The next 100 years of Automotive design
Thoughts on Apple Car, Part 38
No horse, no engine, no driver. What is a carriage, after all?
It carries us and our belongings around. And has been doing so for centuries. Over time, it changed in three major ways — the fourth big change is the one we are going through now.
„Horsepower“
The first initial design of a carriage was the one that was pulled by a horse. Some sort of box with doors on four wheels (or slides, in Winter). There was a driver’s seat outside of the main compartment, and a room for the passengers to sit in. The driver was looking into the direction of driving, to look over the horses and the road he was going on. The passengers sat facing each other, looking to the left or right to get a glimpse of where they are going by.
Four-wheeled wagons were used in prehistoric Europe, records go back as far as 1900 BCE.
The performance metrics of that day are still around, and “horsepower” is one of the first main points on any car’s feature sheet.
