It was standard in Tucker "Torpedo" 1948. And I'm quite sure it was standard in Volvo back in the late 50s/early 60s.
And to the one mentioned that GM was first in FWD on a big car: Wasn't Citroën out with this "a few years" a head of GM?
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Tesla BEV Competition Developments
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And to the one mentioned that GM was first in FWD on a big car: Wasn't Citroën out with this "a few years" a head of GM?
I'm not sure the Citroen cars qualify as "big" - are we talking about exterior size, weight, power, or interior capacity?
I am pretty sure that Cord had them both beat the a large, powerful (for the era) car - though they didn't build all that many of them.
That was me. Of course the Citroën Traction Avant had not only front wheel drive but a unit body, in 1934. For that matter the Cord L-29 beat it by a few years but did not have the longevity of the Citroën.
The question comes down to the definition of ‘big’. Until GM got the Oldsmobile Toronado/6th generation Cadillac Eldorado nobody had managed both FWD and a gigantic beast of an engine. The Cord had a Lycoming, the Citroën had a modest 4-cylinder. Only GM could make it work on gigantic terms, although they did not really market it.
FWIW, in 1967 I drove the Cadillac version from NYC to Los Angeles. When I diverted for some giant sequoia tourism I found it it handled snow vastly better than the other cars of the time.
Both Volvo and Saab had standard seat belts in 1958/1959. A Saab GT750 was the first car I ever saw/drove with seat belts. They were even three-point, which was a Saab innovation taken from aircraft precedent IIRC.
Maybe this history is OT, but it certainly illustrates the perils of early adopters since all of these brands have disappeared as independent ententies except for Cadillac. The innovations of all of them have ended, or so it appears.
We must hope Tesla does not meet their fates.
Had a Volvo 122s with 3 point harnesses standard in the early 60s. They were way better than what we have today. Solid, fixed and easy to use. I wish we could get them or a proper4 point harness today. Mercury Cougar had 4 point option but insurance company stopped my wife from getting them by saying they made the car a racer. Go figure.
Well, this was not their first FWD car, but it does predate Cadillac with FWD and is a big car by European standard, and not a small car.
I was not aware about the Cord, but yes, it seams like they beat even Citroen on this. I always have heard that it was Citroen that pioneered this, but that seams that was not entirely correct.
Here is a curious excerpt from the Wikipedia page. The puzzler: which car broke Citroen DS 10 day deposit record of 80K - in just one day after reveal, after more than 60 years?
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What are the spec differences between the generations? I'm having a hard time finding an apples-to-apples comparison.
Specifically, is having a "more powerful... powerplant", yet "less powerful electric motors" due to the gasoline engine having greater power?
Well, the Cord was quite small volumes and, although innovative it was nothing like the wondrous Citroën. The unit body itself was such an advance that it made the Traction Avant still state-of-the-art in 1950. I probably overstate the significance of GM conquering torque steer. As for the DS, nobody could match the suspension, just as nobody could quite believe it when I drove my DS-21 across a newly plowed field with zero problem. I quite loved those cars and still have nostalgia. The tax-driven smallish engine was unusually smooth and efficient, smooth partly because of the massive flywheel.
Just imagine what would have happened had the DS designers had access to li-ion batteries! For that matter what would have happened if André Citroën had continued for a few more decades.
If anybody in the US is inclined to indulge further into Citroën look no further than Oxnard, lust north of Los Angeles to visit the Mullin Automotive Museum. It also has a wide variety of Bugatti's too. It's not the largest car museum but is one of the best I know.
Mullin Automotive Museum
If you can make it to France this will tell you about the history of innovation like no other auto museum I know.
Explorez le passé de Citroën à Aulnay-sous-Bois
It is in Aulnay-sous-Bois near CDG, and is unforgettable.
Sorry for my passionate response to the slightly OT subject of one of my devotions.
Ah, the SM!!
Nope. They changed the final drive ratio, so the Gen 2 electric motor could have greater apparent power. A few years of experience made them confident of the higher rpm not creating high temperature problems for the permanent magnets. In addition the reengineered to reduce rare earths and using cheap ferrite in motor one while reducing weight by ~35kg.
Any way one looks at this demonstrates the depth of GM/LG engineering talent. I include both because several key people, including the LG US head, were part of the first GM team and the two work quite closely together.
As most of us agree GM does not have an engineering problem. They have a marketing and management impediment that repeatedly manages to have them produce serious innovation, then fail to commercialize the innovations in a really effective way.
Not sure about the final drive ratio, but the big change is that second generation Volts use both drive motors at full power with the engine off.
In the first generation, they only used both motors together at higher speeds to improve efficiency - for any real power the ring gear has to be locked to unleash the full torque of MG B.
The one way clutch and new arrangement of the drive unit means a second generation car can use the full power of the main motor at any time and add the second motor to it when the engine is off.
Wow! I have been a Tatra fan. As the design precursor of the VW it had some stability issues, easy to roll, but I love the overall design which seems still to have been very luxurious for the era. The air-cooled V8 in the 603 caught my imagination too.I see the Mullin Automotive Museum has a Tatra 87, I had a Tatra 600 25 years ago
Sounds like Kodak. Hope they learned from Kodak (I’m being serious).
Yes, this is a Tesla enthusiast’s site, but my family had always bought GM—and I still have lots of good memories of their cars (although my wife had the direct opposite experience).
The technological change sort of doomed Kodak. My father sold photo supplies and had a direct Kodak distributorship (only one in Central California after a while) from the 70s until the late 90s. He was also an unusually technical photographer (he wanted to be an engineer, but ended up in art school) so the R&D people would use him as a beta tester and he learned a lot about what was going on behind the scenes.
