Automotive Design & Production

The Handbasket Syndrome

While it might seem that the auto industry is going to hell in a handbasket, as the Gershwins put it, it is not necessarily so. Those who are surviving -- and thriving -- are those who are dealing with "the New Automotive Normal." Those who understand that the New Normal has a whole lot to do with distinction and differentiation are going to be among the prosperous. There are companies that forthrightly produce cars and trucks that are distinctive in some discernable ways that are able, for t...

Back to the Future: Scuderi Revolutionizes Engine Design

Scuderi Group have developed an air-hybrid engine that, unlike traditional internal combustion engines, features a split-cycle configuration. Since the split-cycle configuration produces compressed air during its operation, Scuderi engineers decided it would be ideal if they could capture the air produced during the combustion process and use it to power the engine and auxiliary items. The result is a compressed air tank attached to the engine block that stores the air for use during various ...

Sky Power

Seeing the Light

Valeo Sylvania, along with its Asian partner Ochikoh, plan to lead the way when it comes to developing next-generation lighting systems, including having the first full LED headlamp on the global market by 2008. Valeo Sylvania is bullish on the future for LEDs, even though only 7% of vehicles sold in the US in 2005 have rear lighting systems using the technology. The supplier predicts that penetration will jump to 25% in 2010 and upwards of 45% by 2015 for rear lighting applications. LEDs all...

Advancing Portable Inspection

Faro Technologies Inc and Delcam PLC have teamed their technologies to facilitate inspection of tooling and parts essentially anywhere it is needed by combining the portable coordinate measuring machine from Faro with the CAD-based inspection software From Delcam. Basically, the CAD model of the part is imported into the system from which there is offline programming of the inspection sequence. Beyond touch-probe measurement, Fare is also expanding its offerings in non-contact scanning of not...

Vw's Hallmark Moments

Volkswagen (VW) has been caught in decline in the US for the past four years, with sales falling from 356,000 units in 2001, to 224,195 units in 2005. This will change if the brand's new US boss, Adrian Hallmark, has anything to say about it -- and he does. Hallmark wants VW to regain its sell-confidence and project an image of building vehicles with great driving dynamics and affordable price tags. Fulfilling the latter half of that goal will require some major tinkering and Hallmark wants V...

Dr. Diesel Would Be Proud

A bar in Ingolstadt, Germany, is not where you would expect the future of sports prototype racing to change, but it is where Dr Ulrich Baretsky, head of Engine Technology at Audi Sport, sat down one night in Jan 2003 with a representative of the Automobile Club de I'Ouest, the sanctioning body for the Le Mans 24 Hours, to discuss endurance racing's future. After VW Group chairman Ferdinand Piech gave his blessings at Le Mans in 2004, the first diesel race engine was running on the dyno in ear...

The Rubber Meets the Road

A typical race tire has a tread face as thick as two credit cards, and requires unique processing techniques. The techniques developed for racing tires -- when applied to sturdier materials -- result in less distortion, and higher quality and consistency. Technologies like long-link carbon and smoother bead design have made the move from racing to road, with the former giving greater heat resistance, longer tire life, and retaining wet weather traction as the tire wears. The latter, a seamles...

Engineered Elements of the '07 Sport Trac

Engineered elements of the second-generation Ford Sport Trac, a 2007 model, are presented. Compared with a conventional four-door Explorer, 80% of the body parts are different. The independent front and rear suspension are the same as on the four-door. But given that the Sport Trac has a bed, the tuning is different. The mid section of the Sport Trac is 16.8-in longer than the four-door model. There is an additional cross member on the Sport Trac for lateral stiffness. Compared with the first...

Pdf Goes 3d

Adobe Acrobat 3D is reviewed.

Less Talk, More Action

Doug Betts, SVP, Total Customer Satisfaction, Nissan North America, believes speed is of the essence in rectifying problems that can lead to customer dissatisfaction. To wit: A 60-second discussion around a table is much more efficient than months of exchanging e-mails. These discussions -- codified in Nissan's Customer Satisfaction Team (CST) process -- are key to his goal of rectifying potential problems quickly and correctly. Once the entire team agrees a problem is fixed, the solution is ...

The Curse of the Short Term

The malaise that continues to pervade in the US domestic auto industry can be traced back to one thing: short-term thinking. Simply put, if it were not for the need to squeeze every nickel to make quarterly profits look better or losses less bad to appease Wall Street, Americans would probably have better cars and trucks chock-full of the latest technology to make driving safer and more efficient. Imagine if one of Detroit's Big Two actually had the willingness to say to suppliers, show the c...

Coatings to Improve Performance

Various ways have been sought to minimize friction loss over the years, but one that is increasingly interesting to the automotive industry is coatings. This is hardly a new solution with surfaces having been coated for years, but what is starting to come to the fore is a process called "Diamond-Like Carbon" (DLC) coatings. Unlike other surface treatments that either increase wear resistance or improve friction behavior, DLC coatings make both properties available in a single surface treatmen...

The Russian Auto Landscape

The size of Russia's car market is impressive. It is among the Top 10 markets in the world and 1.45 million vehicles were sold in the country in 2005. Spurred by rising incomes and greater desire for comfort and safety, sales of foreign vehicles in Russia have jumped by 50% to 606,000 units in 2005. But it is not just the upsurge in production among foreign manufacturers that is inciting the interest of international suppliers. Russian manufacturers too are giving their suppliers more respons...

