What’s in the number?

A childhood stamp collection got me into checking the populations of countries all over the world.

High school marks in algebra, arithmetic, new math and business practice were usually the top of the class, well ahead of my grades in such subjects as history, English and French.

I’ve been a numbers person for as long as I can remember and since this is my 400th column for Herald Wheels, a quantity my high school English teacher would be very impressed with, I thought I would consider numbers and vehicles.

Does the car in question have two, three, four or five doors? How much does it cost? How much does it weigh? What was the year of manufacture? And what about wheelbase, the distance between the centre of the front wheel and the centre of the back wheel that every car nerd worth their salt should know?

Let’s continue with engines that are mostly four-, six- or eight-cylinder these days. There are a few three-cylinder econocars and even fewer 12-cylinder exotics to drool over.

Back in the day, when American cars saturated the landscape, it was all about engine size in cubic inches, and those numbers are still riveted into my brain.

Ford had engines with cubic inch displacements like 260, 289, 351, 352, 390, 428 and 460. A good ear could identify GM’s 283, 348, 350, 396, 454 and Chrysler’s 273, 340, 383 and 426.

These numbers were easy to spot. Just open the hood and they were emblazoned on the valve covers or the air cleaner, not buried in the verbiage of a small sticker on the radiator shroud or firewall of today’s cars.

Some performance engines had names tagged onto numbers like the 426 Max Wedge, Boss 302 and Turbo-Fire 327.

Knowing those engines still make it easy for me to remember a number. Just checked into room 383 at a thousand-room hotel in Las Vegas? No problem finding refuge after a night on the town because brother Bruce’s Super Commando V-8 1968 Road Runner was a 383. Then things went metric with engine sizes and cubic inches gave way to litres so now it’s engine sizes like 2.0, 3.5, 5.0, 5.7 and 6.6 litres. Easier to remember but not as exciting as those legendary performance engine sizes.

If engine displacements are not numbers you care to etch onto a brain cell, what about vehicle manufacturers that designate their models by number?

Audi’s are 3s, 4s, 5s, 7s and 8s. With BMW it used to be the three-number model name identified body size as well as engine size. If a 540 BMW blows by you, it was a mid-sized sedan with a 4.0-litre V8 powerplant. A 535 would have been the same body with a 3.5-litre I6 engine.

But with the new smaller, more powerful engines, that tradition has been lost because who would want to trade in a BMW with smaller last two digits in its model designation? Scandalous. Performance is measured with numbers as well. Vehicles have top speeds and acceleration times usually related to 0-100 kilometre/hour times. These days 10 seconds is a tad lethargic, five seconds is very quick but not slingshot like below three seconds, the zone at which ultra-performance cars spec out.

Tires and rims are designated by numbers, too. A 265/75 R16 designates a radial ply tire on a 16-inch rim with a tread width of 265 millimetres. The 75 is the tire’s aspect ratio that is the ratio of the tread width to the height of the sidewall. More numbers. Of course, fuel economy is measured in numbers. It used to be miles per gallon so the bigger the number, the lower the operating cost. But now it is commonly measured in litres per 100 kilometres so lower numbers are the way to keeping money in the wallet.

Back in the day, there were some numerals we never had to think about, like the number of airbags, Sirius XM satellite radio stations or passwords for onboard Wi-Fi systems because they simply did not exist.

So, for numbers people, there are obviously lots of things numerical to relate to in the automotive world. There goes a four-door, six-cylinder, sixspeed 2016 Chrysler 300.

For my 400th column, I don’t care to equate that number to an automotive engine though. Ford, GM and Chrysler all had 400cubic inch V-8s but this was in the early 1970s and they were all sluggish dogs choked by emerging emission systems.