Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Wen | No. 7-Song

Many people should have found that there are many animal elements in today's cars, including lions and leopards in the car logo, cats and dogs in their names, eagles and dragons in the design language. But you must not know that today's cars can go up to heaven and earth and travel across mountains and rivers, imitating which big guy in the animal kingdom.

It is only 137 years since Karl Benz invented the world's first three-wheeled car in January 1886. But it is because of the imitation of animals that cars today can also say, "I can also fly and hide."

According to relevant data, the Precambrian outbreak 530 million years ago, the fossilized crustaceans found in sedimentary limestone strata include lobsters, crabs and shrimp, indicating that crabs appeared on the earth as early as 500 million years ago. Taken together, it has existed on the earth for much longer than human beings.

The powerful thing about crab walking is that it is not afraid of the obstacles in front of it and can translate horizontally, bypassing it with a minimum radius of motion. If the car also has this function, it is convenient to travel through the jungle gully.

In crab mode, the car can perform actions that other vehicles cannot. For example, in the coveted parallel parking, the crab mode can be almost achieved, or in the jungle, cars can easily cross the tree obstacles ahead like Ling Bo's micro-walk.

Crabs' lateral walking depends on a special body structure, and so does cars. Crab mode is to let the rear wheel and the front wheel deflect in the same direction, so that the whole car body has the effect of oblique front translation. When the rear wheel is deflected in the opposite direction with the front wheel, the minimum turning radius will be greatly shortened and has better maneuverability when off-road. Taking into account the complex structure, space and other reasons, most cars can not achieve all-wheel steering, so they can not complete the crab line.

Of course, the regular crab mode can not move perpendicular to the car body, 90 °lateral movement needs to be matched with special wheels. For example, looking up at the combination of U8 + McNum wheel, using four-wheel independent motor, four wheels can be controlled independently, and through many bevel rollers arranged in the tread of McNum wheel tire, the force mode can be changed and the diagonal wheel can be used to turn to form a lateral force. We know that the direction of the force and the direction of motion are the same, so the 90 °lateral translation is realized.

However, the disadvantage of this kind of wheel is that the braking force is not very good and can only be achieved at low speed. Therefore, its application scenarios are mainly in narrow and complex roads, and are mostly used in engineering vehicles such as forklifts and trailers.

Mud-bouncing frogs are amphibians. The earliest frogs with jumping movements appeared in the Jurassic period, from about 9960 years ago (with an error of 600 million years) to 100 million years ago (with an error of 4 million years). Frogs can jump around in mud puddles and move much more efficiently than wriggling earthworms.

Cars can commute faster on low-adhesion roads if they can also imitate the frog's bounce pattern. For example, the bouncing function provided on the new Mercedes-Benz GLS and GLE models, under the premise of hanging into the D gear, adjust the driving mode to Offroad, enter the relief mode, click the Start function key, and the suspension will automatically pop up. The car body can escape more quickly from porous areas such as mud, sand and snow because of continuous up / down jumps (lifting / lowering the chassis).

Mercedes-Benz is able to achieve this capability thanks to Mercedes-Benz's E-Active Body Control body control system. It has a set of hydraulic air suspension, and the damping damper in each wheel is equipped with two working cavities, one of which is a regulating valve and the other is a liquid storage tank, which can independently control the height of the four suspension of the vehicle and realize the lifting and lowering of the vehicle on one side.

Of course, the bounce mode is not suitable for flat ground use, the driver can manually turn off the bounce, or automatically release the bounce when the driving speed exceeds 15km / h. This system has faster response speed and higher reliability than the traditional active suspension. In addition to the bounce mode as proof, it also has a Pre-Safe function, in which the suspension system lifts the vehicle 8cm in the critical moment of an impending collision, with a stronger body structure to meet the impact and divert the impact to minimize damage to the affected side.

Water-floating water driving human contact with water is an eternal topic, about 71% of the earth is covered by water. The researchers say the surface area of lakes around the world increased by 46000 square kilometers between 1984 and 2019. So it would be great for cars to be amphibious like turtles and frogs.

Looking up to the floating mode of U8 makes us have more expectations. It can let the vehicle enter the deeper wading road, and the whole vehicle can still drive normally after it is floating. From the previous exposure of the real car picture, the car has been deep into the water, the front of the car is obviously submerged, the water ripple behind the car also shows that the vehicle is in a floating state.

