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angelr
Can you avoid being killed or injured in a car crash if you are a defensive driver, remain vigilant, and is always in your mirrors watching out for other dangerous drivers while driving on the roads? Or is there just no way to escape a dangerous driver? Also does seat belts help to protect you? I ask this question because I am going to begin taking drivers training lessons soon and would just like to know. I'd appreciate it alot.
Answer
If you are careful and avoid situations involving idiot drivers you can avoid almost all accidents. However sooner or later you will be in one that is not your fault.
Think about all those trucks that were in that chain reaction I-5 tunnel collision. No matter how great the guy in the middle truck was he was guaranteed to be involved when the vehicle ahead of him slammed into another one and stopped and the guy behind him kept going until it hit his truck.
I was in myself this summer where I was in a line of cars stopped for a red light and the car behind me slammed into my car because that driver had no idea that 10 cars in front of her had been stopped for a while waiting for that light to turn.
As far as seat belts all you have to do is listen to the evening news. There is always a story about "a car filled with four teenagers slammed into a tree at high speed. The three without seat-belts were ejected from the car and pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth had a seat belt and was taken to the local hospital with non-life threatening injuries."
If you are careful and avoid situations involving idiot drivers you can avoid almost all accidents. However sooner or later you will be in one that is not your fault.
Think about all those trucks that were in that chain reaction I-5 tunnel collision. No matter how great the guy in the middle truck was he was guaranteed to be involved when the vehicle ahead of him slammed into another one and stopped and the guy behind him kept going until it hit his truck.
I was in myself this summer where I was in a line of cars stopped for a red light and the car behind me slammed into my car because that driver had no idea that 10 cars in front of her had been stopped for a while waiting for that light to turn.
As far as seat belts all you have to do is listen to the evening news. There is always a story about "a car filled with four teenagers slammed into a tree at high speed. The three without seat-belts were ejected from the car and pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth had a seat belt and was taken to the local hospital with non-life threatening injuries."
What was the first road car to use limited-slip differential?
nakkecil22
I know Ferdinand Porsche used it on a GP car in 1932, but did he use it in the early 356? Or the early 911? Because I found that the Facel Vega HK500 had LSD.
I've wondered now, all of a sudden, since I thought LSD was new.
Answer
The main reason why manufacturers, to this day, have poured millions into auto racing is that it really is a testing ground for the production car industry; quantum leaps such as disc brakes would have taken decades more to hit the streets if Jaguar had not evaluated them on it's successful C-Type race car.
Getting power from the engine to the wheels of an automobile has provided a seemingly endless challenge for rear-wheel-drive, front-wheel-drive, 4-wheel-drive, front-engine, rear-engine, and mid-engine cars, longitudinal, transverse, vertical, slant, and flat engines, plus an amazing array of hardware in between. George Selden's notorious 1877 patent was for a front-drive carriage with a transverse 3-cylinder engine, anticipating the Chevy/Suzuki Sprint by over a century. When it comes to car designs, there are very few new ideas, just progressively successful adaptations of old concepts.
The heart of the drivetrain is the transmission. Because gasoline engines develop their torque over a very narrow speed range, several gears are needed to reach useful road speeds. (Steam engines and electric motors can be used in cars with no transmissions.)
The modern transmission was introduced by a pair of Frenchmen -- Louis-Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor -- in 1894. The engineers had invited the press to a demonstration of "the most revolutionary advancement to date in the brief history of the motor car industry." Unfortunately, the engine in their demo vehicle died, and they were reduced to giving a chalk talk on multi-geared transmission theory to a bored press corps.
One 19th-century newsman reported their invention as "more hocus-pocus from charlatans trying to cash in on the public's fascination with the new motor car." Maybe the inventors should have skipped the tech talk and just used the description later attributed to Panhard: "It's brutal, but it works!"
Cars of the time transmitted engine power to the wheels in a simple fashion that was easy for non-engineers to visualize. The engine drove a set of bevel reduction gears that drove a shaft and pulley. Leather belts extended between the pulley and geared wheels on an axle. One wheel, the small one, got the car going by meshing with a ring gear on one of the driving wheels. The big wheel then took over to get the car to hustle along at a top speed of 20 mph. If the car encountered a hill that it did not have the power to climb, the driver would come to a dead stop so he could engage the small wheel.
Thus did British auto pioneer F. W. Lanchester describe the transmissions in his cars: "One belt-driven HIGH gear that will go over everything and one bel-driven LOW gear in case the car had to climb a tree."
It was not until a year after their disastrous news conference that Panhard and Levassor regained their reputations. At this time, they had their first car ready for the press to drive. With it, they changed a lot of minds.
That 1895 Panhard-Levassor was revolutionary -- not the transmission alone, but the whole drivetrain layout. In fact, it has served as the prototype for most vehicles built in the 90 years since then. Unlike other cars of that day, it possessed a vertically mounted engine in the front of the vehicle that drove the rear wheels through a clutch, 3-speed sliding gear transmission and chain-driven axle. The only modern features missing from the setup were a differential rear axle and driveshaft. These came along three years later, in 1898, when millionaire-turned-auto-hobbyist Louis Renault connected a vertical engine with transmission to a "live" rear axle by means of a metal shaft.
