The engine professor's dream cars

The engine professor's dream cars

Bernhard Geringer is a man in demand. As an expert in combustion engines as well as current and future alternative drive solutions, he is currently constantly booked for lectures and asked to provide future scenarios for individual mobility. “It’s really exciting what’s happening right now,” he says, visibly excited. For a technician like him, the current hectic activity in the vehicle manufacturers' research and development laboratories is the pure elixir of life.

The background: Legislators are putting pressure on lowering emissions limits, decarbonization lobbyists want to switch industry and transport entirely to electricity, and climate protectors are gaining more and more influence on politics in Europe and Asia. At this year's International Vienna Motor Symposium, Fritz Indra, Viennese grand seigneur of engine development, vented his anger about the development and accused Audi boss Rupert Stadler in front of the assembled audience of doing great damage to the automotive industry by committing to electromobility. “No one wants to study engine technology at technical universities anymore,” says Indra, “young people no longer believe that the combustion engine still has a future.” Fortunately, Bernhard Geringer cannot confirm this fear for his Vienna institute, on the contrary: “Engine technology is still very popular with our students, we won’t be running out of young talent any time soon.”

DREAM CAR GOLF GTI

Growing up on a farm in Lower Austria, Geringer's fascination for mechanics and machines was first awakened by tractors and agricultural equipment. As a teenager he attended the HTL for agricultural machinery technology in Wieselburg, and during his holidays he gained his first experience as a mechanic on his 50 cc Puch moped. In 1976, the then 18-year-old got his driver's license and his parents gave him his first car, a used Opel Rekord with a 90 hp 2.0-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine. “Back then it was still common practice to repair exhaust pipes, install additional headlights, adjust the carburettor or change tires yourself,” says Geringer. In 1978 he was allowed to drive his first dream car when he persuaded his father to buy a Golf GTI as a family car when he graduated from high school. “The GTI had the mechanical Bosch K-Jetronic injection system on board and was very sporty to drive thanks to its low weight,” says Geringer. After two years, now a mechanical engineering student in Vienna, he bought a newer model of the GTI with a five-speed gearbox and kept it until 1985, when he completed his doctorate at the TU. His next car was an Opel Kadett GSI with a 2.0 liter engine and 115 hp - “a very good, high-torque naturally aspirated engine with injection”.

Geringer remained as an assistant at the Institute for Vehicle Drives until 1988, when he was hired by Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim as an engine developer. As a Daimler employee, he drove a Mercedes 300 E with a six-cylinder gasoline engine. The 3.0-liter 12-valve engine with intake manifold injection produced 180 hp and was so reliable that it was built almost unchanged from 1984 to 1995. In the development laboratory, however, Geringer experimented with exotic concepts such as 5-valve engines, which were built as 4-, 8- and 10-cylinder units for tests but never found their way into series production. Daimler also experimented with the variable electro-hydraulic valve control, which is now used in Fiat's Multiair engine and is also going into series production at Jaguar. The young engineer Geringer wrote his doctoral thesis on this topic. In 1992, Bernhard Geringer moved back to Austria for family reasons and took his current dream car with him: a VW Golf VR6 with a 174 hp 3.0-liter six-cylinder gasoline engine. The innovative unit was a mixture of in-line and V-engine with a cylinder angle of just 15 degrees so that it fit into the compact car's narrow installation space.

FROM 6 TO 12 CYLINDERS

Geringer was hired by Steyr Daimler Puch as a vehicle developer and stayed there until 2002 after the takeover by Magna. In his free time, he continued to indulge his passion for cars and made quite emotional purchasing decisions. Among other things, he acquired a BMW 750i with a 300 hp 12-cylinder engine, which, however, soon turned out to be a cumbersome gas guzzler. “Apparently the speedometer had been reset and the car was under a lot more stress than I thought,” said Geringer. After a few months, he ended his 12-cylinder adventure and bought a sensible new car. He remained loyal to the Audi A6 Diesel until 1998, when he bought a Toyota Picnic Van for his family of four. In addition, a fun car was needed, the choice fell on a used Porsche 911 convertible from 1986 with 260 hp, which Geringer used as a summer vehicle for a few years and then sold again. “If I had foreseen the enormous increase in value that would follow, I would probably have kept it,” he says a little wistfully.

“It’s really exciting what’s happening in engine development right now!”BERNHARD GERINGER

In 2002, Geringer finally received a professorship at the TU Vienna and took over the management of the Institute for Vehicle Drives & Automotive Technology from his predecessor, Hans Peter Lenz. Since he started working, he has not been able to complain about the lack of variety in his fleet. He has long since lost track of the large number of test vehicles. He has currently registered an Audi A6 all-wheel drive with a six-cylinder Euro 6 diesel engine with an SCR catalytic converter and an Audi A3 e-tron with a plug-in hybrid drive. The most advanced and exotic vehicle at the institute is currently an electrically powered Toyota Mirai, which generates its electricity from hydrogen using an on-board fuel cell. For Bernhard Geringer, the fact that the combustion engine could soon be replaced by purely electric drive is an unrealistic scenario. The engine expert is convinced: “With the help of innovative technologies such as electrification, the combustion engine will remain the main form of drive in the medium term and is therefore far from being a thing of the past.”