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Cars To Be Assembled Atom By Atom
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a new article, the Detroit News says that the adoption of nanotechnology by car manufacturers will produce safer, lighter and cheaper vehicles. While GM is already using nanocomposite materials for several vans, Ford is developing new nanoengineered catalysts to replace platinum. The newspaper gives other examples, such as auto-adaptive suspension systems, scratch-resistant paints or nanocoated windshields which will not crack. In fact, all parts in a car can be improved by using nanotechnology, according to the article. And if automakers are only going to introduce limited amounts of nanotechnology-related products in the next few years, their usage should be widespread within ten years. More details are available in this overview."
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Excuse my ignorace, but surely nanotechnology would produce safer, lighter and cheaper (depending on the meaning.. I'm assuming consumer-side cost) everything?
At what point then could we just download 'plans' off P2P and just 'grow' our own car, house, dinner....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think this is "reporter getting carried away by 'nano' buzzword". Nano is NOT the holy grail. Maybe some parts will have nano coatings, but those aren't even assembled "atom-by-atom".
I'm out of gas and I need directions to the nearest gas station so I can spend $2 a gallon on an antiquated and crude fuel to make my futuristic nanocar run.
Thanks!
-Rylfaeth
...I, for one, welcome our -
ahh, scrub it. People will still find a way to drive like idiots, even in super nanotechnologically advanced cars.
Good technology, just too much hype.
if you think that a cheapskate industry like the automotive industry will be all up in nanotech.
Manufacturers are too cheap to do things like hot dip galvanizing body and frame, but they will use a bunch of nanotech? Ironic. Something as simple and low-tech as galvinizing cars that would double or triple their lifetime are left out as too expensive...
Let's start with the simple stuff please.
+++ ATH0 +++
From that commercial where they build that car from legos.
What wonderful news! So in a few years, when modern industrial society has seized up and American life as we've known it comes to halt as a result of the rapidly diminishing fossil fuel supply, our cars will still be shiny!
I apologize for being off topic--mod me down--but the American car/suv/prettiness craze has gotten way out of hand...
More seriously, I urge people to plug into the facts and realties of the worlds fossil fuels, and how the American way of life and economy is presently overly-dependent on this resource.
We can only hope to elect policymakers that have the courage to make the right decisions and foster international cooperation (rather than, say, invade and occupy oil-producing regions).
/rant
G-Force music visualization
Somehow i feel sorry for the poor people assigned the job of actually putting them together.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I'm amazed to hear that the major autos makers can figure out how to use nanotech to build car parts yet the 30% increase in efficiency demanded by new California emmissions guidelines is apparently beyond the scope of all known science and apparently will bankrupt them, according to a suit they filed to render said guidelines illegal.
Etcetera. Sigh.
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If my car is in a wreck or goes into a canal. If I cant open the doors I want to be able to break the windows and get out.
If Im dead...my beautiful windshield doesnt mean a damn thing.
when the nano-vats can be powered by a few kilo's worth of any fresh bio-mass consisting of mostly water.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
* Amenities like cup holders that can absorb or produce heat, keeping beverages at the perfect temperature.
I didn't realize that was such a big problem.
"Any part of the car that's made has the potential to be improved by nanotechnology," Messner said, "because ultimately materials and parts are made out of atoms and molecules."
Oh, right.
The cars produced by nano technology are only 2 mm long at most so getting in to them will be a bit of squeeze.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Car manufacturers are hardly putting current technology to good use, let alone nano-technology.
Even if they could make anything for even equivilent cost, let alone cheaper, they'd probably still find some way of letting it break in 3-5 years.
There is a model out there, one that has been out for 10 years now: the Hypercar. It started as a concept by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and eventually a company by the same name (Hypercar Inc.) was formed. Slashdotters might find it interesting that Bill Joy is one of their investors.
It's amazing technology, and it would have far reaching implications.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
The chance of my car being submerged in water is maybe ten million times less likely than the chance a collision will press my face against the windsheild or door glass at a high rate of speed, in which case I definitely do not want to be able to shatter that glass on impact - if I do, if forms a guillotene that take off a body part when I retract.
I thought that nano-tech products from cabon are super strong. This will turn every car into a bulldozer. How will this be safer?
My problem with Locally Made Cars is cheapness. Not low price, I like that. Cheapness.