Magna's Competitive Approach: Develop &Amp; Build

Magna International, the Tier One supplier of stampings, systems, assemblies, etc, actually developed the idea for the BMW Z4 coupe. According to Mark Hogan, Magna's president, workers at its Piedmont, SC, heavy stamping facility -- which produces outer body panels for the Z4 roadster that is built at the nearby BMW Spartanburg plant -- were puzzled as to why BMW did not plan to produce a coupe version of its popular roadster. The ability to handle complete vehicle engineering services for au...

Geneva Finds Its Niche

Perhaps it is because the town is known more for watches than vehicles that the Geneva Motor Show becomes the home for manufacturers not known to have a visible presence. At the 2006 show, there were a number of these small players. Some even had innovative products. Among them: Based in Angelholm, Sweden, Koenigsegg unveiled the CCX, which stands for "Competition Coupe X," although it is meant to be a road car; the carbon fiber and Kevlar-bodied coupe was designed and engineered to meet US r...

Truth Telling

Recently, Bill Ford stated that honesty must be on the table if Ford is to survive its restructuring. He went on to say that he can deal with anything, except the lack of truth. A better use of the language would have had Ford telling his audience that he needs the best information possible in order to make the right decisions. The truth is that Ford needs leadership more than it needs some nebulous truth. Its next leader must re-establish a product planning organization with teeth, de-emphas...

Creating a New Car Company

William Santana Li and a group of other people have organized Carbon Motors, a company that has been created with the express purpose of building an all-new, purpose-built, law enforcement patrol vehicle. But then he talks about the volume that the company is planning to build: 10,000 to 80,000 per year. Carbon will have a pull-based model, wherein they will produce a vehicle to a direct order -- there will be pre-engineered modules and accessories that can be used to configure the vehicle --...

Kia's Optima-Zation Plan

It is the kind of thing that can make a competing automaker go crazy. First, Kia announces it is building a $1.2-billion plant in West Point, GA, with the capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year. Then it launches the 2006.5 Optima for $16,355. Len Hunt, EVP and COO of Kia Motors America Inc, says this is just the beginning for a company that began by selling 12,000 vehicles in the US in 1994, and is on track to move 300,000 in 2006.

The Toyota Product Development System's Implementation Challenges

For conducting business in the US market, Toyota has historically had several separate business entities. On Apr 1, 2006, Toyota merged its R&D operations and its manufacturing operations into a single company. Under the Toyota Product Development System (TPDS), extremely close collaboration between R&D and manufacturing is the norm. There are substantial challenges most suppliers will face when they move to implement the TPDS. Some of these key challenges involve: 1. a new approach t...

The Importance of Investment in Technology

Kolbenschmidt Pierburg has sales of E2,050 million in FY 2005. Its earnings before interest and tax was 146 million in 2005. Which is to say that the company did well in an environment that might seem to be less than conducive to reporting such positive numbers. How did they do it is somewhat surprising. While some companies are reducing their investments wherever they can, in FY 2005 the company increased its investment in research and development. It is through the investment in engineering...

Aluminum Rising

Aluminum has surpassed iron and taken the number-two spot on the list of materials used in automobiles worldwide. Looking at North America in particular, there is an average of 319 lb of aluminum used in light vehicles, up 16% since 2002. The primary application areas for aluminum are the powertrain, driveline, wheels, and heat exchangers. Some of the applications where European vehicle manufacturers are focusing aluminum application are bodies-in-white, instrument panels and enclosure panels...

Bmw Debuts New Cold Test Center

After spending more than 30 years testing its vehicles in four different locations in the Arctic Circle, German luxury carmaker BMW has selected Arjeplog, Sweden, as the locale for its new cold weather testing facility, marking a consolidation of cold weather testing for future BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce vehicles into one facility. BMW made the decision to build its $19-million complex in Jun 2004 and within 10 months the construction of the three test buildings and multiple tracks was complet...

Faster Developments for Racing

When asked how much time he spends designing, Bryan Holzinger, design engineer, Rahal Letterman Racing, says with certain exasperation that it is his full-time job. By his estimate, the number of changes that are made can be as many as 200 on a given vehicle. During testing, the cars are instrumented with more than 60 sensors that are used to monitor everything from gearbox oil temperatures to suspension loading. Not all the teams in the Indy Racing League are as big as theirs and they do not...

Electronics Under the Hood

The importance of electronics under the hood is something that is being driven by a number of factors, both market-driven and regulatory. Whether it is the seemingly ever-increasing price of fuel, the attention being paid to alternatives such as ethanol, hybrid technologies, or environmental regulations, what Mike Crane of Siemens VDO says is happening is a shift in fundamental engine architectures in order to accommodate them. Joe Fadool, Siemens VP, Powertrain Electronics and Drivetrain Sys...

Racing Toward Relevance

You cannot stop manufacturers from spending more money, all you can do is make it less and less worthwhile for them to do so, says Peter Wright, technical advisor for the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the governing body of international motorsport. The balance of money spent -- some Formula One teams reportedly are spending nearly half a billion dollars per year, with most dropping more than $150 million each year -- entertainment value and sport is a constant problem for r...

Plastics: The Return of Body Panels?

According to Derek Buckmaster, global market director, Exterior Body Panels and Glazing, GE Plastics, new materials developments are showing solutions vis-a-vis one of the key problems that plastics seem to present, which is the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Buckmaster says that they are working on two different materials for body panels that have reduced CTE. One of them is what they are calling high modulus ductile. Rather than adding glass, they are adding a nano material. This m...