End of the Line

Structural batteries have been touted by many experts as a way to decrease electric vehicle weight, an application where every ounce is critical. Incorporating large masses like engines and batteries into the vehicle structure does reduce weight, but it makes it difficult or impossible to cost-effectively replace those units when they fail. If the economic and business model supports disposal of t...

The automatic transmission has been mass produced since the 1940s, but until the ‘60s most people changed gears manually. Why? The clutch and gearbox was, and is, a simple, robust and reliable power transmission technology that costs less, weighs less and engages the driver with the vehicle in a way no automated system can. But modern automatic transmission technology delivers superior performance...

With the ongoing war in Ukraine, the potential health effects of depleted uranium in antitank shells are in the spotlight again, as they were during the Gulf War. While depleted uranium is not an immediate health hazard to crews handling it, the small amount of residual radiation remains long after the battle is over carries a specific cancer risk. That risk is small compared to the other risks co...

The backlash against complexity starts with agriculture.  Today’s farmers are facing a significant technical challenge: larger, more expensive machines that can only be serviced by factory-trained technicians. With an urgent need to keep equipment running, many farmers are hacking equipment software to do the repairs themselves. Equipment manufacturers can monitor system access and may void w...

The annual trade show on industrial automation - Automate 2023 - showcased a wide variety of advanced automation solutions, and many of them were branded as “AI enabled.” While there is no external manifestation of artificial intelligence in industrial robotics, the implementation of AI will have a profound effect on American industry. Low-code and no-code robot programming is rapidly becoming the...

With the Canadian government announcing a $13 billion subsidy program to entice VW to build EV batteries in southern Ontario, a similar joint venture project in Canada from Stellantis and LG has been stopped. According to the automaker, the reason is a lack of government subsidies. Has EV manufacturing now become an entirely government-financed industry?   * * * Want to watch this podcas...

The recent launch of SpaceX Starship, one of the biggest rocket ever built—bigger than even the legendary Saturn V from the days of Apollo—ended in failure. However, much was learned. The gigantic booster got the stack 24 miles up, to the point of staging, before the vehicle failed catastrophically. Although the mass media labelled the loss of the launch vehicle as a success, the simple fact is th...

The steel reinforcement of concrete has been around for centuries and was standardized around 1950. Steel reinforcing bar—known as rebar—has a convenient property: a similar thermal expansion coefficient to the concrete surrounding it, making it a natural system to add tensile strength to concrete beams and columns. Unfortunately, steel is prone to corrosion, especially when moisture seeps inside...

Autonomous driving capabilities have been well-demonstrated in millions of Tesla cars, as well as in robotaxis fielded by companies such as Cruise, Waymo and Baidu. But the most economically powerful use case for self-driving isn’t in taxi service, it’s in the trucking industry. 3.5 million Americans drive trucks, earning an average of over $40,000 a year. It’s good money for a craft that requires...

From the earliest days of science fiction, robots have often been depicted as bipedal and humanoid. That’s still true today, even though industrial robots have never followed this pattern. For true mass adoption of robots as consumer devices, however, major players such as Elon Musk are actively developing devices that stand on two legs. But is this really the best way forward for mass production...

Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese engineer and quality control expert, is less well known in the West compared to legendary quality pioneers like Shewart, Juran and Deming, but his lifelong work to promote manufacturing quality was instrumental in launching the post WW2 Japanese manufacturing economy. He is most well-known for the development of quality circles, but his seven basic principles of qual...

Way back in the 80s, the general consensus about muscle cars was that the Golden Age was over. Small foreign six-cylinder engines, front-wheel drive and crippling exhaust emission controls length of the days of the Chevelle SS, the GTO, the big black Mustang—and the king of them all, the Hemi Superbird—were over. We were wrong.   Inconceivable advancements in engine technology mean that...

The airline industry has always been challenging. Very high fixed and variable costs and extreme sensitivity to external events as varied as a conflict between nations and lousy weather conspire to make profitability thin and risks increased. In commercial airplanes, high equipment costs mean that dispatch reliability is critical for profitable operations. Planes don’t make money in the hangar, me...

