General Motors Corp. showed off the so-called “skateboard” for its Chevy Sequel technical concept vehicle at SAE’s 2007 World Congress this week. The vehicle, which GM calls the “most technically advanced automobile ever built,” was said to represent the third stage in the automaker’s “Reinvention of the Automobile” program.”
Designed around hydrogen fuel cell technology, the Sequel uses three electric motors and a lithium-ion battery for its propulsion system. The vehicle reportedly has a 300-mile range between hydrogen fill-ups and emits only water vapor.
Late last year, GM announced that it had created the first driveable version of the vehicle.
The so-called “skateboard” shown at SAE this week is an 11-inch-deep chassis that contains all of the Sequel’s propulsion, transmission, steering and braking components and provides a single electrical connection to its body.
Experts say that the intelligent highway will save more lives than seat belts, airbags, and electronic stability control. For sheer lifesaving capacity, nothing in the history of the auto industry will come close to it.
In a bid to help automakers cut the fuel consumption and emissions of next generation engines, Freescale Semiconductor is rolling out a three-core microcontroller said to boost computing performance without drawing more power.
Bionic limbs, innovative infusion systems, and transcranial doppler brain scanners are just some of the innovations engineers are bringing to the exploding medical design arena.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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