The reason why it can achieve such a strong wading ability, in addition to the electric vehicle has no intake and exhaust system, what is more important is that its four-wheel independent drive has a special design. When the vehicle is in the water or floating, the motor can output the corresponding torque for each tire according to the actual swing angle of the vehicle, just like the soles of the tortoise feet, which can also help the vehicle out of trouble in the water.

It is already very difficult for traditional cars to achieve four-wheel independent control on land, but in a wading environment, the "swallowing ability" of water must also be taken into account.

Looking up to the U8, in addition to relying on four motors, the body also has excellent tightness. In this regard, new energy vehicles, especially electric vehicles represented by BYD, have advantages. We can often see many holes in the body-in-white of fuel vehicles, in addition to drainage holes, positioning holes, wire harness holes and other functional holes, including a large number of weight reduction holes. This will make it easy to flood the body chassis for a short time after it is submerged.

Looking forward to the U8 using the trump card combination of CTB + blade battery, CTB technology is the battery body integration technology. We know that the waterproof requirements of the battery pack are extremely high, the traditional battery pack waterproof requirements reach the IPX7 grade (the top is 0.15-1 meter from the water surface, continuous for 30 minutes, the performance is not affected, does not leak), looking up to U8 can reach the IPX8 grade, this level means that the top is 1.5-30 meters from the water surface for 30 minutes, the performance will not be affected, do not leak.

However, to be clear, this design should not be involved in the water for too long, it is in response to unexpected situations-flying cars have been developing in China in recent years, and the urban coverage of our country is also steadily increasing. According to 2020 data, China's urban coverage has reached 60%. The urban coverage rate in developed countries is more than 90%. The higher the urban coverage, the higher the quality of life. But commuting is getting worse every day, and traffic jams are the norm.

It would be great if the car could fly like a bird when needed.

Nowadays, the positioning of flying cars is relatively vague. Some people regard it as a reduced version of the aircraft, and there are also hopes that it can travel freely both in the air and on land.

You may ask, can't airplanes also be used for air and land use? Strictly speaking, airplanes, especially passenger planes, are crabs on land. Crabs can only walk sideways, while most planes do not have reverse gear. When they step back, they need tractors to move out. Therefore, a qualified flying car reverse function is essential.

The ideal flying car would be the model of the Dutch company PAL-V. Their Liberty (Freedom), which was unveiled at the 2018 International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, is a masterpiece, with a two-seater, three-wheel setting and the ability to move freely on land.

The design speed of domestic urban expressways is 60-80km / h, and the maximum speed of 90-120km / h Liberty is 90-120km / h. The maximum speed can reach 160km / hpm Liberty can fully meet the needs of daily use.

Of course, in the trend of lightweight development, carrying a large wing must be bad for energy saving, and most aircraft need a long runway to take off and land.

Audi designed a detachable wing to solve this problem. Audi and Airbus unveiled a flying car called the Pop.Up Next at the Geneva Motor Show in 2018. The Pop.Up Next hoists the car vertically into the air through a huge drone module, and removing the wing is a conventional car.

The working mode of the Pop.Up Next is similar to that of a helicopter. Take-off does not require a run-up. It is a vertical takeoff and landing. To know that the average flying car run-up distance is up to several hundred meters, for example, the PAL-V Liberty needs a 165m long asphalt or lawn runway to assist take-off, landing requires 30 meters of open space.

Therefore, if it is a wing detachable mode, once the technology is mature in the future, it will not pose a particular challenge to urban infrastructure, just like switching power stations, government departments will only need to focus on strengthening air control and planning wing loading and unloading points.

Conclusion humans have invented paved roads to achieve more efficient commuting efficiency, but the earth is so big that there are always places that industrial technology can't reach, and no matter how fast you run, you can't fly fast. Cars help us overcome these problems by imitating the walking of animals.

Although these technologies only exist in a small number of cars for the time being, I believe that with the development of the automobile industry, more and more of them will appear in our field of vision. I'm afraid the cars at that time were really flesh-and-blood "animals".

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: autocarweekly (ID:autocarweekly)

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