Road Noise

Noise levels inside a car can come from many different exterior factors, as well as from the car’s mechanical componentry.  Are there ways to nullify the racket?  When some cars get up and going they are just purely noisy contraptions.  The road and wind racket inside a noisy car’s interior can be almost deafening; and even at the best of times, your conversations are kept short, sharp and to the point.  Any lengthy journeys inside the worst culprits can be painful and wearisome.

Not so long ago some researchers in Germany thoroughly tested a range of cars to see which ones were the noisiest cars to travel inside, and which cars were the quietest.  This sort of information would be handy when one might be considering purchasing a potential vehicle for commuting purposes – particularly when it will be a car that you frequently spend long hours journeying in.  What the researchers came up with is amusing to read.  The noisiest was a Porsche 911, but here were the top 30 noisiest cars they tested:

The following were the quietest cars the team tested, and the top positions were taken by the BMW 730d, Jaguar XJ and Audi A8:

What interests me the most was the lack of Japanese cars in the top 30 quietest cars?  I always thought the Honda Legend was remarkably quiet.  Maybe, they didn’t add this model to the list because of the German bias?

There is such a thing as road cancellation technology, where new acoustic technology helps to nullify road noise in cars.  Audio giant Harman and British automobile-maker Lotus have recently collaborated to produce the Road Noise Cancellation (RNC) system.  By fitting accelerometers into the chassis of the vehicle, these gadgets identify and monitor the frequencies of unwanted tyre noise and relay the information back to a main control unit in the body of the car.  An algorithm in the controller creates inverse sound waves through the car’s speakers to cancel out the road noise.  With rolling road noise cancelled out, the cabin is a more relaxed and peaceful place for the driver and passengers to be.

Tell us about some of the quietest or nosiest cars you’ve ever ridden inside – or driven. http://credit-n.ru/offers-zaim/zaymer-online-zaymi.html

Tesla: The Supergeek’s Supercar

Back in the 1880s, electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla tinkered around with using an AC motor to power vehicles. For some reason, the idea didn’t catch on the way his fellow inventor Thomas Edison’s lightbulb did, and cars kept mostly running on fossil fuels for another century while gaslights faded into the past. Tesla’s electrical car was sidelined into the realms of fiction, along with his ideas for wireless electricity transmission and death rays (yep, he’s the original “mad scientist who’s developed a death ray” beloved of sci-fi, superhero cartoons and steampunk, AND he predicted mobile phones). However, concerns about peak oil led to the ideas being dusted off again and considered seriously.  Was it possible for electric cars to be feasible for everyday use? Could people invent a battery that would hold enough charge to power a car over more than just a few kilometres? Oh yes – and can electric cars be cool rather than geeky and boring?

Enter Tesla Motors, a company founded in 2003 with the long-term goal of making mass-market electric vehicles that could provide the fossil fuel market with some serious competition. The Tesla Roadster proved that an electric car could indeed deliver the goods, combining style and performance with purely electric motors. The Roadster was the first purely electric car to have a battery range of 320 km per charge. This award-winning design made the cover of Time magazine in 2006 and proved hugely popular in the USA. The Roadster had a 0–60 mph time of 3.9 seconds and a top speed of 165 km/h, which is more than the legal road limit (and what else would you want anyway)? Its styling was very classy indeed and used carbon fibre throughout for the bodywork.

The Roadster is no longer listed on the Tesla Motors website. Three sedans have taken the Roadster’s place: the Model S, the Model X and the Model 3, which are very boring and ordinary names for cars that are anything but boring and ordinary: the Model S, for example, has a 0–100 time of 3.0 seconds (performance variant) and will do so without the engine roar typical of its petrol-powered peers doing the same thing.  They are an idea whose time has come – unfortunately too late for Nikola Tesla, who died in poverty in 1943 in spite of his brilliance and many inventions (he sold his patents).

