Theos story- The Hyundai i10 1.2

[Eisberg]

Well, hello everyone!

After a quick introduction of myself lets get right into it!

Now, before we start, what do we actually work with?

- 2015 Hyundai i10 1.2 MT. German/european version. Curb weight is 1015 kg (2238 lbs), over 105kg (231 lbs) more than a Mitsubishi Mirage despite the fact the Hyundai is 18cm (7 inches) shorter. Ok, it got steering wheel heating, corner lights etc but still very heavy. The 4 cylinder 1.2 l engine with 87 hp is the larger one of the 2 available (with the other being a 3 cylinder 1.0 with 67 hp) and has a 5 speed manual behind it. Its nickname is "Theo", named by the previous owner

- Daily commute: 11km (6.8mi) one way. Around 50% country road, 50% city with almost no stops (so I can go in fifth gear for 6.8km distance uninterupted, not bad!). A lot of downhill in the beginning however means the engine struggles to come to temperature. From around 0°C / 32°F it takes around 5km to get the coolant to 60°C / 140 °F. On the way back it only takes about 2km (1.3 mi) for the same temperature.

- Reselling. It is technically not my car and I am limited to mods that easily and without damage can be undone.

- Germany. Here we follow ze TÜV and ze Straßenverkehrszulassungsverordnung. A full boattail would probably get me murderd by an angry TÜV-guy in my sleep.

- Myself: I do like my heated seats, heated steering wheel and AC. I will not get rid of them but will try to make their use more effective.

So, whats the plan? Well, I don't know. I see what I can do with the given car and given tools. But we can start of with some very exotic stuff like:
- increase the tire pressure to 2.7 bar / 39 PSI
- Put a scangauge on the instrument cluster
- Do the hypermiling

As I have wrote in the introduction, i once managed to get 4.96l/100km / 47.4 MPG but, due to colder weather, necessary extra routes and my sister driving it for a while it came all the way up to 5.82 l/100km or down to 40.4 MPG. So we now have to get serious. For a beginning I removed the rear seats (see the pics below)

Shortly after removing the rear seats it started to snow yet again over here so I had to pause.

Now, where are we going from here?

Most certainly I will do an improvised grill block maybe within the next few days. I also plan to do an underbelly pan (the Hyundai does not have one from factory). After that? Who knows.

For a final question for all the scangauge-pros around here: I have calibrated it just a few days ago for this car but I keep having a problem with it showing 0.0l/100km fuel consumption at low throttle. The cars own fuel consumption meter shows a clear and realistic value, the scangauge shows nothing and I have to floor it for a secound to get it to spit out some values again. Did anyone else have that problem and know what to do?

[Eisberg]

Lets continue with part 2, the partial grill block. As seen in the first image, the i10 has three major grill openings, a slim one around the Hyundai logo, another slim one above the licence plate and another much larger at the bottom.

The large one in the bottom is the one I am intending to block entirely. Now Hyundai has done some work on it already and blocked the outer edges. The actual grill opening I have marked in red (it was already late noon with a deep sun so the lighting isn't great ).

As material I had some leftover black foam board at hand. Now despite it being cold and we just having a break from ice rain and snowfall I was able to use ultra high precision machinery to fabricate the grill block seen in picture 2. The CNC machine used to achive this is included in the pic

Fastening it to the grill was done with 2 cable ties, which proved to be a bit tricky but doable.

Pic 3 shows the result (yes, it got quite dark).

Also I did some weight measurements on the rear seats removed last time, 31 kg. So half my weight and the curb weight is now below 1000kg

I am probably going to pause now for a few days and try it out next week.