Believe it or not, it used to be illegal to pump your own gas into your car. This was because of fire laws. Most of the states had fire laws that prohibited “untrained personnel” from dispensing flammable fluids. This, of course, meant gasoline being dispensed at gas stations. Here’s the story.
The Super was a car that Buick launched in 1940. Like its Cadillac, Pontiac and Oldsmobile counterparts, the Buick Super was built on the General Motors C-body platform. The C-body platform was General Motors newest large sedan chassis that was designed to be longer, wider and lower to the ground than previous generations. It had an aggressive looking stance that provided more interior room while at the same time improving aerodynamics and styling.
On standard cars, spoilers are those curved shaped things that usually swoop up from the rear of the car. Generally they are plastic or fiberglass and are affixed to the rear trunk lid. On race cars, they are much more elaborate. They might be huge affairs that rise up way off the car and on F1 Indy cars, they embellish just about every surface and just about touch the ground.
Automobiles and car horns are pretty much synonymous. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any motoring vehicle that doesn’t have one. And, as you probably know, the relationship between cars and their horns goes back many years. In fact, it goes back to the very beginning of self-propelled vehicles. Here’s the story.
When you are an automotive engineer and you are designing a vehicle for maximum fuel efficiency, you use all the energy sources you can find. That’s why design engineers of hybrid vehicles tap the energy that gets wasted when a hybrids brakes are applied. Instead of converting the motion of the vehicle into wasted heat via the brake pads as ordinary cars do, hybrid vehicles have a small generator on each axle that converts the car’s kinetic energy into electricity. This electric power is then fed to the vehicle batteries.
In any internal combustion-powered vehicle, another source of wasted energy is the movement of the exhaust gases that exit the tailpipe. Using these strong gases to power automotive sub-systems isn’t a new concept as superchargers have been doing it for years. The way it works is the exhaust gases are used to spin a turbine that, in turn, drives fresh air into the vehicle’s engine. This allows more air-fuel mixture to be exploded in the cylinders which produces more engine power.
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