Designing the Cars of the Future One Question at a Time

Well, this may come as no surprise to you if you have ever done any collaborative work and brainstorming. The other day, we learned something very interesting in our think tank, at one of our regular local meetings at a local coffee shop. As a warm-up we had a quick brainstorm on the designing of cars for our future. Specifically we've been concerned that the Chevy Volt seems to have crashed (not literally, but production has been halted), the car costs too much, there are too few buyers, and it's just not pulling for all those 100s of millions of dollars invested in R&D and retooling. Okay so, let's talk about this, and let me explain what we learned through trial and error during our brainstorming session.

We first started with the typical concept of someone taking notes, and others just blurting out whatever came to their mind on new auto designs and ways to build our future cars. After 4 or 5 people spoke out in rapid succession one person asked; why does it have to have wheels?

Well, that completely sent all the other comments back to the drawing board, and we made a quick right turn if you will. Next folks were talking about hovercrafts, low pressure area, and the types of blowers that would be needed. Others began discussing how they would prevent all the noise from blowing out the driver's ear drums, and taking that noise and vibrational energy to power up all the other systems in the vehicle - noise recapture.

Then they started discussing the types of motors such as gasoline and diesel. And the same person who asked the question before asked; why does it have to run on liquid fuel?

Then we started talking about electricity, batteries, and gas type fuels like hydrogen. We decided that electric batteries were too heavy, but that the weight doesn't matter as much in a hovercraft, many of the hovercrafts are quite heavy. However, others still wanted to reduce the weight, and they started talking about how to redesign the batteries to be more efficient, lighter, and not use materials which were hard to get, or very costly.

As we began talking about body design styles, and braking systems because this vehicle would not have wheels, the same individual asked; why can't the body of the vehicle also help in the braking? One of the folks in the group was a former aerospace person, and we started talking about air brakes, spoilers, wing flaps, and things of this nature. Interestingly enough, just in our little brainstorming session we totally redesigned the future of human cars.