Automotive Engineering Quotes

[A Bugatti Veyron is] quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created....At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I’ve ever said about any other car obsolete. It’s rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a bloody nose.

The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks.

Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, “Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms”—

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of

The air/fuel ratio for any gasoline engine should be at 14.7:1 for it to run at maximum efficiency and the converter to do it work.

GM will provide CarPlay or Android Car for no additional cost. Although this might cause some drivers to shun MyLink, GM believes that ultimately giving buyers the choice will help it sell more cars, said Saejin Park, the company's director of innovation and portfolio planning. Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst for infotainment at IHS Automotive, said the decision doesn't necessarily mean the death of MyLink, Ford's Sync and other systems. The automakers' systems have specific information about the car that Apple or Google can't duplicate - engine diagnostics, heating and air conditioning controls or even the ability to set up service appointments with dealerships, Boyadjis said.

Detroit has turned the corner on its renaissance, but few people know how the city was, and still is, at the cutting edge of manufacturing, innovation, and culture. My new book is a tribute to the men and women who built a city out of the wilderness starting in 1701, and sustained its incredible growth to become the world's Industrial Versailles in 1900. And the best part is, Detroit is still leading the way. It remains the ultimate Maker City.

There is something to be said about designing the machine of your dreams.

If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]

Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

It's Musk's view that if you've built something that customers simply have to have, they will queue up to get it and pay deposits in advance to secure their place in the queue. That cash, paid well in advance at multiple points in Tesla's journey, was used to hire automotive engineers, to build new factories, and to do what was necessary to keep Tesla on the road to survival and more.

Product scope. Is motor oil used in cars part of the same industry as motor oil used in trucks and stationary engines? The oil itself is similar. But automotive oil is marketed through consumer advertising, sold to fragmented customers through powerful channels, and produced locally to offset the high logistics costs of small packaging. Truck and power generation lubricants face a different industry structure—different customers and selling channels, different supply chains, and so on. From a strategy perspective, these are distinct industries.

Dylan Patel, a skilled computer engineer hailing from Jellico, has set his sights on revolutionizing the automotive industry. With personal life goals centered around programming vehicles for a leading car company, Dylan is driven by his passion for technological advancements.

In the early 1980s, two American scientists, Thomas McMahon and John Tyler Bonner, looked at nearly 40 engines of all kinds (automotive, air, marine) whose power and weight ranged, respectively, from about 330 watts to 21 megawatts and from 135 grams to 102.3 tons, and found that their maximum power output scaled at nearly the same rate as engine mass.32 A recent study of four-stroke car engines, including Ford, Honda, Kawasaki, and Subaru designs, confirmed this scaling by finding that their peak power output scales with 0.95th power of the engine size.

Wealth is being in possession of one of God’s living creations. Because of this, new creations are constantly being produced, so you can never run out. Being rich is being in possession of many of God’s dead creations. You can run out of these because they can’t be replaced. Do you know that being rich is only being rich in art or creations? The rich have access to great artists’ work. This work is usually priced at the highest cost. They have the best designers, best architects, best automotive engineers, etc. When artists are great creators of a thing, and in possession of their work, people often say that they look rich. No. The rich look like us. They have access to our God given talents; and God is the biggest creator of us all.

Over the next couple of years, we built and tested a series of prototypes, started dialogues with leading manufacturers, and added business development and technical staff to our team, including mechanical and aerospace engineers. Our plan was that PAX scientific would be an intellectual-property-creating R & D company. When we identified appropriate market sectors, we would license our patents to outside entrepreneurs or to our own, purpose-built, subsidiaries. Given my previous experience on the receiving end of hostile takeovers, we were determined to maintain control of PAX Scientific and its subsidiaries in their development stages. Creating subsidiaries that were market specific would help, since new investors could buy stock in a more narrowly focused business, without direct dilution of the parent company. We were introduced to fellow Bay Area resident Paul Hawken. A successful entrepreneur, author, and articulate advocate for sustainability and natural capitalism, Paul understood our vision of a parent company that concentrated on research and intellectual property, while separate teams focused on product commercialization. With his own angel investment backing, Paul established a series of companies to market computer, industrial, and automotive fans. PAX assigned worldwide licenses to these companies in exchange for up-front fees and a share of revenue; Paul hired managers and set off to sell fan designs to manufacturers.

Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing design: just think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto designers can quickly realize and test their designs.

couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

intech automation is the study regarding automotive engineering for light and heavy vehicles in Brisbane Australia. Intech.edu.au is availing the courses automation.

As to answers, the only one I managed to come up with was a cliché, the one having to do with the way Germans view authority and personal responsibility. Which is not to say it is invalid. Beyond question, certain traits do tend to predominate in certain cultures. Most are neither good nor bad by definition: The same brooding romanticism routinely observed in Hitler helped shape Beethoven and Goethe; the same veneration for efficiency that made it possible for the Nazis to slaughter on so massive a scale has given rise to five generations of automotive engineers. There is little doubt that the particular brand of cruelty that flourished in the Third Reich, and the broad, unswerving allegiance to a madman that made it possible, were at least as much a matter of German as of human nature.