Per Capita Davis: Smart cars take us for a ride
The Volkswagen initially was envisioned in the late 1930s as a “people’s car” that could carry two adults and three children at highway speeds and be affordable to the average German citizen. It was designed to be simple, fuel-efficient and easy to use and repair.
It was not, however, the first effort in this regard: There were many previous efforts to provide “cars for the people.” As an example, way back in the 1920s, while Henry Ford’s assembly lines were churning out cars for the middle class, a German inventor came up with “The Littlest Electric Automobile.”
Since Ford’s cars were referred to as “flivvers,” this smaller car was marketed as a “Flivverette.” It was so small it was meant to be stored in a doghouse instead of a garage and looked more like an entry in a soap box derby than an actual automobile.
The two-seater Flivverette, able to reach speeds up to 25 miles per hour, had a battery with a range of 28 miles. While Ford was targeting any “man making a good salary,” the Flivverette was supposed to be for absolutely everybody.
For whatever reason, the Flivverette was never a commercial success. It was, however, ahead of its time in terms of attempting to downsize the automobile to something affordable and fuel-efficient.
Many of us grew up in a time when big cars were the big thing, and a V-8 engine was deemed a necessity. The “V-8” stands for how the eight cylinders are arranged — with four on either side of the engine and each cylinder slanting inward so the two sides, when viewed from the front of the engine, have a V shape. The smaller cars back then had six cylinders. The more cylinders, the more power, and the more fuel required to run the engine.
Some seem to continue to lust after all the power a V-8 provides, but the world is moving toward smaller and smaller engines. Nowadays, the V-8 is seen mostly in race cars, muscle cars, luxury cars and SUVs. The six-cylinder engine is still common, but there are an increasing number of four-cylinder models.
Europe, where small cars are more the norm, also produces three-cylinder cars and, with fuel economy standards rising, U.S. automakers are also developing three-cylinder models. However, recognizing the American appetite for power, these three-cylinder cars are being re-engineered to provide more horsepower than a standard four-cylinder model.
Ford has come a long way from the Model T and is planning to introduced a turbo-charged three-cylinder engine in 2012 and eventually install these in millions of vehicles. The benefit of this change in engine design is increased gas mileage while maintaining at least a semblance of power. This is one example of how engineers are rethinking the car for a climate-smart world.
But this is nothing compared to what engineers are working on for the future. Cars have changed: It’s virtually impossible to do your own work on a car. To even give it a simple tune-up requires significant and expensive computer equipment.
The Silicon Valley engineers who transformed the telephone into an Internet-connected device with hundreds of thousands of cool applications are now at work redesigning the car. The first computer chip was installed into a Cadillac odometer in 1978; the average car today has as many as 200 such chips and more than a mile of electrical wiring.
A recent news article claims that the Chevy Volt, the new plug-in electric vehicle, has computerized systems that require more than 10 million lines of code to run its various systems.
It has been widely reported that Google is working on a car that drives itself (think how much work you could get done while commuting if you didn’t have to pay attention and drive) but it is less well-known that many major car companies are already far down the road (so to speak) on the same thing.
BMW has a test car that can drive at high speeds around a race track. They use it to train drivers; their fingers lightly hold the steering wheel but let the car do the driving. The idea is that the trainee experiences the feeling of taking exactly the best line at the best speed through a turn.
Audi has a driverless car that self-navigated the 12.4-mile Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb. In addition to BMW, other car companies — including Mercedes, Toyota, General Motors and Renault-Nissan — all have opened facilities in Silicon Valley with the purpose of figuring out the car of the future.
And, the U.S. Department of Transportation is studying how cars can communicate with one another to reduce the number of crashes (5.8 million per year) and deaths due to car accidents (nearly 40,000 per year), reduce congestion on the roads (4.2 billion lost hours per year), and achieve better fuel economy out of a reported nearly 3 billion gallons of gasoline that are wasted annually.
It sounds like we are being taken for a ride, but there are those who say that by 2030 we may be able to use our smart phones to call our smart cars to come pick us up at the airport.
— John Mott-Smith is a resident of Davis. This column is published on the first and third Thursdays of each month. Send comments to johnmottsmith@comcast.net
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Posted by John Mott-Smith
on Oct 5 2011.
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