Future of the
car In order to limit deaths, there has been a push for self-driving automobiles. There have been many notable efforts funded by the NHTSA, including the many efforts by the NavLabgroup at Carnegie Mellon University. Recent efforts include the highly publicized DARPA Grand Challenge race.
A current invention is ESP by Bosch that is claimed to reduce
deaths by about 30% and is recommended by many lawmakers and carmakers to be
a standard feature in all cars sold in the EU. ESP recognizes dangerous
situations and corrects the drivers input for a short moment to stabilize
the car. |
The electric car
in general appears to be a way forward in principle; electric motors are far
more efficient than internal combustion engines and have a much greater
power to weight ratio. They also operate efficiently across the full speed
range of the vehicle and develop a lot of torque at zero speed, so are ideal
for cars. A complex drivetrain and transmission would not be needed.
However, despite this the electric car is held back by battery technology -
so far a cell with comparable energy density to a tank of liquid fuel is a
long way off, and there is no infrastructure in place to support it. A more
practical approach may be to use a smaller internal combustion engine to
drive a generator- this approach can be much more efficient since the IC
engine can be run at a single speed, use cheaper fuel such as diesel, and
drop the heavy, power wasting drivetrain. Such an approach has worked very
well for railway locomotives, but so far has not been scaled down for car
use. Recently the automobile industry has determined that the biggest potential growth market (in terms of both revenue and profit), is software. Cars are now equipped with a stunning array of software; from voice recognition and vehicle navigation systems, vehicle tracking system like ESITrack to in-vehicle distributed entertainment systems (DVD/Games), to telematics systems such as GMs Onstar not to mention the control subsystems. Software now accounts for 35% of a cars value, and this percentage is only going to get larger. The theory behind this is that the mechanical systems of automobiles are now essentially a commodity, and the real product differentiation occurs in the software systems. Many cars are equipped with full blown 32bit real-time memory protected operating systems such as QNX. A new invention by Carmelo Scuderi has the potential to permanently change the combustion engine. The engine is still in the process of patenting, raising capital, and developing a prototype. The invention is claimed to improve the efficiency of an engine from 33% to 40%, a substantial improvement. In addition, toxic emissions are claimed to be reduced by as much as 80%. The new invention calls for dividing the four strokes of a normal engine over a combination of one compression cycle and one power cycle. The inventor claims that the invention will also create more power and will cost manufacturers less to produce. However, given that there is not even a working prototype of this design it is still only speculative at this time (May 2006).
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