Questão 13 - CESGRANRIO 2013

10 Things You Didn’t Know About...Cars

by Corey S. Powell

1. Horsepower (hp) rates the engine performance

of cars and other motors. But what is the meaning of

horsepower? By its formal definition, it is the power

required to lift 33.000 pounds (15.000 kg) by one foot

(31 cm) in one minute. Note that, in spite of the horse

in the name of this measurement, the average horse

would have only about 0,7 hp.

2. In 1760, King George III, the English monarch

who nearly crushed the American Revolution, housed

around 30 horses in his Royal stables in London.

Today, a typical compact car packs a 150-horsepower

engine. So, any suburban commuter with his compact

car nowadays has instant access to at least five times

as much sheer muscle as King George III had.

3. The first documented auto fatality in the United

States was H. H. Bliss of New York City, who was

struck by a taxicab on September 13, 1899, while

exiting a trolley car.

4. Last year 32.310 Americans died in auto

accidents. If the 1962 fatality rate still held, there would

be an extra 150.000 deaths annually, equivalent to

losing the population of Pittsburgh every two years.

5. We can credit the diminishing rate of accidents

to a mix of improvements, including crash impact

standards, air bags, better tires, antilock brakes, and

stability control. Most importantly: seat belts. Eightyfour

percent of people now buckle up, compared with

14 percent three decades ago.

6. Lighting is one of the next frontiers in safety.

BMW is developing headlights that highlight nearby

people to help focus the driver’s attention, and side

and rear mirrors that block 80% of the light intensity

coming from the headlights of the cars behind. A

Carnegie Mellon University researcher team has

developed headlights that can track droplets and

avoid illuminating them, rendering rainfall nearly

invisible.

7. In 2004, Nevada hosted the first Grand

Challenge for self-driving cars. None of the contenders

finished the course, and one leaped menacingly at

spectators. Now Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has

completed 140.000 miles on the road with only two

small accidents—one of them caused by human error.

8. Many expensive vehicles are already partly

autonomous, with brakes that activate if sensors

indicate an impending crash, steering that prevents

drifting, a sonar system that navigates right into

parking spaces, and cruise control that prevents

following the next car too closely.

9. Going beyond with self-driving cars, soon

state-of-the-art research on transportation will give

government the tools to improve highway flow by

regulating distances between cars. It will also ease

urban congestion by automating the search for

parking, which causes up to three-quarters of city

traffic. Intelligent unified GPS systems will be able

to distribute cars along the concurrent highways and

streets which will avoid bottlenecks and, finally, traffic

lights will be synchronized for longer distances.

10. “Crashless is the goal. In the last 20 years the

car industry has worked a great deal in designing cars

that when crashing would protect their riders. In fact,

modern cars protect drivers and passengers in frontal,

rear and offset crashes by using crumple zones to

absorb crash energy. This means that the car structure

absorbs the impact of the crash, not the driver or

passengers. But this way we will never completely get

rid of accidents with casualties. The way to go is not to

crash. And we are very close to designing crashless

vehicles.” said John Maddox, head of the National

Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Available at: <http://discovermagazine.com/2012/oct/16-things- -you-didnt-know-about-cars>. Retrieved on: 10 Oct. 2012. Adapted.

In the text, there is reference to the first fatal auto accident in the US, in which H. H. Bliss was the victim. When this accident happened, Mr. Bliss was