Mind over Matter — Common sense over High-Tech hijacking reality
If a hi-tech proposal lacks common sense, it might as well be considered Alchemy 2.0. Hi-tech tends to rearrange reality according to its preferred recreation. Take self-driving vehicles. If traffic’s innate complexity and fluidity can’t be tackled, then traffic itself and infrastructure need to be rearranged, is what AV developers are pushing for. The same goes for the ride-hail business (Uber, Cruise, Waymo etc.). Not TNCs, but governments, legislation, chauffeurs need to adapt — that’s how they think. ‘Whizkid ingenuity’ is overvalued, in my opinion. Some of 20th century’s best ideas were actually based on plain common sense. Good to know, before you start throwing away dollars to yet another exercise in what’s basically wishful engineering and poaching away ‘engineer talent’. Rethinking how things ought to work, should lead to a reinvent and reformat of products.
For instance, did you know that the idea of using swept wings — setting the wing at an angle instead of perpendicular to the airplane’s fuselage — to reduce high-speed drag, was first developed in Germany in the 1930's? About thirty years after the Wright Brothers took to the sky for the very first time. Next came making wings thinner than the usual airfoil. Now we say: wasn’t that obvious? Why didn’t they come up with that sooner? Left: Messerschmitt ME-262, one of the first swept-wing (fighter) planes.
Israeli architect of the Marina Bay Sands Casino in Singapore, Moshe Safdie, once told that someone had put a shelf on top of a mock-up of skyscrapers and left it there, probably while he was cleaning the office. That inspired Moshe to top tall buildings with a horizontal element. It dawned on him that high rise forced planners, architects, builders and office people to think and work vertically, in stead of laterally, which is the more natural, down-to-earth way of doing things. The landmark Casino was completed in 2010. You might say that high-rise constructing came full circle more than a century after the first skyscraper, basically a bridge built vertically, was introduced.
Shipping (aka intermodal) containers — weren’t those obvious? Haven’t we been mass-transporting goods for the better part of the 20th century? Yes, we have. Nonetheless, it took until well after WW2 before trucking firm owner Malcolm McLean came up with the intermodal container. Containerization dramatically lowered transport costs, changed the face of international trade, formed a major contribution to globalization. It did away with the manual sorting of most shipments and the need for warehousing. Containers have standardized dimensions. They can be loaded, unloaded, stacked, carried efficiently over long distances, transferred from one transport mode to another — container ships, rail transport flatcars, semi-trailer trucks .
Did you know that sloped armor — armor plating ‘angled’ backwards — was first used in WW2? Sloping an armor plate makes it harder for an anti-tank projectile to penetrate. Hitting a armored plate at an angle other than 90° the projectile also has to travel a greater thickness, compared to hitting the same plate at a right-angle, and has a greater chance that it will get deflected. A simple idea, but the mighty German Tiger tank didn’t have sloped armor. The Russian T-34 tank you see on the left did.
The notion of geostationary orbit — objects flying at a predetermined altitude and velocity that keep them within the earth’s gravitational pull in a fixed position — was first disseminated on a wide scale in 1945 by SF- writer Arthur C. Clarke. Yep, it’s the same man who co-wrote Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 — A Space Odyssey’ movie. Without satellites circling the planet, worldwide communication and broadcasting would have been unthinkable .
More than sixty years after the first car made its appearance, Alec Issigonis’ Mini debuted, primarily because of a fuel shortage caused by the 1956 Suez Crisis. Petrol was rationed in the UK and car sales slumped. The Mini broke away from the usual setup by having the engine mounted transversely and by employing front-wheel drive. To optimize cabin space the wheels were pushed to the corners, which gave the Mini go kart-like handling. Almost all hatchbacks with FWD developed since have used the same layout.
Like the Austin Mini, new-iSetta is a concept that brings together many new elements. To be able to create a sleek shape (one of the biggest contributing factors to boost economy) whilst maintaining safety standards, passengers don’t sit next to each other. The old Romans already knew that arches make for a stress-resistant construction. new-iSetta has a Da Vinci-inspired frame underneath the outer panels and a dual-purpose rear cowling, covering the twin wheels and integrating a flush-mounted rear bumper (which is a safety feature too). Lighter materials can be used. Besides, a vehicle that hinges on its (clustered) rear-wheels displays virtually no flex, contrary to a box resting on its four wheels. Space-efficient use of the present road and parking infrastructure is a nice bonus too.
Bottom line, as long as we’re not capable of “beam me up Scotty” from A to B, the transport mode will be a physical thing. It better be as space- and energy- efficient as possible, given the huge climate change challenges, particularly since a car’s average occupancy is around 1.3 person.
Ralph Panhuyzen | sevehicle@gmail.com | @NextGenEV
