Electronic safety systems may be showing their value. According to new statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of people who died on the nation’s roads last year reached historically low levels. Overall traffic fatalities fell to 41,059, the lowest level since 1994. Also, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles dropped to 1.37, the lowest fatality rate on record.
An electronic stability control mandate, set to start on September 1st, is expected to reduce annual fatalities by an additional 6,000 to 9,000 per year. Smart highways, which are farther out in the future, are expected to reduce annual fatalities to as few as 10,000 per year.
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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