111–120 of 302 posts
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A lot of things humans do are pointless, but all the same we do them. Doesn't stop it being fun does it?
0-180 in the same time and hitting a speed limiter is going to be just as much fun for everyone. Unless you happen to have laid out a strip at Bonneville Salt flats. That seems poor justification.
Does anyone have any insights to if this brings any interesting science to the table that is applicable outside of this context? I personally have zero interest in a fast car going fast, but it's always interesting to see how these sorts of difficult feats help humanity in more general ways.
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Unions, mostly. The tech is there, especially on a 100% grade separated line like the TGV - no road crossings, and the full length is either fenced, in tunnels, or on bridges.
That's true of attempts to remove the guard, but I don't think it's true of automating the driver. Automatic train operation systems are expensive to design and maintain, and their advantage is mainly in precision: if you're trying to put 30 trains an hour down a segment of tube tunnel, it's very helpful if the system reacts immediately to red signals and brakes at a constant predictable rate. For longer distance ser…
In a GoA (Grade of Automation) 4 system the intent is that if things go wrong the remote team operates the train. This obviously means it can't cope with power failure, but these are invariably electric trains so they aren't going anywhere without power anyway. A mechanical fault that renders the train unable to continue safely under its own local supervision would result in a remote operator controlling it though.
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How would a Tesla's initial torque compare to the Bugatti? Would the Bugatti reach 30 mph much faster?
Top Gear actually did a road test of a Tesla S vs an Aston Martin starting at 30 MPH and the Tesla dusted the Aston Martin. Considering electric motors start with max torque, and the stats that are easily googlable, the Tesla would have no problem with the Bugatti. Never mind the Tesla is smaller, has a lower center of gravity, and costs 15x less and has more range. And it's probably worth noting that the Tesla is al…
That car looks remarkably non-aerodynamic for that insane speed.
Many things that look very aerodynamic really aren’t, and vice versa. Much of fluid dynamics is non-intuitive.
He works at it starting with tire limits during ABS braking, and throws in real-world examples like Tesla and the Dodge Demon.
He covers a bunch of other car engineering topics. For example, the Atkinson cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z45fM2N-4C4
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This got me thinking. Once I thought it was fun , but the more I look at it, the more I feel it is utterly pointless. A racing car has a function: to get around a track faster than other cars (over a period of laps). To do this, it needs to be versatile: turning, braking, acceleration, fuel consumption, range of vision and suspension (among others) play a role. That's the true engineering challenge. It's why it has w…
The pointlessness is kind of the point, along with a bit of juvenile thrill. These cars are a display of wealth and excess. You're telling the world you can afford this much power and don't need to worry about things like utility or efficiency, and maybe you'll just keep it in a garage or drive it around a track, but still you can have a car so powerful it's almost illegal and most people can't.
It's pretty impressive. In terms of a daily driver, I think the fun comes from the acceleration, and thus the torque a car can produce. My daily driver is a Mazda 3 / Mazda Axela, which comes with 200 Newtonmeter torque at 6400 rpm. It's ok, it's fun, but yeah. So the other day I drove a 2013 Nissan Leaf (BEV), which gives you ~250 Nm torque right at the beginning. This was so much fun to drive. So for me, a car does…
It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…