Those boffins at New Scientist...
Discussion
...have featured some car related stuff recently. Firstly, some stuff about tread patterns:
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Question:
Why do car and motorcycle tyre manufacturers keep coming up with such varied tread patterns?
Answer:
In the late 1980s I worked on three-dimensional CAD/CAM design software for a top tyre manufacturer.
The software allowed the designers to create almost lifelike pictures of tyres based on two-dimensional drawings of the tyre section and the treads.
The designers told me that this saved them a lot of time, because many of the hundreds of designs they produced every year were turned down by the marketing department purely because of their appearance. Tread patterns were described as "not sexy enough" or "not masculine enough" and were sent back to the drawing board.
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Only when the marketing department agreed with the general look of the tyre and its tread pattern could a set of test tyres be produced. These were cut by hand, because of the high cost of a mould, and then tested.
Experienced tyre designers knew what made a certain tread pattern perform well for a given type of tyre and could therefore deliver surprisingly new and different designs again and again that satisfied the marketing department's desire for new products but also still behaved well during the tests.
Andre de Bruin , Sonoma, California
And some stuff for you SUV fans:
www.newscientist.com/hottopics/cars/article.jsp?id=99993462&sub=Hot%20Stories
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Many SUVs are large and have an intimidating road presence, but that is part of what makes them safe, says George Peterson of AutoPacific, a Californian market research firm. People feel safer in aggressive vehicles, he says.
However, Joan Claybrook, a former head of NHTSA and now head of consumer rights group Public Citizen, says aggressive SUVs are making others buy similar vehicles. "It's now a highway arms race, where if you want to be safe, you get bigger and bigger," she says.
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And in terms of fatalities from all types of crash, SUVs are slightly more unsafe than passenger cars. In 1999, for every 100,000 registered vehicles in the US, there were 16.4 fatalities in passenger cars, and 17.8 in SUVs.
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...have featured some car related stuff recently. Firstly, some stuff about tread patterns:
The designers told me that this saved them a lot of time, because many of the hundreds of designs they produced every year were turned down by the marketing department purely because of their appearance. Tread patterns were described as "not sexy enough" or "not masculine enough" and were sent back to the drawing board.
...more...
WHAAAAAT!!!
Not sexy enough??? I don't give a S**t what it looks like so long as it sticks to the road like s**t to a blanket.
Bloody marketing people. It should be left down to the engineers to develop the tyres.
Andy
PS. Its true about the Slow Ugly Vans though. Loadsa Americans buy them cos they think they're safe when in fact they're not.
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