Hardly surprising, we seem to have a really bad reputation for making cars unless it's F1.
Even our Mars lander failed.
Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), Britain's sole entrant in the trans-continental World Solar Challenge starting tomorrow in Australia, has withdrawn its “Resolution” vehicle from the race. CUER entered the race with an innovative design featuring tilting solar panels, the better to catch the maximum amount of solar …
Citation Please.....
Then go look at the figures for our Car Exports. 70%+ of what we make is exported.
Then go talk to Honda, Nissan, Toyota and BMW about how we export pretty well engineered and made cars
Then go talk to Ford about hoe we make most of the engines used by Ford in Europe
Then go talk to Rolls Royce and Bentley
etc
etc
etc
We do make lots of 'stuff'. Perhaps you might like to open your eyes.
Wait...are you talking about Jags? Because here in Edmonton Jaguars are well known (infamous) for being vehicles you have to keep a complete set of tools and diagnostic equipment in the trunk. The damned things are always breaking down, the parts are hideously expensive and the "computer" systems on board were crafted from the raw, elemental madness at the centre of the universe.
"Well made cars?"
Bollocks.
we seem to have a really bad reputation for making cars unless it's F1.
If you ignore the jingoism from the three twats then the rest of this says otherwise.
Morgan is about the only UK car manufacturer still alive, all the others are foreign owned
Hence we can blame the faulty Jags on the Indians who own and run it, not on the UK ex unionised car workers who killed the industry by producing Austin Allegro's and Morris Ital's
@AC 11:46
Hence we can blame the faulty Jags on the Indians who own and run it, not on the UK ex unionised car workers who killed the industry by producing Austin Allegro's and Morris Ital's
Are you a greengrocer? Only you seem to have a problem with apostrophes...
We have a now thriving car making industry after investment largely by others so the somewhat off colour snipe was not entirely justified. In any case this appears to have been a design issue rather than a 'making issue'. I does suggest that wind tunnels are not the be all and end all and that physical testing is just as, if not more important.
Progress is made by pushing boundaries, In this case a boundary appears to have been pushed in a possibly wrong direction. To me the machine had proportions that looked out of balance, perhaps to high for the width, perhaps an incompatible suspension geometry, perhaps several issues. I do not know, but any fool can speculate.
One certainty is that it needed more development and validation work before it was shipped. It is this aspect that has been the killer in many other projects, so test, test and test again. Then let someone who knows nothing about the product test it a bit more - they will probably find more issues than you knew could possibly exist. (I liked using staff from seriously non technical departments, they could and did break everything until it was strengthened to withstand their best efforts.)
Fair play to them - they tried, and ultimately they can't risk people's lives if they have a good reason to be worried.
They tried something innovative, and most of it worked well. There's a lot of good that's come out of it even if the headline isn't what they wanted.
Well done to the team.
Wrote :- "If you're so clever, why aren't you out there?"
Why the sarcasm? The first thing that sprang to my own mind when I read TFA is how the hell did they get to within a day of the start before discovering there are fundamental stability problems with the design?
As for being "out there" if "you're so clever", there are plenty of other "clever" things to be done other than attending this event. In my case, I am busy helping to keep power stations running, but if I had been a few years younger I might well have been involved in this project.
However, as an engineer of some experience by now, I would comment that insufficient attention to dynamics, as opposed to the statics and quasi-statics, is the downfall of many engineering designs.
"Why the sarcasm?"
Why the necessity for the original AC to post a snarky "Weren't *they* stupid" post? An opinion, it seems, that you appear to share without knowing much more than the AC did. As it says in the article testing “revealed new dynamic instabilities, which we have not been able to fix in the time we have left before the race.” but it's easy to make comments on such things with 20/20 hindsight.
With all due respect, it's a 3,000 km run.
The car needs to be stable. The test track can only give you a single snapshot of the conditions you might experience on the road.
I can't say I like the idea of using tilting solar panels on an ultra light vehicle that may not in its basic configuration be particularly stable or easy to control
Dear sad faces, you can support Stella from Eindhoven:
http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/team/view/8
It's competing in the Cruiser class (4 wheels, 2 drivers) as favourite but was already beating all vehicles but one from the Challenger class in the qualification round. But perhaps everyone was holding back :)
They made an effort to combine a very narrow aerodynamic shape with tilting solar panels and the result wasn't stable and the car pranged. You just have to read or watch "The Right Stuff" or "Unsafe at Any Speed" to realize that a lot more money, testing and engineering time has gone into machines whose safety characteristics resulted in a lot worse....
So, my condolences and congratulations to the Cambridge team. My one suggestion is that they develop the car somewhere that has more sunshine :)
Ah, I see that some of us haven't done much engineering or software development. You can test all you want, try and replicate every real-world situation you can think of, get sort of smug and launch your product and then, guess what, hubris is followed by nemesis.
Then you go back and fix the problems: change the antenna in a mobile phone; replace a start button; recall 2 million cars to fix a problem; put helium in airships, not hydrogen; don't build reactors in tsunami-ridden earthquake zones; whatever.
The Cambridge people tried, it didn't work as envisaged and they've learnt what doesn't work, a normal real-world development stage, not a disaster.
Ah, but to be honest, one look at this thing, and the first (well, second, after - cool idea with the tilting panels) thought you have is 'that'll fall over the first time they hit a bump on a corner". So it's less a matter of testing, and more of finding someone who know a little about car dynamics (and Formula Student would probably help there).
It is odd that they only found the problem at the event itself though. I guess all their testing was on very flat tracks, which is understandable since they cannot actually test run it legally on a road in the UK.