Sports Car Design

Sports Car Design



Sports Car Design

Introduction

The motor car has changed people's lives in many ways. From the point of view of the individual, car travel bestows considerable benefits. However, it can also produce undesirable side-effects, some of which are immediate and tangible, for example, noise, pollution, and visual intrusion. Less immediate, but no less important over the longer term, are the effects of car ownership and use on the evolution of cities, encouraging the dispersal of land uses and generating inflated travel distances that sooner or later translate into traffic congestion on the arterial network. Finally, car ownership and use affect social welfare, re-distributing the benefits of mobility away from non-car using minorities and eroding the degree of social engagement across communities. Collectively, therefore, motor cars can do a great deal of damage, and over the last 100 years or so, engineers and planners have been engaged in a continuing battle to prevent cities from being overwhelmed by the rising tide of car traffic.

Most of the measures have been passive, in the sense that they accept the car as it is, and attempt to adapt the infrastructure accordingly, or to control the demand for car travel through disincentives of various kinds. But some researchers have questioned the concept of the motor car itself, as a private vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine and used by individuals in pursuit of their personal aspirations independently of community needs, as the best way to cater for travel during the 21st century. The critics are drawn from several disciplines whose boundaries overlap. But we can distinguish four main groups: (i) urban planning and transport engineering, (ii) environmental science, (iii) aesthetics, and (iv) the social sciences.

Previous Work on the Concept of the Motor Car

Planning and transport

Much of the car's impact in planning terms has been indirect and unintentional: urban blight, the proliferation of 'non-places' and the blurring of the character of cities throughout the world. This was not what was intended. During its infancy, the car promised fresh air and countryside, and manufacturers—Henry Ford in particular—urged on the American public the notion that the automobile would redeem purchasers from the grim conditions of the city and allow them to live more healthy lives on the outskirts. Moreover, as Rosenbloom (1992) has pointed out, in the USA, mass car ownership allowed women to join the labour force in larger numbers, not because it gave them access to the city centre, but because it enabled them to reach workplaces that were widely dispersed throughout the suburbs, which were not accessible in any other way.

In Europe, by contrast, modernist architects were keen to herd city-dwellers into tower blocks surrounded by open space, and to separate vehicles from pedestrians by raising or sinking the carriageways. Le Corbusier, the most influential of all, attempted to do away with the street altogether, referring to it at one point as merely 'a trench'. Architectural modernism of this kind has since evaporated, while Henry Ford's more homely vision lingers ...