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Computer Designed Car Sets Speed Record
amcdiarmid writes "Several sources are reporting that the first entirely computer designed car, the JCB Dieselmax, has broken the diesel speed record of 236MPH at a speed of 328MPH. From the article: 'The record attempt came after a string of trial runs on the runways at the airbase. But while testing went well, the team endured a troubled time in the US. The combination of the altitude (4,000ft) and the higher air temperatures affected the performance of the second engine, which was generating insufficient turbo boost pressure and led to days of work for the small team of engineering experts.'"
broken the diesel speed record of 236MPH at a speed of 328MPH.
But they could probably top 350 MPH if they'd ditch the CB antenna and Yosemite Sam "Back Off" mudflaps.
this thing gets some real looks at the Sapp Bros.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Several sources are reporting that the first entirely computer designed car, the JCB Dieselmax, has broken the diesel speed record of 236MPH at a speed of 328MPH.
..and it will help those computers find Sarah Connor just that much more quickly.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
a diesel computer designed car going 328 MPH filled with hard drives.
...on the next day of testing, it again bested the record. This time it was 350.092 MPH. http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?t ype=topNews&storyID=2006-08-23T151359Z_01_L2331696 1_RTRUKOC_0_UK-TRANSPORT-DIESEL-RECORD.xml
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
But while testing went well, the team endured a troubled time in the US.
Sources said the motor had been making an unbelievably loud clunking sound, as well as spewing black smoke. Only later did they figure out that was the way the engine was supposed to sound.
(/RM101, the not-so-proud one-time owner of a Diesel Mercedes Benz, the loudest, most embarrassing-to-drive car he's ever owned)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Did somebody happen to warn these folks what Slashdot can do to a server??
any odds on how many comments it will take to bring the server to its knees??
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a diesel computer designed car going 328 MPH filled with hard drives.
An information super highway, here?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/diesel-powered- car-edges-on-half-the-speed-of-sound/
Apparently Slashdot isn't as fast as it used to be. That car has already hit 360+ mph. 320+ mph is now old hat.
As an aside, all these smaller blogs seem to be able to keep up with the news much better than slashdot these days. I often find myself with a feeling of deja vu when I'm on Slashdot, as I've no doubt read the clippings elsewhere a few days prior.
Ah, the problems inherent in scale.
... but I want a car that can break the sound barrier. That way I can visit the fiance in 4 hours instead of 8.
The connotation is that someone signed onto a machine somewhere and at the command prompt, typed "design_car -fast -diesel", and poof, there's the design.
It's a human-designed car, designed by humans using computers (as they have for decades), and no pencils this time. TFA goes on and on about all the people on the team and the work they did, and that's great. So, what's with the headline and summary?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Since it was the 1st thought i had......
Gas-powered seems to be at 410mph
No idea why that record held so long for diesel at what seems a low number (236 vs 410)
...the ping times are a bitch.
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You're full of it. The article is 100% true.
This post was designed by a computer.
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...I guess that they'll have to rip up the New Mexico Salt Flats so noone else can give it a go.
--
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and was surprised to see that this thing really runs on 440 AA batteries. Quite the misleading article. Diesel indeed.
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
"... the JCB444 engine has been one of the most significant success stories in the company's history, and in the annals of British engineering."
From what I've seen of British engineering, you don't need to accomplish much to rank highly in those annals. If the engine doesn't fall apart during testing they crack the top ten.
Bah!
Ford has announced that they will begin testing a prototype computer built entirely by a car. The car used to design the computer is actually a Beowolf cluster of recalled Explorers and Expeditions from the Firestone debacle of some years ago.
"We think we can use the characteristics of our best-selling cars to build huge, powerful computers with more space than anyone else", said a Ford spokesperson. "Our latest prototype model already has eight CPU cores in a V shape. It can seat seven hard drives (two of which are situated at the front of the enclosure, visible through the glass front bezel of the machine) and we're making lots of strides in how we can build tires on to the thing so we can drive it around the office while we download our emails and pick up our kids from soccer practice."