Anyone here check out a Cadillac lately? Doesn't it just reek of Chevy? Cheap plastics, ringy body panels with the wrong kind of or inadequate insulation, buttons, knobs and levers that are not only in the wrong or confusing places but feel like they're going to fall off.
I think someone needs to learn how to make a car before they make a super-nanotech-alien-killing-machine car.
I mean, foot handbrakes? What is this, 1970? I can't use that emergency brake in an emergency because my feet are busy DRIVING!!! It's a parking-only brake. At least they finally found a manual transmission.
You'd think Chrysler would learn something from Daimler. Nope. Check out the trunk on the Crossfire. You practically have to unload groceries from bags before you can get them in the car! How is nanotech going to help that? "Hey, it's 30% stronger!" "Yeah, but I still can't put a suitcase in it!"
Maybe they'll finally come up with paint that doesn't fade and peel quickly, and if good interior materials are cheap maybe they'll start using them. Won't tell them where to put things, however.
Doesn't solve reason #1 why I've basically given up on American cars - the manual transmission. Generally Not Offered. Nanotech won't help that, probably make slushboxes smaller, though. Wait, Volvo already did that. And didn't send us the manual S80. GRRRRRRR.
Walk before you run, people. Walk before you run.
I mean, I've almost lost my life twice in near-crash plane accidents due to material-fatigue (I ignore whether this is the correct term). I mean in one of them part of the fuselage tore... in the other some piece of the hydraulic system caused some sort of havoc...
If nanotechnology allows us to check material integrity in both in the assembly line and in the periodic revisions as someone here has stated what are we waiting for?
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
??? Last time I checked, exhaust came out of cars in Boston too.
Last time I checked, you could hop in the T in Boston instead of driving.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If you have to take into account nanometer-scale effects to design something, I don't think it's too far fetched to call the result "nanotechnology".
The problem is that to in most science fiction and speculative non-fiction, "nanotechnology" has been used primarily as a synonym for "nanorobotics", which would be infinitely cooler but is much further away.
For the uninformed, hot dip galvanizing involves putting iron or steel (not aluminum right?) into a zinc and iron (with a touch of aluminum) molten mix. This does wonderful things for your metal, but mainly the process inhibits rust, which would void any rust warranties your dealer wants to sell you.
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I hope I didn't brain my damage.
I'm not sure what to think of this. I think the american car makers should work on making the existing products they build more reliable, rather than making them more complicated to build.
Either way, there's a lot of good uses for this stuff. I've seen some things about nanotech to create diamond hard coatings on plastic lenses. This could be used on glasses, cheap cameras, computer displays and all sorts of things.
Presently here, but not there.
Is that manufacturing and assembly of products will move from the factory to on site in the home. Companies will respond to this by saying that you owe them patent and copy royalities on the things you repilcate. They will become extremely rich and powerfull, and be all to happy to attempt to impose an all encompasing police state to ensure collection of royalities. (don't believe me, just look at the RIAA when the internet came along, look at how the pharmacutical companies tried to sue millions of dirt poor africans dying of AIDS in the world court for patent infringement - if they're willing to do that they are willing to do anything)
Moral, if you want the benefits of future technology to promote freedon and not take it away, work to get rid of patents today. They hinder far more innovation than they promote, and they are far more like microregulation than some kind of free market property right.
At what point then could we just download 'plans' off P2P and just 'grow' our own car, house, dinner....
... probably far away from the United States or Europe. If "harmonization" succeeds, there will be no such place, and the only products and creativity that will exist will be the glacially slow change industry offers us ... assuming they don't see any threat to their current revinue streams in offering the new product. There will be no innovation from outside, and with government mandated monopoly markets, no competition either.
At the point where the ruling oligarchs choose to relinquish their architectures of control (patent and copyright law) and allow knowledge and thought to be shared freely.
I.e. not in the lifetime of anyone currently living, if ever.
Expect nano-designs to be covered by both patents and copyrights, much like software in America is today. And expect progress to be decimated as a result, and the best products to be created in technical violation of the law in many places, such as mplayer is today (though fortunately not in violation of the laws where its author lives).
And the latter, semi-optomistic note, assumes there are safe havens where free thinking people can still create
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The nanotechnology glass as designed is designed NOT to break...that is not safe in case of collision or car going into a canal. This is not hypothetical, dozens of people in MY COUNTY ALONE died because they were trapped in their car when the car was submerged or burning. They did a special on it where people couldnt break the glass because they didnt have a simple icepick in their car.
