Reinventing the Automobile Mitchell, William J; Borroni-Bird, Chris E; Burns, Lawrence D
2010, 20100129, 2019-06-20
eBook
This book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned ...sedans of fifty years ago. In the twenty-first century, cars are still made for twentieth-century purposes. They're well suited for conveying multiple passengers over long distances at high speeds, but inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities--where most of the world's people now live. In this pathbreaking book, William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive. They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely. First, we must transform the DNA of the automobile, basing it on electric-drive and wireless communication rather than on petroleum, the internal combustion engine, and stand-alone operation. This allows vehicles to become lighter, cleaner, and "smart" enough to avoid crashes and traffic jams. Second, automobiles will be linked by a Mobility Internet that allows them to collect and share data on traffic conditions, intelligently coordinates their movements, and keeps drivers connected to their social networks. Third, automobiles must be recharged through a convenient, cost-effective infrastructure that is integrated with smart electric grids and makes increasing use of renewable energy sources. Finally, dynamically priced markets for electricity, road space, parking space, and shared-use vehicles must be introduced to provide optimum management of urban mobility and energy systems. The fundamental reinvention of the automobile won't be easy, but it is an urgent necessity--to make urban mobility more convenient and sustainable, to make cities more livable, and to help bring the automobile industry out of crisis.Four Big Ideas That Could Transform the Automobile Base the underlying design principles on electric-drive and wireless communications rather than the internal combustion engine and stand-alone operation Develop the Mobility Internet for sharing traffic and travel data Integrate electric-drive vehicles with smart electric grids that use clean, renewable energy sources Establish dynamically priced markets for electricity, road space, parking space, and shared-use vehicles
In the near future, we will witness vehicles with the ability to provide drivers with several advanced safety and performance assistance features. Autonomous technology in ground vehicles will afford ...us capabilities like intersection collision warning, lane change warning, backup parking, parallel parking aids, and bus precision parking. Providing you with a practical understanding of this technology area, this innovative resource focuses on basic autonomous control and feedback for stopping and steering ground vehicles.Covering sensors, estimation, and sensor fusion to percept the vehicle motion and surrounding objects, this unique book explains the key aspects that makes autonomous vehicle behavior possible. Moreover, you find detailed examples of fusion and Kalman filtering. From maps, path planning, and obstacle avoidance scenarios...to cooperative mobility among autonomous vehicles, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, this forward-looking book presents the most critical topics in the field today.
An important barrier to electric vehicle (EV) sales is their high purchase price compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. We conducted total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations to ...study how costs and sales of EVs relate to each other and to examine the role of fiscal incentives in reducing TCO and increasing EV sales. We composed EV-ICE vehicle pairs that allowed cross-segment and cross-country comparison in eight European countries. Actual car prices were used to calculate the incentives for each model in each country. We found a negative TCO-sales relationship that differs across car segments. Compared to their ICE vehicle pair, big EVs have lower TCO, higher sales, and seem to be less price responsive than small EVs. Three country groups can be distinguished according to the level of fiscal incentives and their impact on TCO and EV sales. In Norway, incentives led to the lowest TCO for the EVs. In the Netherlands, France, and UK the TCO of EVs is close to the TCO of the ICE pairs. In the other countries the TCO of EVs exceeds that of the ICE vehicles. We found that exemptions from flat taxes favour big EVs, while lump-sum subsidies favour small EVs.
•Pairwise comparison of EV and ICE vehicle TCO and sales in eight European countries.•In NO, EV TCO is lower than ICE TCO; in NL, FR, and UK, EV TCO is slightly higher.•Compared to ICE vehicles, big EVs have lower TCO and higher sales than small EVs.•Exemptions from flat taxes favour big EVs, lump-sum subsidies favour small EVs.•Most popular EV models: Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV.
Throughout the last century, the automobile industry achieved remarkable milestones in manufacturing reliable, safe, and affordable vehicles. Because of significant recent advances in computation and ...communication technologies, autonomous cars are becoming a reality. Already autonomous car prototype models have covered millions of miles in test driving. Leading technical companies and car manufacturers have invested a staggering amount of resources in autonomous car technology, as they prepare for autonomous cars' full commercialization in the coming years. However, to achieve this goal, several technical and nontechnical issues remain: software complexity, real-time data analytics, and testing and verification are among the greater technical challenges; and consumer stimulation, insurance management, and ethical/moral concerns rank high among the nontechnical issues. Tackling these challenges requires thoughtful solutions that satisfy consumers, industry, and governmental requirements, regulations, and policies. Thus, here we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art results for autonomous car technology. We discuss current issues that hinder autonomous cars' development and deployment on a large scale. We also highlight autonomous car applications that will benefit consumers and many other sectors. Finally, to enable cost-effective, safe, and efficient autonomous cars, we discuss several challenges that must be addressed (and provide helpful suggestions for adoption) by designers, implementers, policymakers, regulatory organizations, and car manufacturers.
Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an automobile utopia. In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced ...architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way.
While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century.
Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed autopia as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.
To widely commercialize electric vehicles more efforts for their life improvement seem extremely inevitable. Thermal conditions can have profound and nonlinear effects on the degradation rate of an ...electric vehicle battery pack as well as its performance and safety level. In the current study, both cycle life and calendar life of a commercial LiFePO.sub.4 cell are investigated experimentally by means of capacity fading and resistance increment evaluation for 4 different thermal conditions from extremely cold condition of - 20 °C-which is not well studied in the literature-till hot condition of 55 °C. The calendar life tests show that the best condition for storing cells is at 5 °C and 50% SOC and the cycle life tests demonstrate that the best operating temperature is 25 °C based on the dynamic stress test discharge/charge profile (a test profile for electric vehicles). It is also found that the capacity fading and resistance increment at a high temperature such as 50 °C are destructively significant. The presented curves in this paper can also serve as an aging data source for further work on battery lifetime modeling and diagnostics. The role of temperature on the degradation level is also discovered via scanning electron microscopy.
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