Thursday, April 28, 2016

Getting There First: These Are the Auto Technology Pioneers

-First. We all know what it means. What we often don't agree about is who can rightfully claim to be first. In the auto business, being first to innovate a new and desirable feature has competitive advantage—or not. It's possible to be too early, to roll out the -Just getting an early car started was a laborious task. Set the choke, fuel mixture, and spark advance, step out and walk to the front to grab the handle on the engine crank and give it a few turns, adjust as needed until it ran. Replacing the dangerous and onerous task of cranking with an electric motor to do the work was a huge game-changing -Car and Driver loves manual transmissions, but to most people who just want to get somewhere, the process of shifting gears has always looked like a bit of skilled labor that inventors could profitably eliminate. Various devices to make shifting easier came and went until GM Research, under the guy they were now calling -Some -The French company Panhard -Lots of cars today boast -Where V-8s were once the American norm, today's most popular engine is a 2.0-liter four-cylinder unit that makes enough power to push around your two-ton crossover cocoon courtesy of turbocharging.---A turbocharger is a turbine wheel driven by the exhaust gases, linked to a second turbine that compresses the air going into the engine. Packing more air into the combustion chamber allows for more fuel and a bigger bang on each power stroke. (A supercharger does the same job using a belt-driven compressor rather than one using the otherwise wasted energy in the exhaust gases). --In aircraft, turbos allowed their engines to keep running in the less-dense air at higher altitudes. The first production cars with turbocharging came from General Motors, the 1962 Corvair and Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire, which had very different engines and systems. The Corvair's flat-six (in the photo), originally rated at 90 to 110 horsepower, went to 150 and, later, 180 horses courtesy of the turbo. The Jetfire's V-8 got to 215 horsepower using water/methanol injection to prevent pre-ignition (ping) in its high-compression (10.5:1) combustion chambers.---It was 1973 before BMW put turbocharging and fuel injection on the same production-car engine (the 2002 Tii Turbo) and 1976 before Saab took the technology mainstream. Saab went decades arguing that a 2.0-liter turbocharged four was ideal. Now nearly everyone agrees, but Saab didn't survive to say -Driving all four wheels was tried by several inventors in the horseless-carriage era. A 1902 Spyker (Dutch) shown in 1903 most often gets credit as the first four-wheel-drive car, and by 1911 America's FWD company incorporated the technology into its name (F standing for Four, rather than Front). ---Although Miller had four-wheel-drive racing cars at Indianapolis in 1932, Oshkosh (1917) and Dodge (1934) found a real market for it in their trucks. Military applications in WWII on trucks and, notably, the Jeep advanced the technology so that after the war it showed up on the Unimog (1946), the Land Rover (1948), and the Toyota Land Cruiser (1951, although it didn't get that name until 1954). In all these, though, four-wheel drive was there to enhance off-road ability and not really useful for parents who just want to get the carpool through a snowstorm to hockey practice.---Automotive four-wheel drive really starts with a system devised by Harry Ferguson, whose tractor-making concern spawned Ferguson Research to develop it. First applied to a Formula 1 racing car in which Stirling Moss won a 1961 race on a rain-soaked track, the -The first to offer a seatbelt in a production car was Nash in 1949, followed by Ford in 1955; Saab made them standard equipment in 1958. These were lap belts like those racers had started using some years earlier. When offered as options they didn't sell very well, although these two-point belt systems became more popular in the early 1960s. Volvo (pictured) still grounds its safety sales pitch in the company's invention of the three-point belt with a shoulder strap to restrain the torso. Volvo made it standard in 1959. Inventor Nils Bohlin had been hired the year before (from Saab, where he'd created the ejector seat for jet fighters) and charged with making Volvo's cars safer. The company patented the three-point belt but offered to let all automakers use it for free. This did not prevent others from coming up with messy two-belt -Although the first patents and research on airbag technology date to the early 1950s, it was the 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado that was first available to the public with one. And we mean one. It was for the front-seat passenger. In 1974 (on '75 models), the option appeared on full-size Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac models for both driver and passenger. The photo shows a 1975 Buick Electra with the option. There was a lot of pushing and pulling between government and industry, with the regulators first settling for any -Opening and closing the window—if the car had them—was about as close to -Starting the engine, keeping it running, and powering the lights was about all early automotive electrical systems could manage, so the first radios were add-ons with their own batteries. Chevrolet had a pricey option in 1922, but until 1927, interference from the ignition system made even the best radios unusable with the car in motion.---This began changing in 1930 with the introduction of the Motorola AM radio, still an aftermarket add-on that took days to install and had its own battery. It wasn't until 1935 that Motorolas like that in the bottom left photo became commonplace in cars from the factory, when Chevrolet was first to offer that option.---The 1953 Becker Mexico, top photo, not only had both AM and FM reception but a station-search function.---Sirius and XM—then competing but now merged—launched satellites in 2001. In-car receivers for the subscription service appear in more than half of the new cars sold in America today.-Nice as it was to have radio in the car, what came through the speakers was chosen by the broadcasters, not the car's occupants. Bypassing the gatekeepers to dial up your own tunes began with the 1956 Chrysler Highway Hi-Fi, (top left) a vinyl record player. In a car. To keep it from skipping constantly, it rotated the record at slower speeds and the arm with the needle was designed to prevent it sliding across the record and scratching. This was not very effective, however, and the need to buy specific records designed for the car's players didn't appeal to owners and it faded fast.---An improvement was the eight-track tape player (bottom left) that first came as an aftermarket add-on. Ford was first to offer it from the factory, in 1965.