Automotive Engineering

The old breakers’ yards, going for a long time, are soon to disappear. The future is now in recycling components from these vehicles and all as a consequence of a new Directive approved by the European Union. The new law came into being in the Spanish State in December 2002. From February of this year the Royal Decree for the Direction General of Traffic obliges owners of vehicles to obtain a certificate of destruction in order to be legally free of contractual ownership of the vehicle. Here, in the

Optimization is an effective method for enhancing the crashworthiness of cars. In a series of simulations of crash tests at Linköping University in Sweden it was possible to reduce the penetration of passenger space by a third.

Every year 47,000 people are killed in automobile accidents in the EU. This is as if a jumbo jet were to crash every third day. Such horrendous figures cry out for ever greater investments in crashworthiness. Modern optimization technique, based on so-called finite e

Yes, we can, according to this dissertation from Göteborg University, which deals with the impact of road tolls on car use, factors that influence attitudes to road tolls, and road tolls in comparison with other types of steering mechanisms targeting automobile use. But you have to have a positive attitude toward cutting down on car use (which people rarely have) and you have to plan how to go about it and regularly monitor your progress in relation to a realistic goal. Otherwise routines and impuls

The rapidly increasing demands of today’s car buyers have placed a heavy burden on car manufacturers to constantly innovate. Building prototypes to test innovative car designs is a lengthy, not to mention expensive, process and one that companies keen to retain their competitive edge can ill afford. With contemporary simulation systems often falling short of R&D expectations, the eight-company-strong team of EUREKA project E! 1924 CARDS (Comprehensive Automobile Research and Development Simulator) s

Surrounded by projection screens, a blue Saturn sits in a basement room in the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. If you look very closely, you can see several tiny video cameras inside the car, and a glance under the hood gives a whole new meaning to the term “souped-up.”

In the space where the engine normally resides sits an array of electronic instrumentation that turns this ordinary vehicle into a high-fidelity driving simulator known as SIREN (Simulator for Interdisciplinary Re

As politicians and the public leap aboard the hydrogen fuel bandwagon, a University of California, Berkeley, energy expert suggests we all step back and take a critical look at the technology and consider simpler, cheaper options.

In a paper appearing in the July 18 issue of Science magazine, Alex Farrell, assistant professor of energy and resources at UC Berkeley, and David Keith, associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, present various sh