With the runaway success of Tesla and the rapid rollout of competing electric vehicle models from major automakers, the switch away from fossil fuels and transportation seems a certainty. The automotive technology is in place, as is the tech needed to safely charge the vehicles at home and on the road. However, electric vehicles—particularly EV batteries—are different with respect to material inpu...

Personal air mobility is a concept as old as the helicopter itself. Bell Aircraft, in fact, promoted early Bell helicopter prototypes as personal air vehicles, suggesting a future with a helicopter in every driveway. That never happened, but the development of lightweight batteries and electric motors that allow distributed lift through multiple rotors has created a new gold rush as small garage s...

As metrology industry experts will agree, it’s surprising how many engineers misunderstand the difference between accuracy and precision. To laypeople, accuracy and precision are synonyms, both descriptors of how close an attribute is to an ideal. In manufacturing, however, the advent of statistical process control meant that no dimension or attribute is ever considered to be “right” or “wrong.” A...

Ford CEO Jim Farley says that Ford has a problem. Several problems, in fact. The Ford Motor Company isn't alone in this given automakers' multiple challenges today: crippling supply chain shortages, especially of semiconductors, and a costly switch to electrification, one with uncertain profitability, loom large in 2023. Everyone is complaining about high costs and low margins. Yet cars are less a...

Today, we are all talking about small modular nuclear reactors for power—and in some places on Earth, they are an ideal solution. In Antarctica, it’s literally thousands of miles to any logistics support, and ships can visit only briefly during the summer months. You can fly in diesel generators and fuel, and that is being done today, but think of the cost of moving heavy liquid fuels by transport...

Is the internal combustion engine dead? General Motors thinks otherwise and the company announced an $854 million investment in four U.S. plants to manufacture the company’s sixth generation of small block V-8 gasoline engines. Want to watch this podcast as a video? End of the Line  is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as This Week in Engineering, Designin...

According to Kelly Blue Book, the average price of a new non-luxury car in the U.S. at the end of 2022 was about $45,000. In 1926, a typical manufacturing worker earned about $1,500 annually and could buy a Ford Model T for about $500.    Today, the average annual income of that manufacturing worker is $31,000, so an equivalent car today should cost around $12,000. But today’s vehic...

Every year at the end of January, the World Economic Forum holds its annual meeting. It’s believed that much of the planet’s future is decided by the conference attendees, and in the era of climate activism, Greta Thunberg has become a highly quotable and increasingly influential presence.  Her concern for the future of the planet is genuine and she speaks for millions of people worldwid...

Much of engineering is about putting heat in and taking heat out. Anyone who has studied heat engines knows that efficiency is determined by the Delta T between combustion temperatures and ambient, and this has driven designers to build hotter and hotter engines in everything from automobiles to jet aircraft. This has driven the development of heat resistant materials such as nickel-based superall...

Nuclear fusion is all over the news these days, with the announcement of the Lawrence Livermore breakthrough using the laser ignition method. Fusing two nuclei to produce net energy is the way stars operate, and the desire to duplicate this on earth has fascinated scientists since the dawn of the nuclear age 80 years ago. Stars, however, use enormous gravitational forces to create the conditions o...

With most Russian energy supplies to Germany cut off as a consequence of the Russia/Ukraine war, the ability of Germany and other nations in Europe to survive the upcoming winter is very much in doubt. The choices facing Europe in the absence of Russian gas are simple: alternate fossil fuel supplies, alternates, conservation or new domestic fossil fuel production. All have financial and economic c...

With Bell’s recent win over the Lockheed Martin/Boeing consortium in the U.S. Army’s future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, the long-awaited replacement for the venerable Sikorsky Black Hawk will be the Bell V-280 Valor. The Valor is a tiltrotor, and like the V-22 Osprey, combines vertical takeoff and landing with turboprop-like air speeds in horizontal flight. That’s good for the Army, but i...