Chevrolet declined to comment on whether or not they were working on something similar. All they said is that they think Fords suck and tried to sell us on a new Corvette. "It's an American Revolution", said the salesman we interviewed at the local Chevrolet dealership.
RTW...
/CIS Hat We're coming for you /CIS
I found a pic of it here.
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The combination of the altitude (4,000ft) and the higher air temperatures affected the performance of the second engine, which was generating insufficient turbo boost pressure and led to days of work for the small team of engineering experts.
Don't they know that K.I.T.T. can only use the Turbo Boost once per episode?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
... but I still want my goddamn flying car!
as the first car designed entirely by computer Just out of curiosity: Who actually does believe that?
Die-sells are worstest for polluting the atmosphere - that one shared thing - with small particles that get lodged in people's lungs, never to get out again. Maybe the JCB digger folk were out to see how quickly they could do this, or maybe they are cheapskates, not willing to fork out for 'petrol' and set a proper record, i.e. the land-speed record.
However, does anyone know what the record is for a proper vehicle, i.e. not a rocket on a sled, but where the wheels are driven? Maybe this is it, but then again the die-sel record is not up to much, is it? Germans do that speed every lunchtime nipping out for a burger via the autobahn...
from the link .....................
Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) is a British designed and built jet propelled car developed by Richard Noble and Ron Ayers, which holds the world land speed record. It is powered by two afterburning Rolls-Royce Spey engines, as used in British variants of the F-4 Phantom II. It is 54 ft (16.5 m) long, 12 ft (3.7 m) wide and weighs 10.5 tons.
On October 15, 1997 in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada USA, driven by Andy Green, ThrustSSC became the first land vehicle to smash the sound barrier, reaching a speed of 1227 km/h (763 mph).
http://www.speedace.info/thrust_ssc.htm
Something tells me it'll be the red and blue lights that will bother him more than the red and green kind.
Mmmm.. Donuts
88 miles per hourrrrr!
...or did you surf the web to find your wife to be?
I'm sorry, butI reckon you set yourself up for that one.
FTA:
... So if you have had that speed monitoring software installed in your vehicle just drive real fast and leave them wondering :)
The team has also had to alter the GPS software which measures the car's speed, after it kept cutting out at 223 mph because it thought that was too fast
I RTFA and visited the site but exactly how is this car "designed entirely by computers"? More likely is that the computers optimized each component through simulations based on human input. Can anyone fill us in to how exactly the computers helped design the car?
I believe the fastest gasoline powered vehicle; was a single engined vehicle. This diesel is a twin engine. Aerodynamics play a HUGE HUGE factor in top speeds. It takes an enormous amount of horsepower just to increase the top speed by a small amount. Same reason why bikes suck so bad on the top end. Their power to weight ratios on paper show ridiculously fast acceleration numbers possible at higher speeds. But in reality; they are beaten by lower power/weight cars for higher speed runs; solely because of aerodynamics. That and power/weight means much less at higherspeeds. Its more about horsepower and gearing. Ok I'm talking to much now. PS. Ever seen a diesel drag racing vid of a semi-fast one? They blow huge columns of thick black smoke.
Consumers, however, rejected the car due to lack of a stereo, air conditioner, and cup holders.
we have semis going faster than that on the freeway.
Squirrel!
Plenty of other cars have been designed using CAD systems, long before now.
Why can't you people skip the hype and just report facts, for a change ?
...."we need ludicrous speed".
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..there you are.
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One of the design factors for the original engine was to function as a backhoe counterweight. This made the engine block and other components so robust that the engine could easily survive the 2-stage turbocharging.
They used 200 liters of ice for cooling, had diesel particulate filters on the exhaust, and got 4 miles to the gallon. The car had only 2 gallons of fuel to start. They used a tractor with the same engine, untweaked, as a push vehicle.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
For the more metrically inclined among us, 236 M/h equals 379 Km/h (105 m/s) and 328 M/h is 527 Km/h (142 m/s). While the imperial system does have its merits, 527 Km/h looks so much faster than 328 M/h :P
"Since arriving in America, the 30-strong team has had to enlist a local bar to help with its laundry after finding the hotel had no suitable facilities."
Bars are great! Beer and laundry facilities... does life get better?
