Who is controlling automotive advancements or lack there of?

Originally posted by imawlinn
Who is controlling automotive advancements or lack there of?
..

Simple answer. The oil industry.

There is too much money in petro, rubber and plastic to change anything.

Costs are known, profits are maximized and corporations are required to provide a return on stakeholder investments.

There is no future for execs and no profit for those companies that change the current process.

Create laws that require corporations to innovate and move off oil and then we'll see some change.

Originally posted by MoosKept240
Well you have to think of what it is. A combustion engine. 4 stroke, 2 stroke, diesel, rotary, radial. All combustion engines. There have been advancements over time, like the jet engine. We are at the crucial point where the next advancement should be knocking at our door. But as far as I am concerned suck squeeze bang blow will always be the way to go....

EDIT: I wanted to add this video. This NRE nelson racing engines. There is still so much we can do with what we have.


You may want to turn you volume down a little bit for the first part.

edit on 28-3-2011 by MoosKept240 because: (no reason given)

it amazes me how long turbo's have been overlooked,,,,,, the grand national came out in 86 and were so dominant and mean with a 6 cylinder no less

turbo has been all the rage in the last 3-5 years,,,,,,,, i believe they will dominate promod this season over nitrous and superchargers

but hey if we're gonna show off big engines and pure power ,,,,,,,, what about a funny car or top fuel 8000 horsepower , 300 mph in 4 second , 6g nitroburning 500' big block

It's got more to do with government regulations in the U.S. than anything else.

The U.S. has the most heavily regulated automotive industry on the planet. Any new devices to be sold on cars "from the factory" have to go through an entire hearing process just to be approved.

The "hybrid" cars we have today are a pathetic attempt at an electric car. The technology and manufacturing processes we have today allow for the wheel, itself, to be the motor (it is, basically, a very large brushless DC fan like in your computer). That is inherently a 4-wheel drive system with individual track controls and electric-recovery breaking. Though you could get away with two-wheel systems on economy cars (but in the volumes these things would be produced, 4-wheel drive would become the standard as the costs of the added material would be less than the costs of fracturing the product line).

Such electric drive systems are inherently high-torque and very efficient. A gasoline-burning (or diesel) engine can be used at optimal specifications to generate the power necessary. Or one of those magical free energy devices that are supposedly so easy to make can simply be swapped out at a later date (the manner of generating the electricity can be modular in design - no need to stay confined to one form of 'engine').

Originally posted by imawlinn
In this day and age where my new cell phone is practically obsolete before I get my first bill, how is it that automobiles are still using the same basic engine design from almost 100 years ago? While I know that many improvements have been made to the combustion engine to make it more efficient and reliable, it is still that same engine from a hundred years ago. Piston draws gas and air into the cylinder, compression and spark ignites the mixture, forcing the piston down creating the power then exhausting the gas. My question to you is, How can we be making leaps and bounds in other fields (computers, cell phones, science, astronomy. etc.) while the automobile engine has remained reletively unchanged for sooo long? If the automotive industry advanced at the same rate as cell phones, or computers our cars would be flying by now and producing zero emmisions. This is my first thread, so forgive me if it's generic (no videos or links, haven't figured that out yet) but Just wanted to say hello to everyone and get my first thread out of the way. Would love to hear everyones thoughts on this subject...

Well first of all your cell phone IS a computer. A computer with a wireless transceiver chip.

At one point in time we used Vacuum tubes instead of transistors. The tubes were very costly,inefficient and unreliable.

The Solid State transistor revolutionized that.

The computer chip is simply a sandwich of silicon permitting millions of transistors to be etched into it at a very low cost.

This is why your cell phone's cost drops every couple of months...its called Moore's Law.

The chip in your cell phone, is made of silicon, silicon purified into making chips...at practically pennies per chip. And the more they produce the cheaper they become.

This leads to why we haven't seen much of a transition and/or progress in the automotive realm. And why the internal combustion engine is still being used.... it's very cheap to produce.

And Gasoline is STILL the best store of potential energy per volume. Unfortunately.

But we do have some alternatives available today.... the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf and even the Tesla.

But they cost more than your generic automobile which is exactly why we don't see more of them.

People don't want to pay for new technology unfortunately especially if the current technology works fine.

Look at the new Chevy Volt, it's an electric automobile and NOT a hybrid.

It does have a gas powered 4 cylinder engine which it uses as a generator to charge it's batteries but it is solely an electric powered car.

In order to provide a reliable Lithium Ion battery pack for this new technology it costs 10,000. in batteries alone.

This adds up to an overall cost of $42,000.

Which many people just aren't willing to pay. Especially If they can get a decent gas powered car such as a Chevy Cruze for half of that.

So using the chip analogy and phone vs automobiles is really a case of apples and oranges.
The chip reduced the cost of computers, unfortunately our current alternatives as in electrics only raises the cost.

I am a big fan of electric cars though and feel that they willl see the light of day eventually , especially as the costs come down.

Take a look here at Plasma Boy with his electric drag racer White Zomby, 0-60 in 1.8 seconds outrunning C6 (the latest) Corvettes AND turning sub 12 second quarter miles.

ATS wouldn't embed the link to the video....so here's the link. Please watch, for he simply owns that Vette !

Good thing they weren't racing for pink Slips !!!



www.youtube.com...



Also this one where he switches to Lithium Ion Batteries = lighter weight

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: imawlinn
yep, combustion engine ha some good innovations (fuel injection, etc.) but nothing absolutely ground breaking.
On the other han, you can see that automotive engineering as a whole has made a huge leap forward in terms of performance, safety.

a reply to: KarmaComa

The underlying reason is that there is no Moore's law in thermodynamics. Engines were already running at a significant fraction of their maximum efficiency & capability from fundamental physics limits.

By contrast, microchips get more and more efficient the smaller you could make the features. And back in say 1968, existing technology was very, very far away from the fundamental limit, which is the size of atoms. So there was quite a number of generations of progress because there was nothing hard in the way. Fewer atoms = more power. Less is more. Now we're starting to hit up against fundamental physics limits.

By contrast, with transportation, more is more. Given the atoms on the periodic table, it is very difficult to have a more dense energy storage than liquid hydrocarbons, in particular kerosene which is the base for Diesel fuel, jet and some rocket fuels. Electric batteries have much lower limits for major physical & chemical reasons. Beyond chemistry you need to go to nuclear but that has many other problems.

The energy it takes to speed something up to get into orbit is just the same as it was in 1960. Liquid Kerosene was the right solution then, and it still is today (Space X). Is there any conspiracy keeping progress back in rocketry? No, nothing other than the laws of physics.

With automobiles, everything that can be electronicized and automated is, and there's great progress in sensors & control & communication vs 1960. But in the end, you will still have an engine and four tires on four wheels.

Tesla is obviously making the most progress on fundamental automotive innovation today.

a reply to: neonitus

Neo that's so laughably incorrect as to be horrifyingly depressing on such a profoundly deep level that even my black humor obsessed friends couldn't derive even a single snort of derision from your comment!!! Lord Kelvin and the idiot who wanted to close the patent office would fit in nicely on the ATS science forums lately....


For the record no one actually working to advance mainstream technology forward believes crap like this now nor did they really believe Kelvin then.

We still have sail boats. Think about that.