Tesla Motors is the brainchild of a Canadian entrepreneur with the delightful name of Elon Musk. Tesla is not his only breakthrough invention: he’s also one of the team who created PayPal, the man behind the SpaceX non-governmental space exploration organisation (the one that’s thinking about the Mars colony) and tons of other high-tech ideas, including SolarCity, which produces low-cost solar panels to reduce dependence on fossil fuels even further. He is the owner of the famous aquatic Lotus Esprit that appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me and has strong opinions on keeping a lid on artificial intelligence, in spite of owning an AI company.

Of course, with any vehicle, you’re going to have to think about how you’ll make sure it’s got what it takes to move, whether you have to top it up with electricity, petrol or diesel. One of the big barriers to the widespread use of purely electric vehicles is the problem of recharging the battery. You thought recharging your mobile phone was bad! This infrastructure problem is a hurdle that has to be overcome with any new fuel or power source type. With electrical vehicles, there’s also the problem that many generators run on fossil fuel, which means that this technology isn’t quite as green as you thought it might have been. However, the boffins are working on improving ways to get electricity without burning fossil fuel and coal (like Elon Musk’s SolarCity power project mentioned above), so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Tesla models can be charged with enough juice in the battery (OK, I’ll spare you the science lesson about electrical potential energy) to last them 270 km. At Tesla’s specific supercharger stations, this charging process takes about 30 minutes, which is quicker than charging my mobile phone when it’s run flat. You plug it in, head off to the shops, then come back when you get a notification via the Tesla charging app. Tesla vehicles can also be topped up with charge at “destination charging stations”, which are businesses (e.g. shops, cinemas, etc.) that have a compatible charger

Three Tesla models are available for sale in Australia today. Most of these are likely to be sold in Victoria and New South Wales, as these are the states which have Tesla-specific “supercharger” charging stations available. Most of these charging stations are located strategically along the M31 highway between Melbourne and Sydney, and another is located up in Port Macquarie. Destination charging is also available in all states except Northern Territory (most of the Top End misses out – sorry, Darwin and Cairns!). For those interested in a test drive, the showrooms are located in Sydney and Melbourne.

It’s true that purely electric cars have a long way to go until they are as popular as petrol/diesel cars, mostly for infrastructure reasons. However, given the way that hybrid vehicles have caught on, we are likely to see more pure electric cars such as the ground-breaking Tesla, gliding around Australian roads. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the Toyota Prius was a real novelty by being a production hybrid; now just about every car manufacturer is putting out hybrids. Now if we can just solve the problem of making sure that we’ve got enough sustainably produced electricity (i.e. if we don’t end up having to use fossil-fuel fired power generators to meet the electricity needs of heaps of hybrid and electric vehicles), all will be very well indeed.

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Drive A New 3-D Printed Car

With new automotive technology rampaging on it seems that we’ll be able to buy our own 3D-printed cars.  The world’s first 3D printed car is called “Strati” and is made by Local Motors, and is reportedly going on sale during 2016.

Did you know that most vehicles that we drive around in today are made up using around 2000 parts?  Local Motors indicate that the Strati is made up from just 40 parts.  Mechanical parts like the suspension, motors and battery are sourced from a Renault Twizy – which is a battery-powered two-seater electric city car designed and marketed by Renault.  Everything else on the Strati is made up of integrated single material pieces.  These pieces include the exterior shell, frame and some of the interior features, which have been printed using ABS plastic that has been reinforced with carbon fibre.

Strati

Local Motors has developed the car so that it’s available with all the digital 3D-print files and build manuals available to the public for downloading and modifying by individual users.  Local Motors aims to open around 100 micro-factories near major cities around the globe over the next ten years.  The Strati boasts a sporty, little 2-seater design that, at present, takes 44 hours to print.  Local Motors are working to speed this process up so that it only takes 24 hours to create.  The Strati’s body is laid down layer-by-layer or slice-by-slice, and the Strati has approximately 212 layers laid down in its body.  So, similar to a home desktop 3D printer, the Strati uses BAAM (big-area additive manufacturing) technology which relies on a digital 3D model part becoming sliced into layers.  These modelled layers are then used to generate real layers of ABS plastic that are generated by the 3D printer.