This is a serious question. Why should I care how fast we can get a diesel engine based car to go? Last time I checked the fastest I drive is around 80mph. I'd be much more interested to see more efficent engines, than more powerful. However, could this technology trickle down to produce more efficent engines? Is there any practical application to this, besides pure speed?
Altitude? Altitude? Is this the flying car the Jetsons promised us?
Or, perhaps they mean elevation?
Damn it, the Jetsons lied to us, and so did this article!
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Good thing they run the tests during the day...to give those Brits a fighting chance.
...They took our advice. A person or organizations prosperity is parallel to the seriousness taken while reading slashdot.
Sig: I stole this sig.
This is neat and all, but Mercedes did it almost 30 years ago with a lot less technology. They made a variant of the exotic C111 using a modified version of their 617 series 3.0L inline-5 cylinder turbocharged engine to get up to 325km/h. If I'm not mistaken, that is the car JCB has beaten.
I wouldn't call JCB's record making that big a deal over the C111. Mercedes had a car that could do _laps_. It appears as if the JCB won't even make it out of earshot before it runs out of fuel. Also, Mercedes engineers didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars of simulation software that JCB had. Their website shows UGS as a partner. I have a few seats of NX4, Teamcenter 10, SolidEdge 19, and Femap. It's not cheap. JCB's engine is over 4 liters displacement. Mercedes' was 3. Not to mention, JCB needs TWO of their engines to accomplish this task. JCB's engine was derived from backhoes, whereas the Mercedes engine was derived from production cars. Heck, I've got a couple of those engines. I don't think the Dieselmax could beat a C111 with only one engine.
Yes, what JCB has done is pretty cool, and I think they deserve credit for making a record breaker. However, I don't think that a whole lot of actual engineering progress was made in the development of their Dieselmax.
If diesel is so efficient, then why haven't we invented a diesel-powered Delorean yet? My guess is that if running on diesel power, the flux capacitor requires speeds in excess of 300 MPH. So soon enough, we'll be creating time paradoxes left and right! (Is "soon enough" a phrase that is applicable to time travel?)
--Edward Dassmesser
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With two engines I'd EXPECT to be getting much higher speeds. Even if one engine is used purely for a turbo, I'd expect to see a split in the transfer of power. This does *NOT* surprise me at all. Hell, if a Campagna T-Rex had two engines, one for turbo/mass air induction, I'd see that beating almost ANYTHING on the road today without any extra modification. It already takes right hand turns at well over 70 MPH without squealing the back tire. And yes, I *HAVE* test-driven one. Memphis is one of six dealerships that I'm aware of in the USA.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It looks like you're designing a car.
Would you like help?
(*) Get help designing the car
(*) Just design the car without help
[ ] Don't show me this tip again
Modern diesels (say, designed in the past 25 years) aren't much noisier than petrols, and are a hell of a lot cleaner. I think the big problem is that American manufacturers just can't make a decent engine, either petrol *or* diesel. Pretty much all the US V8s I've heard have been mechanically *much* noisier than anything else - probably because of their antiquated pushrod designs. Did you know the rest of the world has moved onto overhead cams now?
'Since arriving in America, the 30-strong team has had to enlist a local bar to help with its laundry after finding the hotel had no suitable facilities.' ..paying special attention to drivers underwear after runs at that speed.
!sig
Come to Europe and get a whiff of my domestic (Renault) diesel car, it runs fine. But I actually have it maintained, as you obviously didn't with your mercedes diesel.
I know Americans associate diesel with trucks and stuff, but here in Europe a fairly large quantity (I estimate 33-50%) of domestic cars run on diesel. It has better mileage, cheaper fuel (which is still a bigger issue here, even now we pay about twice as much for our fuel as you do) and with turbo and injections they are at least as quick as petrol engines.
Here in the Netherlands we have a bit of a problem with the diesels producing more NOx particles, but with the EU requiring new cars to have fine dust particle filters, this should not be much of a problem in a few years.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
...but does it have a Flux Capacitor?
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
Anyway, long story short, North America needs to get back on the trolley as far as diesel goes. It seems to be a great fuel these days, and with biodiesel coming around the bend, it looks to get even better.