If you make it out of nano, its also going to be an issue for paramedics to try and get into the car.
A seatbelt has a button to release it. There should be some safety measure built into nanowindshields that will allow them to be broken or removed in case of an emergency.
but if you dont need !ANY! employees to make a car (and I assume by that time all other manufactured products) won't you like have a !DEMAND! problem? All you'd need to produce cars is a marketing dept and a black box that excreates chevys.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
You download open-sourced plans ;P
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
... I live out in the country and I am SERIOUSLY considering getting a horse. I've worked with them before on a ranch and at a stables, but never owned one, but still... grow your own fuel, grow your own replacement vehicle, the same vehicle can be used for basic trannsportation, as a tractor in the garden and woodlot, etc. I got several vehicles to choose from to drive around and work with now, but still... it is not far fetched to think that the old fashioned way might become pretty valuable and "new" fashioned pretty quickly. Like say the worlds various nutjob "leaders" for one reason or another decide the middle east might be a good place to start tossing some nukes around in, how fast before normal civilisation slows to a crawl then? Like RIGHT NOW I think some aforementioned fatcat nutjob folks with the juice to pull it off are considering whacking iran with nukes, premeptively. It COULD happen. I think-just a hunch but I think-that things could get outta hand pretty qucikly then, and this go to the pumps get what ya want lifestyle could go buh bye. Who would have access to fuel? The government and uberrich and that's about it, with maybe a few gallons a week with a ration card or something. Lot of the dudes here at slashdot don't remember it, a lot of us here DO remember it, the OPEC embargo and how FAST your fuel reality can change, no matter the reason. If you can't get it or only can get 2 gallons, than that's it, you can bitch all you want to, but if the fatcats don't have it or won't cut it loose, you are screwed.
Pie in the sky hydrogen and backyard Mr. Fusion tech ain't here, and ain't gonna be here for awhile, and growing a lot of grains to make biodiesel/ethanol you might as well just feed it to yourself and the horse and be done with it, eliminate the middleman. I already got some solar and a wind genny so I'm covered for a minimum of electric for whatever that is worth. We heat primarily with wood, so that's covered. We use this idea called "shade" for cooling in the summer, that's all we got, and one small fan we could do without actually. It's only mid june and the garden is exploding already, we gots more food then we can hardly give away in the 'hood now. FUEL though no matter which alternative energy scheme you look at is a hassle, at least at what people would consider to be "normal" quantities. I've made some ethanol before and burned it in two motorcycles and one chain saw, so I know I got the skills to do that, but it takes a ton of some kind of carbohydrates to pull that off. You got to have *mass quantities* of sugars basically. The large scale outfits doing it are being cute and a little loose with the practicality aspects of it, they use huge quantities of diesel and oil and natural gas derived fertilisers and other stuff just to grow some sugars to turn them back into some sort of fuel, it's a circular illogicity in a lot of aspects. I guarantee mass farming like we know it just ceases without diesel and big quantites of electric and natural gas. It just STOPS, at least the way it's set up now. Just basic food without cheap diesel and cheap natural gas could rise to..geez, pick a number, 20x what it costs now maybe.
I just think at some point in time that this cushy lifestyle everyone is used to in the industralised whirrled is gonna get seriously b0rken. That's why I keep thinking of horses (or mules or whatever), hay burners. Worked for thousands of years. I also think the big oil guys and banks and whatnot KNOW this and are arranging reality to see who is the bigdog and who will actually own and control middle east oil, and i guarantee it don't got nuthin to do with "bringing democracy to the poor..." fill in the blanks ethnic groups. It's about WHO OWNZ THE OIL.
I remember my folks and my grandparents talking to me about the great depression. They were flat broke but existed more or less OK until the bogus bankers and taxes stole their land from them, which I think is part of why the depression occurred, a planned mass ripoff, but that's a side issue, we got
The dinosaurs wouldn't have to be functional, they would just have to decay properly, so all of the early versions could be put to good use even if the cloning part went slightly askew*. Yay - genetic experimentation without all of the nasty public relations fallout!
