Common car abbreviations and their meanings

Cars are getting too much, right? So much so that a lot of people get confused as to what each car’s designation, usually emblazoned on the back, really means.

With this in mind, we decided to round up the most common car abbreviations currently dominating our South African roads.

All those little letters mean they’re all hot and cost a fortune though…

GTI

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Way back in 1961, Italian carmaker Maserati became the first to use the GTI name and the almost always abbreviated GTI or GTi simply means Grand Tourer Injection.

It (if I can say) is the most dominant name in the hot hatches garage today. GTIs use a fuel-injection variant traditionally used for Grand Tourer cars, and the term is now applied to various hot hatchbacks, even though they do not have the luxury usually linked with Grand Tourers.

However, Volkswagen made the designation more famous in 1976 with its Golf GTI and the Peugeot 205 GTi launched in 1984.

TDI

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To refresh your mind a bit, the first Volkswagen Group TDI engine was Audi-developed; an inline five-pot mill, introduced in the Audi 100 in 1989.

Turbocharged direct injection is the design of turbodiesel engines featuring turbocharging and cylinder-direct fuel injection that was developed and produced by the Volkswagen Group.

These TDI engines are widely used in all mainstream Volkswagen Group marques of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles made by the company.

TFSI| FSI

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Turbocharged fuel stratified injection denotes a type of forced-aspiration “turbo” engine where the fuel is pressure-injected straight into the combustion chamber in such a way as to create a stratified charge.

Fuel Stratified Injection or FSI is a proprietary direct fuel injection system developed and used by Volkswagen AG, as well as its luxury subsidiary Audi.

It was introduced in 2000 when VW introduced the 1.4 litre direct-injected inline-four unit in the Volkswagen Lupo city car.

CDI

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Common-rail direct fuel injection is a direct fuel-injection system for petrol and diesel engines.

Back in 1997, the Alfa Romeo 156 2.4 JTD became the first passenger car maker to boast the CDI system and, in the very same year, Mercedes-Benz joined the stream with its W202 model.

TSI

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TSI stands for “turbocharged straight injection” and was inspired by the technology of Volkswagen’s TDI Clean Diesel and FSI direct fuel-injection engines.

TSI engines are compact, high-powered and use less fuel. They allow higher torque at lower RPMs, which means more power with less fuel usage.

VVT-i

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Dubbed Variable Valve Timing with intelligence, this is variable valve timing technology developed by Toyota. The Toyota VVT-i system replaces the Toyota VVT offered starting in 1991 on the 5-valve per cylinder 4A-GE engine.