---Cassette tapes, which opened the door to the personal mix tape in addition to commercial albums, turned up on the aftermarket in 1968, and you could still find the option on many cars built through 2010. ----Factory-installed Compact Disc (CD) players started with the 1985 Becker Mexico Compact Disc offered by Mercedes-Benz. In the U.S., the 1987 Lincoln Town Car offered the -Power windows first appeared on 1941 model-year Packard 180s. The window "lifts" used hydraulics to power the operation, managed by electric switches. These were essentially a development from the technology used to operate power-folding tops on convertibles and were also employed to power seats on various luxury cars in the immediate postwar years. In 1951, the Chrysler Imperial (previously cited for its power steering) had electric power windows. Today, power windows are so much the standard that young drivers are often mystified when they encounter the rare hand-cranked window.-While there are various assertions that a GM engineer patented the idea in the mid-1950s, the first production car with the option was the 1966 Cadillac DeVille (bottom) photo. Swedes like to take credit for making them standard, for the driver's seat only, on the 1972 Saab 99 (top right photo) and 96.-Massaging seats were first offered on 2000-model Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac cars. A comparison of recent offerings can be found here.-Touchscreens manage all kinds of functions on your 2016 cars but they were an amazing thing to see—in all their monochromatic glory—when the first ones appeared on the 1986 Buick Riviera. They managed the radio, climate controls, trip computer, and what GM maddeningly insisted on calling "gages."-Before there were Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), Honda took a run at an electronic in-car navigation system it called the Electro Gyrocator. Take a CRT monitor with a moving dot that could trace a line, overlay it with acetate maps (Tokyo only), and then try to make the phosphorescent dot follow the same route you had pre-marked with the Honda-provided pens.---The dot moved in accordance with input from an inertial guidance system (like those missiles and aircraft used pre-GPS), and Honda invented and patented a gas-rate gyroscope to manage the task. The guidance system was more accurate than the maps available, so those had to be redrawn for the purpose. If you lived in Tokyo and could afford to throw down a couple grand atop the price of your Accord, the Electro Gyrocator option might help you get somewhere without getting lost.---We kid. Honda was way ahead of the industry here and although some of its technology was just too early, it had a usable system using digital maps to offer on its 1990 Legend. It wasn't GPS, though. And that was what in-car navigation really needed.-Early GPS advocates carried their handheld units into cars in the early 1990s, but Oldsmobile was first in the U.S. to offer a system made to work in a car. The Guidestar system was a $2000 option in the 1995 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight. A test run in rental cars, conducted with AAA and centered around Orlando, Florida, had proved the concept starting in 1992. Sadly, GM had given up on the touchscreen for a while by '95, so there was no place for the unit in-dash and it had to sit on a stalk on the center console. It also wasn't all that accurate, and decent digital maps were still a decade or more away, but dang, it was first.-Head-up displays were invented for jet-fighter pilots but are found in even inexpensive compact cars today. This, like touchscreens and GPS navigation, was a side benefit of General Motors' ownership of high-tech companies including Hughes and EDS. GM first offered the option on the 1988 Cutlass Supreme Indy Pace Car replica. That was an awful car, actually, so luckily GM rolled it into other models. Among them was the Corvette, which got the industry's first color HUD in 1998 when the C5 generation debuted. Our photo shows the display as it was used on a C6 Corvette.-Cadillac also brought night vision from Hughes into cars, pioneering with the classic infrared green-screen variety on the 2000 DeVille. Technology has advanced on several fronts since, as you can see here.-The 1970 Lincoln Continental offered the luxury of -You're driving down a dark road and need the high-beam headlights, but there's oncoming traffic. You have to keep dimming and then relighting the -Four-wheel steering is showing up again on luxury and performance models from several makers. Some horseless-carriage-era cars had steering for all four wheels, but the front-wheels-only variety still dominates because it does the job well enough. Getting the rear wheels to help via a passive mechanism that Porsche called its Weissach axle improved the handling of the 928 in 1978. Active steering of the rear wheels using hydraulic rams to push on suspension elements appeared on the 1982 Nissan Skyline R31. Nissan called the system HICAS, but that car wasn't sold in the United States. Honda was first to bring active four-wheel steering to America in 1987 on its Prelude. At high speeds, the rear wheels steered in the same direction as the fronts, but at low speeds they steered the opposite way to improve maneuverability, particularly useful for parking. Many other makers used variations of this system. It was most popular in Japan where Skylines and Preludes both kept their systems through 2001. Modern systems apply more advanced electronics, but the benefits remain subtle and fall short of compelling when compared with the cost.-Fans of burnouts and drifting may enjoy turning their expensive tires into so much smoke, but if you're just trying to get somewhere, wheelspin is a problem. The 1971 Buick MaxTrac traction-control system was the first such to reduce power when the car detected wheel-slip under throttle. When it worked (not reliably), it did so by interrupting the ignition spark. This induced misfire did not pass muster as emission rules became more stringent and big belches of unburned hydrocarbons became forbidden. Better ways, such as applying a brake, cutting back on fuel, and retarding the timing were brought to bear in 1987 when Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Toyota all introduced the first modern traction-control systems.-Stability Control-Adjusting the suspension on the go? Cadillac and Packard offered the option to drivers in 1932, via a lever that mechanically adjusted the dampers. Yes, your car's computer-controlled multi-mode system is far more sophisticated. Oh, and those trick, fast-reacting shocks full of magnetized fluid that adjust mid-stroke? GM did that first, too . . . on the 2002 Cadillac STS and the 50th Anniversary Corvette (a 2003 model C5).-An active suspension anticipates and adjusts for road-surface irregularities and the longitudinal and lateral accelerations of motion, rather than just reacting to conditions as they arise. They first had their heyday in the late 1980s and early '90s, contemporaneous with the rise of other -That's the busy part of a 2014 Chevy Camaro braking system designed for track use in our photo, but the point is: time to stop. Early cars had really primitive braking systems, and a lot of --

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