A little while ago I wrote about drum brakes and it reminded me of the Le Mans winning Jaguars of the 1950s. One of the advantages the Jags had over their American, German and Italian rivals was their use of disc brakes. The other cars mostly still used drum brakes that were inferior in their ability to slow a car down. Thus the Jags could brake much later than the other cars … [Read more...]
Space Frame Chassis
A while back I described the use of the monocoque to produce a very strong but heavy chassis that probably 90% of the world's mass produced cars use. As a follow on, I’ll talk about the space frame chassis that really took off after World War 2, however like many technologies had it’s birth closer to the start of the industry. A space frame is a truss – multi interconnecting … [Read more...]
Drum Brakes
Drum brakes were the first type of speed reduction on an automobile (apart from engine braking). The design came from the clasp brake that railway locomotives used - the difference being that a clasp brake applies pressure on the outside of the wheel and the drum brake applies it on the inside of the mechanism. It is a very simple design and concept, to reduce speed, the brake … [Read more...]
Light Detection and Ranging Technology
Now called LIDAR, it was originally named after a mix of light and RADAR because it does the same thing as RADAR but uses light instead of radio waves (the “RA" in RADAR). It is now one of the technologies used in self driving (or autonomous) vehicles combined with cameras, ultrasonic detectors, GPS and radar equipment. These pieces of equipment have been around for decades … [Read more...]
De Dion Suspension
The De Dion Suspension system came out of one of the industry’s first manufacturers, De Dion Bouton, although it wasn’t Count De Dion or Monsieur Bouton who invented the suspension but the Count’s brother-in-law Charles Trepardeaux who worked for them for a while. Trepardeaux designed a way to keep the wheels on the ground when the vehicle was travelling. He originally … [Read more...]
