they'd rather support the farmers who grow corn to make ethanol from. I just found out I'm not supposed to put E10 in my car. After using it for 8 months. Grrrr.

A lovely little motor.

Hi there oldtamiyaphile. I thought all cars in Australia had to be OBD compliant from 2006. Does your Proton have the plug under the dash?

What part of Oz are you from? I'm on the Central Coast, just north of Sydney. Far enough away from the madness, but close enough if I need to go there for something. I always take the train if I can; Sydney traffic is hellish.

Well, that probably explains why your mileage is poor. If you drove it like a proper 600cc gutless granny car, you'd probably get much better mileage :D. It's a toy though, right? Toys are to have fun with.

L/100km is no harder than km/L. I had to learn it too when I moved to Canada. Just divide the other way.

Another aussie Copen owner here.

I assume you are already on the Copenworld forum (think I've seen the car on it).
Aussie Copens are the same engine and ECU as the Jap models.
Both the Aussie and Jap cars didn't adopt OB2 until 2006 and even that was only for new models so they could have continued selling them unchanged after that if Daihatsu hadn't pull out of OZ.
UK turbo ones were converted to OB2 but it's not as simple as an ECU change there was some other changes as well, fuel system was converted to return less for example.
It's better to stick with the Aussie system anyway as there are more parts available from Japan.
We can use the D-Sport ECU for example where the UK versions can't .
I had a Unichip piggyback system installed on mine and apart from the power and drivability improvements my fuel consumption on my usual spirited drive over the mountains dropped from 7.5l/100k to less that 6.5l/100k.
They are working pretty hard on the highway 4000rpm and on boost so economy will never be great even with such a small motor.

Hi Jez, nice to see you here.

So, you were getting around the same fuel usage as I am. I guess that makes me feel a little better; I thought there might be something wrong with my engine, robbing me of fuel economy. I wouldn't expect too much from it, anyway; the extra power has to come from somewhere, where else but more fuel? I have noticed there's little difference between highway and city driving as far as fuel economy. That suggests the motor is working pretty hard all the time. More reason to keep the oil nice and clean.

I landed here after deciding to see what would happen with replacing the battery with a capacitor bank and/or lithium battery. I have confidence of success based on the research I've been able to do. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. My hope is to forget about battery issues for the rest of the life of the car.

I wouldn't mind hearing more about your unichip piggyback system. Is this something you can install yourself? I almost bought Copen from Grunt on Copenworld, but he ended up selling it to his niece. He's living in Japan now. I think he had D-Sport ECU on it. I don't know much about that, either, or whether it helps the fuel statistics.

Considering that the Great Britain is surrounded by the sea, it does surprise me that algae-based biodiesel (which could eventually be blended with fish liver oil-based biodiesel) ain't taken so seriously as an alternative to match the demand and keep the costs at a reasonable point while also decreasing the dependence on petroleum.


Are you sure that Passat hadn't been illegally chip-tuned and straight-piped in order to enable it to "roll coal"?


Some of those minimalist cars are actually quite interesting, while povertry-spec versions of regular ones are not so attractive at all.


I never drove any of those, but they seem to be quite cool.

Can't do that here. Emission checks are too strict. Your vehicle is measured and physically examined every 12 months. And not code reading. The exhaust gas is actually sampled and measured. If it is not within tight values it is a fail and can no longer be used on the road until repaired and retested.
No, the Passat was gubbed. Whatever had happened had happened since the last test and wouldn't pass another.

Unichip needs to be installed by a qualified person and dyno tuned.
If you search for Unichip on Copenworld all the detail and results are on there.
D-Sport ECU is essentially a standard ECU with the rev limit raised and the boost cut raised best I can tell. It's not programable like Unichip.

You wouldn't install either of the systems to save fuel anyway. At about $1200+ for D-Sport and about $1800+ for Unichip they would take a while to payback.

If you want a mighty boy I have a couple up for grabs...

Also, try bypassing the boost control solenoid. It should drop to 4-6psi and avoid the richest parts of the fuel map.

Who knows? The same way it can be chip-tuned to enable the fitment of a straight-pipe, it can be reverted in order to pass the test.

[QUOTE=You wouldn't install either of the systems to save fuel anyway. At about $1200+ for D-Sport and about $1800+ for Unichip they would take a while to payback.[/QUOTE]

Gaaakk!! You're not wrong! Don't think I'll be going there. I've got no reason to want more grunt out of it. I just want it to last as long as possible. Anybody who gets to own one of these is very lucky, imo.

Hello, I'm in Sydney.

I'm not sure how much sophistication is on that ECU but it's not uncommon to swap out or in different brands of ECU on JDM cars.

On https://www.pcmhacking.net/forums/index.php which is basically a Holden ECU forum, people added ODB ports to various ECU's. It might be possible to add one.

Welcome anyway. I'm interested to see what you do.

I realise that but he could be pulled over at any time. If I had been a traffic car I would have given him a pull. If you'd seen the car you would have realised it was not an enthusiast. It was just a clapped out banger. Not long from the crusher.

But anyway, unless it had been previous to the DPF mandate, it might have still been illegally DPF-deleted even if the motivation was to ease the maintenance.

Here in Australia, it's legal to have a hotdog muffler on a turbo car. That's what I have, which is straight-through after the cat.

I doubt any cop here is going to be complaining about a 1.3T or whatever it is with a cat-back straight pipe. Except if the car is post 2016.

Lot's of JDM cars here get some sort of Exhaust upgrade. Emissions are only checked when the Authorities develop an attitude about the mods of any particular anti-social type car - which is sortof half acceptable.

If the COpen had 1200hp then it might get an emissions check but before that probably not.

Car was actually a 2008 (I said 5 years old but it was in fact 9 years old - checked dashcam) and that was before DPF were fitted to UK vehicles.

You mean some sort of bogan-specific enforcement? :D

Yeah pretty much.