The live rear axle -- which Renault adapted from an idea developed in 1893 by an American, C. E. Duryea -- was called the differential rear axle. It used a number of gears to overcome the problem of rapid tire wear, which resulted on turns with the "dead" axles used by all other carmakers. "Differential" referred to the ability of the unit to turn the outer driving wheel faster than the inner driving wheel, eliminating tire scuffing in turns.
By 1904, the Panhard-Levassor sliding gear manual transmission had been adopted by most carmakers. In one form or another, it has remained in use until recent times. Obviously, there have been improvements, the most significant being the invention of a synchronizing system that permits drive and driven gears to be brought into mesh with each other smoothly without gear clashing. This system allows both sets of gears to reach the same speed before they are engaged. The first of these synchromesh transmissions was introduced by Cadillac in 1928. An improvement to the design patented by Porsche is widely used today.
Between the time the sliding gear-transmission was introduced and the perfection of the synchromesh, there were other attempts at making it easier for the driver to shift gears. One was the planetary transmission in the 1908 Model T Ford. It had a central gear, called the "sun" gea
The main reason why manufacturers, to this day, have poured millions into auto racing is that it really is a testing ground for the production car industry; quantum leaps such as disc brakes would have taken decades more to hit the streets if Jaguar had not evaluated them on it's successful C-Type race car.
Getting power from the engine to the wheels of an automobile has provided a seemingly endless challenge for rear-wheel-drive, front-wheel-drive, 4-wheel-drive, front-engine, rear-engine, and mid-engine cars, longitudinal, transverse, vertical, slant, and flat engines, plus an amazing array of hardware in between. George Selden's notorious 1877 patent was for a front-drive carriage with a transverse 3-cylinder engine, anticipating the Chevy/Suzuki Sprint by over a century. When it comes to car designs, there are very few new ideas, just progressively successful adaptations of old concepts.
The heart of the drivetrain is the transmission. Because gasoline engines develop their torque over a very narrow speed range, several gears are needed to reach useful road speeds. (Steam engines and electric motors can be used in cars with no transmissions.)
The modern transmission was introduced by a pair of Frenchmen -- Louis-Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor -- in 1894. The engineers had invited the press to a demonstration of "the most revolutionary advancement to date in the brief history of the motor car industry." Unfortunately, the engine in their demo vehicle died, and they were reduced to giving a chalk talk on multi-geared transmission theory to a bored press corps.
One 19th-century newsman reported their invention as "more hocus-pocus from charlatans trying to cash in on the public's fascination with the new motor car." Maybe the inventors should have skipped the tech talk and just used the description later attributed to Panhard: "It's brutal, but it works!"
Cars of the time transmitted engine power to the wheels in a simple fashion that was easy for non-engineers to visualize. The engine drove a set of bevel reduction gears that drove a shaft and pulley. Leather belts extended between the pulley and geared wheels on an axle. One wheel, the small one, got the car going by meshing with a ring gear on one of the driving wheels. The big wheel then took over to get the car to hustle along at a top speed of 20 mph. If the car encountered a hill that it did not have the power to climb, the driver would come to a dead stop so he could engage the small wheel.
Thus did British auto pioneer F. W. Lanchester describe the transmissions in his cars: "One belt-driven HIGH gear that will go over everything and one bel-driven LOW gear in case the car had to climb a tree."
It was not until a year after their disastrous news conference that Panhard and Levassor regained their reputations. At this time, they had their first car ready for the press to drive. With it, they changed a lot of minds.
That 1895 Panhard-Levassor was revolutionary -- not the transmission alone, but the whole drivetrain layout. In fact, it has served as the prototype for most vehicles built in the 90 years since then. Unlike other cars of that day, it possessed a vertically mounted engine in the front of the vehicle that drove the rear wheels through a clutch, 3-speed sliding gear transmission and chain-driven axle. The only modern features missing from the setup were a differential rear axle and driveshaft. These came along three years later, in 1898, when millionaire-turned-auto-hobbyist Louis Renault connected a vertical engine with transmission to a "live" rear axle by means of a metal shaft.
The live rear axle -- which Renault adapted from an idea developed in 1893 by an American, C. E. Duryea -- was called the differential rear axle. It used a number of gears to overcome the problem of rapid tire wear, which resulted on turns with the "dead" axles used by all other carmakers. "Differential" referred to the ability of the unit to turn the outer driving wheel faster than the inner driving wheel, eliminating tire scuffing in turns.
By 1904, the Panhard-Levassor sliding gear manual transmission had been adopted by most carmakers. In one form or another, it has remained in use until recent times. Obviously, there have been improvements, the most significant being the invention of a synchronizing system that permits drive and driven gears to be brought into mesh with each other smoothly without gear clashing. This system allows both sets of gears to reach the same speed before they are engaged. The first of these synchromesh transmissions was introduced by Cadillac in 1928. An improvement to the design patented by Porsche is widely used today.
Between the time the sliding gear-transmission was introduced and the perfection of the synchromesh, there were other attempts at making it easier for the driver to shift gears. One was the planetary transmission in the 1908 Model T Ford. It had a central gear, called the "sun" gea
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