* Unless they're tasty - this is prime cookout season, you know.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Open Source Sushi
This is utter BS and should be recognized as the hype that it is. Certainly, nanotech of the materials kind is, and will continue to be important and useful technology. But, how are those little atoms going to machine a precision piston bore in a sleeved cast iron block? Better still, how the heck are those atoms supposed to press that sleeve into the block? Anyone? Anyone?
The fact is, no one alive today is going to see a finished car emerge, self-assembled, from a chemical vat. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed, or just being a blowhard.
Now, will "nanotech" be able to make harder steels and more durable paints? Sure. Are we becoming buzzword weenies when we call it "nanotech"? Maybe. If you want to stretch the definition of "nanotech" to anything that's small (as opposed to molecular machines that can hunt down viruses in your body, lets say), then nanotech has been around at least since the iron age.
Metallurgists have been trying to figure out ways to make hard and strong steels since humans discovered iron. Everything from the construction of bridges to the selection of carbide grades involves knowledge of the microscopic details of materials. Granted, most of that stuff isn't quite on the nano-scale, but for most of the nanotech hype I've encountered, the differences haven't been all that great. It's more of a spectrum from small to smaller, rather than "this is nanotech, and this is not".
So far, there's a few interesting applications of nanotech that are completely unique to nanotech, but assembling cars is still the realm of the macro world.
Couldn't agree more.
Safety has become a valuable sales argument for car manufacturers lately. Both passive safety and active safety have evolved quite a lot during the last few years.
Both will for sure keep on evolving in the future, but the only thing that has not and will not evolve are people. To be more exact, the attitudes have not evolved.
Everytime when an accident occurs you see the headlines screaming right at you in the news, and even the most hardened road hogs seem to calm down for a week or two. But after those couple of weeks people somehow forget and continue like they used to, just waiting for the next accident to happen and start the cycle again.
Either we find a way to change the attitudes for good OR we find a way to prevent (or at least minimize) the chance for an accident. Be it computer-driven cars (like in Minority Report if I remember right) or something similar.
We're on the right track for sure, e.g. several brands have cruise control which keeps the distance constant eventhough the speed is not constant. ESP (like the German brands call it) can correct some of the driver's mistakes when cornering. A long way still to go nonetheless!
But will it improve quality in American cars?
probably not. Cars will be as disposible as Cell phones in the future.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Two common meanings when people talk about using nanotechnology.
... is put together atom-by-atom by a process - whether it be tiny machines with gripper arms, or a use of biotechnology to connect atoms together - using plain, simple, raw materials. Think carbon, oxygen, hydrogen rather than wood, steel, concrete.
...
1. Using "nano" materials in construction - the more common meaning when people talk about nanotechnology, is when materials manufactured on the small scale give interesting effects and properties used to make a product better in some form
2. Construction on the atomic scale - this is the (in my opinion) real killer-app of technology, where products, materials, literally anything
It's the number 2 usage of nanotechnology that I'm waiting for. If it becomes possible to construct a motor vehicle using the atom-by-atom build process, you can build cars, trucks, whatever for minimal costs. It will of course, be interesting to see how the companies will handle the logistics and pricing strategies
These are not American figures but I doubt they are much different over there. If we sell a car at the dealers for 30k then the factory will have paid about 15k for parts, and about 1k for assembly labor.
Development costs are about 1-2k, averaged over the entire build.
We'd typically invoice the dealer for 21k
He pays car tax and so on, that's about 20% of the sticker price, ie 6k. We also pay for some marketing.
Cars have got somewhat more expensive to build, simply because catalysts, engine management computers and airbags cost a lot, and general spec levels have increased. Your 1980s high volume derivative would not have had a/c, auto, power seats, power glass, CD player, airbags, ABS, as STANDARD. It would have had 14 inch tires, not 16s. It would have had 120 hp, not 200 (not that, that cost much). In the last 13 years the car I work on has increased in weight by 15%, that weight costs money.
...once the phosphorous got going, the nickel would act somewhat like magnesium. Is that a distress flare in your pants or are you just pleased to see me? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
New Mercedes Benz, some since 2003, have nano-particle clearcoat that better resists scratching of small particles. This clear lacquer supposedly provides 3 fold better scratch resistance in situations such as mechanical car washes.
i d/20312 03.001/mercedes/1.html
check it out here:
http://www.germancarfans.com/news.cfm/news
So instead of the earth being turned into grey goo, it'll get turned into one giant Ford Falcon instead?