Are Innovations In Cars Really New Ideas?
1940 Crosley Its funny, but a lot of the stuff that comes out we think of as new and innovative and yet, some of it is so old that no one would believe it. Take cars for example. Everyone is thrilled with the new hybrids, the cars that have gasoline engines and electric engines on board. When first announced everyone thought well this is an unusual idea. The electric car had been around as long as the gasoline car and electric, gas and steam fought for dominance and gasoline won. But was the hybrid car really a new idea? Not at all. The first hybrid car came out even before the 20th century. It came out in 1898. No one was ready for this idea then and it quickly went by the roadside. We could have been riding sophisticated hybrid cars for over one hundred and ten years already. Cars are strange beasts because many of the ideas that we see today in the newest of cars, are not new ideas at all. The hybrid car that came out in 1898 was the Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid. Yes that guy Porsche is the same one who invented the Porsche sports car that everyone desires. When he created this hybrid, he was only 18 years old. Here is the great part, not only was it an electric hybrid but it used the same type of system that most of the electric hybrids use today and that is electric motors on each wheel. They actually sold over 300 of these cars. I don't know if any survive today, but I guess they would be impractical by our standards, because it took over 2 tons of lead acid batteries to power it and the top speed was only 37 miles per hour, but this was quite brisk for the time. Remember this was in a time when many places had a law that a man with a flag or lantern had to walk in front of a car as it traveled through their town.
Tucker Some cars had been designed with great ideas in mind such as the Tucker, which had a headlight that actually turned as the car made a turn. While we don't see this in most production cars today, it was a very good idea. The Tucker was only manufactured in 1947 and 1948, with only 51 cars made in 1948. It came out with 4 wheel independent suspension, a rubber torsion tube instead of springs, an aluminum engine and fuel injection among other things, including a padded dash board. The other car companies at the time saw this new upstart car company as a threat and did everything in their power to force it out of business and succeeded. Some of the other great things that the car had was a roll bar in the roof, a frame that surrounded the car for crash protection and design features to protect the driver in the event of a front end crash. The windshield popped out in case of a crash. The car even had seat belts. It had the same drag coefficient as a modern Honda Civic Hybrid. Do you think that the idea of a back-up camera is something new in the automotive industry? It certainly seems that it would be, since you would think that it would be tied in somehow to the car's computer system, wouldn't you? You would be wrong if you thought that though. There was actually a Volvo created in the early 1970s that had a backup camera and a lot more. It had rollover protection, crumple zones, collapsing steering wheel, seat belts that locked when in a collision, anti-lock brakes and even head rests that popped up. I guess that you are beginning to see that there really isn't anything new in the automotive industry except for maybe computers and their related applications. That early Volvo became the Volvo 240, but the camera was ditched. As you can see by the first car that I mentioned, the Porsche has always been ahead of his time. Porsche has just about led the world in getting the most from the smallest engines and now this is spreading to many other companies. In 1986 the Porsche 959 had 450 horsepower and almost 500 pounds of torque that was squeezed out of a 2.8 liter engine and sent through a four wheel drive system. Cars like the 2011 Hyundai Sonata have a 2.4 Liter engine as standard that puts out about 200 horse power and some cars are squeezing much more out of small engines today. The Crosley was one of the first compact cars. It was light and powered by a 2 cylinder engine and got about 50 miles per gallon of gas. They introduced the first American Sport Utility in 1948. they also introduced the first mass produced single overhead camshaft engine in 1946. It had 4 wheel disc brakes installed in 1949 and Crosley came out with the first American sports car in 1949 called the Hotshot. On top of all that, it came out with a model that was known as a farm car and was the forerunner of the John Deere Gator. The Hotshot was small but it won the Index of Performance at Sebring in 1951 and also the Grand de la Suisse that year. Crosley actually built a sheet metal engine for war time use, but when installed in cars after the war, it had a poor endurance record.
1987 AMC Eagle Think crossover vehicles are new? Not really. They all owe their roots to the American Motors Corporation, which was later bought by Chrysler. The American Motors Eagle was the world's first full time all wheel drive passenger car. It came in two, three and four door models and paved the way for all those all wheel drive vehicles that came after it. Lastly I would like to mention the General Motors EV-1 again. This was the electric car that GM had leased out starting in 1996 and produced for 3 years. People loved it so much that did everything to try and buy them, but GM would have none of that and collected them all back and had them destroyed. The problem was that some big people and big companies were thought to have killed the car to reduce the chance of it ever going into production and hurting the sales of gasoline. So you see there were many innovations in the past 120 years or so that the automobile has been around. Many of them disappeared only to reappear in the newer cars as great new accessories or options. Much of what we have in cars today we could have had years ago, but for one reason or another we didn't. Take seat belts for example, they were very unpopular with the public who believed that not only were they too much trouble, but that they would trap them in their cars in case of an accident. We know better today, but we didn't in the late forties when they first appeared. Most of the rest of the stuff was thought unnecessary since the U.S. had little or no competition in auto sales. When competition did start heating up, some of the advances that had been experimented with previously did start to appear again. |
