A battery in a traditional car cannot directly create engine spark. It’s only rated at 12 volts, after all, so it needs a little help boosting the signal to the spark plugs. To make that happen, a car ...

Over the past few years, we have run across some teams who, for the goal of attaining maximum power, chose to run without an alternator. We started thinking about that and decided to see if there were ...

In 2019, we took a look at an interesting new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems. It replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle’s engine with an ignition module that uses ...

Over the past few years, we have run across some teams who, for the goal of attaining maximum power, chose to run without an alternator. We started thinking about that and decided to see if there were ...

Back in the day, point-triggered ignition system tune-ups were routine and happened roughly every 12,000 miles, along with a set of spark plugs and an ignition timing adjustment. These days, we’re so ...

As long as there have been internal combustion engines, there has been a need for an ignition system to ignite the air and fuel mixture in the cylinders. From the earliest days of automotive ignitions ...

Automobiles are increasingly more like electronic devices than mechanical platforms. As a share of the total cost of a car, electronics components have grown from about 5% in 1970 to 35% in 2010.