CFD in Car Design: Engineering Against an Enemy Nobody Can See With the collaboration of Yousef Hassanpour, aerospace and chemical engineer (Sharif University of Technology). The CFD study, simulations and images accompanying this article are his own work. Here is something that ought to unsettle anyone who trusts modern engineering: the equations governing how air … Read more
Mercedes-Benz T80: The Six-Wheeled Nazi Speed Machine Porsche Designed That Never Turned a Wheel Walk into the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and you’ll find a black car nearly 27 feet long. Three axles, six wheels, two small stubby wings, an aluminum body built by an aircraft plant. No engine in the bay. No odometer to … Read more
Shelby Daytona Coupe: six cars to take the world away from Ferrari Before Ford stormed Le Mans, before the movie, before the GT40 became a legend, a skinny Texan with a bad heart did something that seemed impossible: he took a world championship away from Enzo Ferrari. Not General Motors with its bottomless resources. Not … Read more
Dymaxion Car: Brilliant and Forgotten Walter Chrysler wanted in. Henry Ford wanted in. Henry Kaiser wanted in. Three of the biggest names in American manufacturing looked at Buckminster Fuller’s three-wheeled aluminium teardrop and reached the same conclusion: this thing changes everything. Ford offered him anything in the catalogue at seventy-five percent off. Chrysler believed it … Read more
Ferrari built an SUV designed to hide the SUV Ferrari spent years swearing it would never build one. Then it built one, refused to call it an SUV, and invented a three-letter acronym rather than say the word out loud. FUV. Ferrari Utility Vehicle. Easy to laugh at. Marketing departments do this all the time. … Read more
The Mate’s Rear Wing: What Works and What’s Just Expensive Sticker (AeroNEC · 5) You know the car. Hatchback, lowered, and a rear wing the size of a picnic table bolted to the bootlid, tall enough to serve tea on. Top Gear built a whole comedy strand out of cars like it. And the question … Read more
Ground Effect: The Dirty Trick F1 Had to Ban (AeroNEC · 3) In a wind tunnel in the mid-1970s, a team from Lotus watched something that shouldn’t happen. The tunnel’s moving floor — the belt meant to simulate a road rushing past — peeled up off its rollers and stuck itself to the underside of … Read more
How to Glue a Car to the Ceiling: Downforce Explained (AeroNEC · 2) Remember the bit in Men in Black where Agent K flips the Crown Vic onto the roof of the Queens-Midtown tunnel and just keeps driving, upside down, lights flashing? Sci-fi nonsense, obviously. Except the physics underneath the gag is real, and a … Read more
The Wall You Can’t See: Why Your Car Won’t Go Any Faster (AeroNEC · 1) There’s a moment in the old Top Gear Veyron film where James May, flat out at Ehra-Lessien, tries to explain what it actually takes to push a car past 400 km/h. The numbers stop making sense. The engine is drinking … Read more
The Italian Who Walked Away From Henry Ford Detroit, 1920. The Rouge plant was still being built but Highland Park was already running flat out, churning out Model Ts at a pace nobody in Europe could match. Henry Ford himself sat down with a 27-year-old visitor from Turin and offered him a job. Stay in … Read more
Vision EQXX: Everyone bragged about horsepower. Mercedes drove 750 miles on 201 and won There are two ways to impress someone with a car. The easy way and the hard way. The easy way is big numbers. A thousand horsepower, two thousand, nought to sixty in under two seconds — figures that fit in a … Read more
