
What about those funny shaped cars? [video] - fortran77
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7H396OOGZw
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csours
There really is an amazing cross-over between cars and airplanes in the 1930s,
to the extent that General Motors bought an airline! (Disclaimer, I work for
GM, but I did not work for GM in the 1930s)

Both airplanes and cars were very new, and they shared many design features
and goals.

Where did it all go wrong? For one small example, consider the weight
penalty/bounty. These number are illustrative, not exact or proportional.

Imagine that saving 1 gram of weight on an airplane would be worth 1 dollar
over the lifetime of the airplane. In that case you would have a bounty of 1
dollar per gram; your engineers could spend that dollar to "add lightness" to
the airplane. The purchase price would go up, but the lifetime cost of
ownership would go down.

For an automobile, the bounty might be 0.05 dollar per gram. Automobiles are
getting lighter nowadays, but very slowly.

So, if you try to make a car with the same structural components as an
airplane, you may be paying a penalty of up to 0.95 dollars per gram
relatively speaking!

In other words, you're paying just as much for your flying car as you would
have for an airplane, and now you have a vehicle that is bad at both being a
car and being an airplane.

This entirely leaves aside safety equipment and many other questions.

\---

One other thing to note is that many of the "streamlined" cars shown are
actually aerodynamic disasters due to small trim pieces/headlights/etc; but
they never actually got fast enough for it to really matter.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I think the idea that there were shared design goals, was their fatal mistake.
You illustrate several of these, thank you.

The speed difference is another - streamlining mattered not at all for a car
at the speeds they were generally going at that time.

Further, a plane is always headed into the wind; cars are pinned to the road
by friction and most often have cross-winds. There were tragic car rollover
problems throughout the 30's because of this misconception/failure to
recognize utterly different design goals.

Generally the only thing in common was, a factory making chassis and shells.
Other than the manufacturing technology, there was almost complete mismatch of
design goals.

~~~
dredmorbius
Prime movers and fuels also.

Both the automobile and airplane ... took off ... atvirtually the same moment,
once petroleum-based fuels and reciprocating, Otto-cycle engines existed.
Power-to-weight matters _more_ for aircraft, but it's a critical problem for
both, along with range (fuel capacity) and reliability.

Body design and aerodynamics aren't the only issue. Though also a bigger
problem for aircraft.

Materials (duraluminium), controls, aerodynamic theory, infrastructure
(airports, navigation, traffic control, safety standards, incident
investigations, etc.), are other key elements.

Then came gas turbines. Auto engineers tried to apply them but they weren't a
good fit.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Controls, maybe not so much? The road-impulse and 16ft lane limits of the
auto, apply to a plane not at all.

And so many pod-car designers didn't address controls at all. They just took a
Ford chassis and made a new (wood!) frame and skin.

Further, the auto price-point means the fancy materials were a no-go for a
production car anyway.

As for traffic control, safety, navigation - different as night and day. Good
call.

~~~
dredmorbius
For controls: development, and especially, standardization.

For aircraft, there's the matteer of movement in three dimensions, with speed,
yaw, pitch, and roll controls, as well as communication, navigation, and cabin
environment controls. Autos have only two dimensions of freedom and less
complex requirements generally, but orders of magnitude more operators with
orders of magnitude less training and oversight. Addressing user-base scale is
its own complex problem.[1]

To be clear, my list of key elements wasn't asserting _equivalence_ between
land vs. air craft, but adding them to fuels and engines as crucial enabling
technologies.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Arguably, much of the increase in computer processing capacity has gone in
to enabling ever less-skilled populations to make effective use of them.

------
chrismorgan
This style of design, prioritising aerodynamics highly, hasn’t been popular in
cars for a long time, but it is popular in one niche type of vehicle:
velomobiles, which are recumbent tricycles with a full fairing (shell). When
you’re doing all the pedalling, there’s a little more incentive to optimise
its aerodynamics than when you’re merely paying for the fuel.

I’ve had an unfaired recumbent tricycle (a Greenspeed GT3) for over five years
and they’re great, especially for long-distance travel and touring (I’ve gone
on solo multi-week trips a few times, e.g. St Louis to Philadelphia in America
and through parts of Victoria and South Australia in Australia). I’m currently
planning and intend soon to start designing a velomobile and trailer that I’d
like to build from scratch next year. (These plans are subject to complete
change, of course.) It’s an interesting domain where a casual person with no
particularly relevant training can actually get going and produce quite decent
results at comparatively low cost. (I mean less than a few thousand dollars.)
There’s lots of interesting and useful information on the internet, though
most of it is from 2005–2012, which is a common era for interesting things
happening on the internet, and you’ll find lots of broken links, and it’ll
probably help a bit if you’re Dutch.

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Loughla
2 things about this.

1\. Those designs may have just been ahead of their time, and now that retro-
future is back in fashion, I could see those swept designs being wildly
popular. I would love to own a vehicle that looks like a 1940's-1950's view of
the future.

2\. I am glad that people like Matthew Bird exist in the world.

~~~
pp19dd
Re: #1, I would love a modern car that looks like a 1937 Packard 120C:
[https://i.imgur.com/i6HxWbm.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/i6HxWbm.jpg)

This is just wishful thinking, but electric cars might be the way forward in
making that happen. Customizable top shell, standardized bottom skate. Design
and order your own.

~~~
sho_hn
Body-work is heavy regulated. E.g. location and size of bumpers, certain
lights not allowed on movable body-work, etc. A lot of the "top shell" also
has structural elements under other regulations.

Lots of older-gen designs would not be certifyably street legal if released
today.

~~~
Guest0918231
That's true. Morgan does make some new vehicles with a classic look though.

[https://i.imgur.com/5sc1Baz.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/5sc1Baz.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/FVlIX2V.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FVlIX2V.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/eEalrSe.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/eEalrSe.jpg)

~~~
notatoad
i believe Morgan falls under the exemptions for small-volume carmakers. Toyota
couldn't get away with that design on the next-gen Camry for example, but as
long as you're only making a few cars you can do some more adventurous things
with the design.

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tingletech
I wonder if there will be a resurgence of the "large scooter" mini cars from
the end of the talk -- but using the new battery and motor tech that the lime-
type scooters use.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
As long as states keep regulating "smaller than a car but doesn't fit into any
existing category vehicles" the same way they regulate motorcycles (all the
insurance licensing and registration stuff you have to put up with for a car
possibly plus some) there will be little to no space for them in the market
because the people who can afford them will mostly just buy similar price used
cars instead because those will deliver better utility, comfort and safety at
the same price point. If you want people to try something new at scale you
gotta make it worth their while and barring some yet unforeseen technological
breakthrough that applies to sub-car sized vehicles but not cars I don't see
any way of doing that besides easing regulation on smaller than car vehicles.

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jansan
Nobody has mentioned Matthew Bird's voice, yet. Isn't it just fantastic? This
is exactly the tone of voice that I could listen to all day.