Kodak knew the technological cliff was coming, but they were pretty much powerless to change enough to survive. Film photography has a long supply chain. Kodak made money selling film, developing chemicals, photographic paper, as well as other misc. supplies. When my parents moved, my father built the garage extra wide to hold all the stock he had on hand (he didn't have a store front) and had two freezers for stuff that benefited from being kept cold (film can be kept almost forever if you keep it cold enough). Before they moved this was kept in a large storage room off the back of the garage.
Kodak made money at each step in the process from film purchase to final print in the customer's hand (on movie on screen, or slide show, etc.) They had built up a business empire to feed this machine. Digital came along and made it impossible for a company like Kodak to stay in business. With digital, the customer might buy a couple of pieces of media, and the early digital cameras ate a lot of batteries, but few digital photos ever get printed and there is no need for labs and chemicals to process the pictures. A whole chunk of their business was gone and replaced with something that didn't need much in the way of supplies.
Kodak did switch gears and started making camera media, floppy disks, burnable CDs, printer paper, and even batteries. All were excellent quality, but they were a new name in all those markets up against well established brands. How were they going to compete against Engergizer and Duracell? A lot of electronics companies had also moved into the digital camera market like HP and Sony, which made it even tougher for Kodak to compete.
Even a heavy digital photography user like a professional is going to buy a heck of a lot less media in a year than they bought film. A busy photographer like a fashion photographer could burn through a case of film in a few weeks. The same photographer might own 20 media cards today, but they get reused and after buying enough for their needs, the only new purchases are going to be to replace media that quits working or gets lost. Maybe a couple a year.
The mainstream car makers do face some difficult technological and logistical problems going forward. Car dealers, which are not owned by the car companies, but are closely associated, make a lot of profit from servicing ICE. EVs need less maintenance, though the service departments will get business during the transition as new car designs work out the bugs.
Car dealers and manufacturers today are already hurting because car reliability has gone up so much. The average age of a car on American roads is 11+ years. That makes 1/2 of the American car fleet a dozen years old or more. A lot of those cars are driven by people who can't afford newer cars, but a fair number are driven by people who could upgrade, but don't want to. I drove a 24 year old Buick until last year and another friend has a Toyota Camry from the 80s he still drives.
When the demand for EVs goes up, EVs will be a hot seller for a while, but with their lower maintenance costs and possible longer lives, the fleet will probably get younger for a little bit, then get even older over time. That is if the current model of car ownership holds. Some people are predicting that with autonomous cars, few people will own cars. I don't think it will be as extreme as these people predict. A lot of people love cars and will own them even if there is a cheaper alternative. The future for car ownership in larger cities will probably be more like New York City which has the lowest car ownership per capita in North America, but still has a large number of car owners even though car ownership is a hassle there and there are many alternatives. Outside of large cities, I don't see a big change in ownership patterns, though a lot of older clunkers will probably be replaced with cheap, fairly new ICE as urban areas electrify and the used market gets glutted with used ICE.
Even a small reduction in car ownership will be difficult on car makers though.
Then there are technological challenges. Some car makers are completely unprepared for the move to EVs. The head of Fiat-Chrysler said last week that EVs could not be made profitably and they were a dead end. They will likely continue to push their ICE-centric strategy until they have to close the doors. The European car makers are focusing on EV development more than anyone in part because a lot of European cities are going to ban ICE in the next decade and most of them have already been stung by Tesla's success. GM is doing more R&D in EVs than any other company outside of Europe, but even if the will is there from the top, turning such a massive ship in time is going to be difficult.
Toyota is betting the farm on hydrogen and I think that's going to end up being a dead end technology for car applications, though there are some areas where it might be a better option than electric cars (such as very cold climates). China is being as aggressive or more aggressive than the Europeans about electrics. They will be mostly focusing on their internal market for the next decade or two, but once their market fills out, their car companies that survive will be branching out and selling in other countries. They will be looking to fill niches left empty by established companies that don't make it. They might buy out the failing companies. They already bought Volvo.
The big problem that the established car makers will face that they are not prepared for is battery supply. Today they keep final assembly and engine production in house, but farm out almost all other production. This works OK but GM's supplier of door handles isn't ignoring them to fill orders for Ford. There will be a global battery shortage for a while (probably a decade considering how many battery factories need to be built) and the suppliers will be angling for the best deals. This will be like a game of musical chairs and some car companies will have trouble getting enough batteries to meet demand. Tesla's strategy will prove very wise. They locked down enough battery production to meet their near term battery needs and they are focusing on making sure all their future plans include enough battery production.
With EV production, the survivors are going to be the ones that have enough battery supply.
Car makers face a different challenge from Kodak. The market shifting from ICE to EVs is not as dramatic a business model shift as film to digital was, but it does have some similarities. Established car makers are going to find themselves competing against companies that are new as well as established companies moving into the disruption space. I would not be surprised if LG started making cars in a couple of years for example. The business model of making EVs and selling them isn't as dramatically different as the world was with film and after film, but there will be changes that need to happen. Big companies also struggle with change, even if they know it's going to happen and some will fail from the strain.
Ahhh, reusability. This paragraph alone made me realize what the Tesla network is going to do to the auto industry. (And yet I follow SpaceX, whose mantra is reusability... I just hadn't made quite that connection before.)
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Nissan Rogue is supposed to be available in the U.S. starting tomorrow with ProPilot Assist. Anyone planning on buying one so we can compare to Tesla EAP?
Nissan’s ProPILOT Assist Making US Debut This Month … In 2018 Rogue
Nissan’s ProPILOT Assist Making US Debut This Month … In 2018 Rogue
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