On the Kei car safety record I think it's mostly the fact they stay on surface streets that are far slower and the drivers know if they screw up, not much between you and what they hit, hit by. I've seen and sat in them. The first Honda 600 to the US was a version of one for those old enough to remember that skareboard ;^P
I wouldn't want to get in an accident in them. My point there was it's how, where one drives can make a bigger difference than safety features. I explaining leaves much to be desired at times.
The Composite vehicles though though various strategies can take it to the highway and live as well as a compact car at least.
Another detail is on can put force on something only as much as it weighs. More than that and it just squits away, allowing lighter struture. I do hard passenger shell with crush zone + on each end and massive strength on the sides among other ways.
Foam, 4 point seatbelts, etc are great ways and I have some that are patentable so can't talk about them for now.
In many ways being big hurts like all the 1 SUV accidents which killed more than the weight saved by a large amount.
Mine was, will be able to brake, drive or accererate from getting into an accident as it's CG is 4" lower than a Corvette's from battery placement. This with good set up allows world class handling second to none. The accident you can avoid is easiest to survive.
Build a better mousetrap, and the customers will come - i.e. Apple's iPhone & iPad. Reduced taxes are good for manufacturing development according to NAM. Government funding for "lightweighting" is a poor use of our tax dollars during this period of high deficits!
Jerry, thanks for the info on those two city cars. It stands to reason the Japanese have created the one with the best safety performance, considering their population density, excellence at designing small, and superior application of technology to everyday problems.
Chuck, the very brief announcement doesn't contain any more details. Considering how important cost is in automotive manufacturing, I'd guess that it would be a major factor, as well as performance characteristics, of predictive modeling for both composites and lightweight steel.
2 very small car types do very well in protection. The Kei Car Class of Japan is this size and they are the safest cars there.
Second example is a 1000 lb? F-1 hitting objects at 200mph and walking away.
Here under products then EV safety is a small composite car head on into an Audi 100. Other ones around the site are the exact kinds of composite vehicles of the future, at least for smart people and just like what I'm building.
Introduction : This department specializes in the development of lighweight designs and structures for vehicles driven by electricity or other means, always with a ...
Next in composites they can get 45% weight reduction now using medium tech composites, not 50% but costs are equal or less than steel.
Fact is composites are not used because big auto doesn't want to use them I think because they don't rust away and if become common, anyone could start up a car company for $100M instead $1B for steel. Both just mean less car sales for them.
Build a better mousetrap, and the customers will come - i.e. Apple's iPhone & iPad. Reduced taxes are good for manufacturing development according to NAM. Government funding for "lightweighting" is a poor use of our tax dollars during this period of high deficits!
I think costs is definitely a huge factor in the decision making, regardless if the goal is lightweighting and a more environmentally-friendly outcome. It's still needs to be smart business, after all. All of this jives with the feature I just wrote on designing for sustainability that will appear in the June issue and online. And many of the CAD/PLM vendors are striking partnerships with providers of these materials/sustainability databases, who's bread and butter is this information, and creating tight links so engineers can access the tools while they're in their familiar CAD environment.
Ann: Like Beth, I also took notice of the predictive modeling part of this effort and wondered what it meant. In addition, I'm wondering if there was any talk in this effort to consider where material costs fit in all of this? Will there be a concerted effort to bring the costs down?
TJ, I would think that creating a safety standard for city-only driving would come with a set of problems. Many of our cities have a blend of interstate and surface streets. Los Angeles is a good example. LA's freeways are fully integrated into city driving. Likewise with Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix.
I agree, we need such a database. Although I think the need is less a slanting problem than it is simply having all performance data, apples for apples and bananas for bananas, for specific components, in one place. I'd hate to try to gather all that now just for evaluating different materials for a single component.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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