I recently purchased a Roadster power steering kit from City Racer, and had it installed by Javier @ExecMotorwerkz. I haven't seen any discussion of this unit on it on the forums here, so I thought I'd give some initial impressions.
It was clearly a massive job to get it installed - despite the marketing, the kit is designed for the Lotus, so Javier needed to move some components around behind the dash; further, it expected to plug into a 12v battery, which wasn't an option for my 1.5. Javier managed to find a way to make it work without installing another battery, but with one issue (more on that in a second).
The unit comes with a three way toggle switch and a dial. The toggle switch turns the power steering on and off. In the center is off and to either side is on. It's unclear to me why it's a three-way switch rather than a two-way one. The dial adjusts the level of power steering. Javier managed to mount the switch and dial on the side by the hood release, which works well.
When I start up the car, and turn on the power steering, the steering wheel frees right up and turns with ease. It makes a huge difference when the car is moving slowly; not surprisingly, at speed, the difference isn't really noticeable. Performing three point turns, parallel parking, backing into parking spaces, and even making turns at corners is much easier than before.
The one issue, which is pretty significant, is that the power steering needs to be turned off before you turn off the car (or, perhaps, turned off before you turn the car on - I'm not sure which, I haven't experimented). If you don't do so, the car won't turn on until the VMS is rebooted. This is a pain. I'm not sure specifically the cause of this, but I believe it is a side effect of how the unit was run to the battery in absence of a 12v.
It was clearly a massive job to get it installed - despite the marketing, the kit is designed for the Lotus, so Javier needed to move some components around behind the dash; further, it expected to plug into a 12v battery, which wasn't an option for my 1.5. Javier managed to find a way to make it work without installing another battery, but with one issue (more on that in a second).
The unit comes with a three way toggle switch and a dial. The toggle switch turns the power steering on and off. In the center is off and to either side is on. It's unclear to me why it's a three-way switch rather than a two-way one. The dial adjusts the level of power steering. Javier managed to mount the switch and dial on the side by the hood release, which works well.
When I start up the car, and turn on the power steering, the steering wheel frees right up and turns with ease. It makes a huge difference when the car is moving slowly; not surprisingly, at speed, the difference isn't really noticeable. Performing three point turns, parallel parking, backing into parking spaces, and even making turns at corners is much easier than before.
The one issue, which is pretty significant, is that the power steering needs to be turned off before you turn off the car (or, perhaps, turned off before you turn the car on - I'm not sure which, I haven't experimented). If you don't do so, the car won't turn on until the VMS is rebooted. This is a pain. I'm not sure specifically the cause of this, but I believe it is a side effect of how the unit was run to the battery in absence of a 12v.