Amazingly, this sort of 3D technology could have you download the necessary files from Local Motors, choose your options, create your own individual Strati on your computer and Local Motors could have the car made up inside two days.  Design engineers from Strati suggest that you could even come up with your own design idea, have it looked at by Local Motors and then once settled, could be printed into your very own unique car design.  That sounds fun; you could design and build your very own car.

The Strati vehicle is currently powered by a 6.1 kW battery which can be recharged in only 3.5 hours.  It alsohas a top speed of 80 km/h – a perfect city car with zero emissions, and costing not much in power to charge.

Manufacturer, Divergent Micro-factories, is also in the business of creating their own 3D-printed cars with a difference, using the latest green technology.  Take a look at their exciting supercar model called the Blade which has a 520 kW biofuel engine that is capable of flinging the car from 0-100 km/h in less than three seconds!

The Blade

3D-printing has been used in all sorts of engineering and modelling projects.  Progressively, 3D-printing has been used in the building industry with all sorts of ingredients used for layering down in its design.  You can even use 3D-printing and it’s layering machines to layer down a concrete building in any style or shape.  This sort of technology allows you to get back to the lego block days when you really could create anything from your childhood imagination.

So what about layering down the dimensions and shape of a 1961 Jaguar E-Type? http://credit-n.ru/zaymi-online-blog-single.html

Are Cars Getting Bigger and Heavier?

Porsche 911 Gets Bigger

When you have a look at the cars on the road, most of them are typically roomy and comfortable to drive.  The bulk of the cars seem to be medium-to-large vehicles, with a few small cars thrown in for good measure.  With our ever increasing desire to buy a new SUV, perceiving that driving such a vehicle will make the drive a safer one, it seems that cars on our roads are increasing in size.  Trends like the increasing SUV market suggests that consumers are really wanting that bigger vehicle with space and style to boot.  So what are the factors making the cars bigger on our roads?

The Safety Element

New cars have to be designed and built with the best safety features available.  If manufacturers fail to take the safety side of things seriously, then people just don’t buy them.  Crash testing informs the potential buyers of how safe a new vehicle will be and, if the crash test results don’t get anywhere near five stars, then the consumers are getting switched off, going to another model or even another car manufacturer to buy their new car.  With safety playing such an important part in new car sales, car manufacturers ensure that their new models going into production are equipped with all the important safety features; and this often adds to the car’s weight and, sometimes, size.  Side impact rails take up space; increased crumple zones front and rear take up space; six or more airbags take up space; strengthened A pillars takes up space, so it’s easy to see how models have had to increase in size.  What about all the extra active safety features like active cruise control, rear parking aids, lane change assist, collision avoidance systems, ABS, TSC, ESC, Limited Slip Diff, rollover detection, driver alerts, launch control, hill descent control… and the list goes on; increased weight and size being the natural result.

Luxury and Comfort Features.

We all like a bit of entertainment, and with more than six speakers, a CD stack in the boot, MP3 compatibility, multiple USB and auxiliary ports, multiple auxiliary jacks, glovebox coolers, cup-holders, back seat DVD entertainment, heated seats, rear-seat recline, electric windows, AWD, a touch screen, infotainment system, satellite navigation, zoned climate control, Smartphone connection, a panoramic sunroof and more, it all adds to the weight of the car – not to mention the ability to hold all these extra gadgets with extra compartments needing to be made to house the features.  Other accessories like larger alloy wheels, boot spoilers and fog lamps all make the car heavier and look larger, too.

People Are Larger So Cars Need To Be Larger

You could argue that with people generally getting larger (fatter would be more accurate but less PC) the general public need to buy a car that fits their bigger frames.

A Positive With Increasing Car Size

One of the amazing trends that runs alongside the cars’ bigger framework, however, is the fact that the modern bigger cars are getting better fuel economy – now that’s a great thing.  Automotive design teams are doing incredibly well at making cars more fuel efficient and more powerful, even as the car’s weight, size, comfort and safety ratings are all increasing.

What’s your thoughts; and do you have any interesting photos to back this trend up with?

Peugeots Side-by-Side