At the opening of the Oxford Brooke’s University
utomotive Building someone asked me what the future of utomotive engineering design would hold. Its not such n easy question, did the wiring designers who built modern car electronics really foresee the desire to stream MP3 from your Ipod through your car speakers or in car DVD (aka MP4)? Its hard to build functionality for a standard that hasn’t been developed yet. The future is always a tough question which offers the most opportunity for embarrassment and so I thought we’d get it out of the way on the first page.
The future of car design was the first article I wrote for Vehicle Technology in 1997. I wrote that car shape would evolve closer to the human shape making personalised passenger transport develop in harmony with the human form. Meanwhile sale of 4x4’s soared and humble pie got served and I ate it. In any case it was a nice idea; aerodynamically cars should resemble the human form in terms of their being sleek, moulded and generally formed around one or two persons in a single file, at least they are the winning designs of Eco-Marathon cars which can run up to 11,300 miles on a single gallon of petrol. Logical maybe but not in keeping with the spirit of the times. Instead, the Zeitgeist was for badges of excess and demonstrations of wealth through defiance to escalating fuel prices, 4x4 sales rocketed just when the realisations of aluminium chassis and engine blocks and 30% plastic cars (Ford Ka) became a technological reality. Nor is it over, hybrid engine modules can down |
grade the petrol consumption of a 4x4 to that of a normal saloon, described by the BBC News24 as unimpressive – A 4x4 that runs on as much petrol as your first car is nothing short of miraculous. Anyone can make a mistake right?
Back to the now, what will humanity and its economies use to distribute itself and its goods – the two main drivers of superpower development? According to the SAE-International President Richard Schaum in his Exchange Lecture to the IMechE 2007, the combustion engine is here to stay, accordingly he has seen the development of all kinds of alternatives – the turbine car (cool actually and Rover developed four, one is on show at the Gaydon Car Museum, never safe enough for general release unlike the General Motors version, which performed quite well apart from the fact that turbines perform poorly at low temperatures and power is better converted by secondary heat exchanges which is why we still hear about steam powered cars). Well, its right, the cylindrical combustion chamber just happens to be a very efficient way to evolve power from combustible fluids. Many other forms of propulsion have been and gone of which the hydrogen car is my favourite example. Anyone who ever worked the diatomitic hydrogen molecule will know it leaks like fury as it is the smallest and therefore fastest moving molecule which only has one ambition – it streams into space from the kinds of airtight connections that engineers dream of hanging off the ends of monkey wrenches to achieve.
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