Makes sense. A less extreme version of why automobiles don't burn coal.
Ford makes its European Diesel engines in Dagenham, and Honda makes advanced cars successfully in the West Country. Give us some decent (i.e. foreign) management and sales to support our engineering efforts, and we are up there with the best.
Pining for the fjords
... that's a rocket on wheels.
Take it back to the dealer, there's something wrong with it. Particularly on US roads you should be getting 43-51mpg stock. A VW/Audi/Seat/Skoda 1.9 PD130 turbo diesel (130bhp stock) can be software remapped to 180-195 bhp without hurting the economy, too...
I took a trip to Iceland a few years ago, and I was surprised to see that the majority of cars were manual transmission (and small). Almost all of the cars you see here in the US are large(r) automatics. You don't often hear it touted, but I've read that a properly operated manual can get 10% better mileage (and are more fun to drive :) than the equivalent standard. I was also surprised, as I mentioned, by the size of many of the cars. You simply can't get a car much smaller than a Mini Cooper here, which is sort of a novelty car. Some might say that this is proof of European sensibility, but I imagine it's largely a product of economic necessity.
Well, you drop off the trailer to save weight and the truck bounces around so much, you feel like you are going to lose a kidney. And that is only at about 40-50mph. I can't imagine a Peterbuilt or a Mac at over 300. Then again, they probably have air-ride and that must help.
The old yard switchers I drove would bounce you all to hell. And during two winters in Iowa, I had to drive one with chains on to go get fuel. I thought I was gonna puke.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
... that they have something approaching working suspension and brakes, unlike American cars.
I'm not so sure about "economic necessity", but over here people don't seem to need or want a 500hp engine in an ordinary family car. What do you use an engine that size for, when you've got such low speed limits over there?
I was nearly at the end of my trip when I came to a stop and watched trip average vs realtime MPG. This was after about 12miles or so. I had the A/C off for the entire trip trying to bump overall average up - I "game" the MFD to see how high I can get the trip average :-)
The 1st gear in this trans (DSG) is quite low and it shifts before 10MPH. there's no hydraulic coupling in this trans either and during an average accel it won't get above 2K RPMs. Yes, gas vehicles see a drop like this too, perhaps even worse. Accel fueling in a gas engine is something I've tuned a few zillion times on standalone EFI systems. It goes fairly rich if you want it smooth. Low MPG makes sense when you consider the RPMs vs speed. By the time I hit 70MPH though it's in the sweet spot for RPM vs wind resistance. Oh and this MPG computer *is* slightly wacky - it reads about 13% optomistic :-( I suspect it's because they want it to be close when it breakes in. I will be modifying it to correct this after I can get a good reading over multiple tanks. The last one was 36.9MPG in mostly city bumper to bumper (figured by hand vs the computer). Our other TDI was the EXACT same way but is slowly getting a little better. Once adjusted it's fairly accurate by our figuring.
It's not all about costs. I'm willing to pay a reasonable premium to conserve for the greater good - especially on something that would allow us to relieve some our dependance on unstable countries who don't wish us well. Repairs and whatnot don't scare me off - I do my own work 99% of the time and I'd certainly take advantage of a warranty.
You may not have stated it outright but you implied there were no worthwhile gains, that it was an endeavor not worth pursuing. Yes, companies sometimes make exaggerated statements in their press releases, such is life. For what reason would they do this in this case? You seem to argue against a diesel hybrid and when I show you evidence that it's worthwhile and being developed you want to talk about OEM's overstating? Wow...
Not sure what numbers you're reading but they claim 15-50% gains in distance travelled on a tank over a gas engine in a Gas/Electric hybrid. They next claim 25% MPG gains with a Diesel/Electric hybrid over a comparable diesel vehicle. Diesel vehicles already get better MPG than a gas vehicle, 25-30% over gas according to that article. A diesel hybrid would stack those gains it seems which is\was my point...
Current unmodified hybrids aren't plug-ins right now so far as I know. They also seem to switch to gas too quickly. Modified for both plug-in and more electric usage MPG goes up a good bit fr
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