The Road Ahead for the U.S. Auto Industry

[Excerpt] In 2004, U.S. light vehicle sales were up slightly, reversing a moderate slide that began in 2001. The 1.3 percent gain brought the market total to 16.8 million units, approximately the same level as 2002, and the fourth highest sales on record. The trend, which began in 2001 of offering low or no cost financing along with high rebates has cast a cloud over the otherwise sunny sales outcome for the year. American consumers have continued the long-term shift towards a preference for light trucks over passenger cars. Trucks passed cars in 2001, hitting over half the market for the first time that year. In 2004, light trucks accounted for over 55 percent of the U.S. passenger vehicle market. Light truck sales reached 9.3 million units, up 3.6 percent over 2003. Passenger car sales were down 1.4 percent compared to 2003, reaching only 7.5 million units

UAS Concept of Operations and Vehicle Technologies Demonstration

In 2017 and 2018, under National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sponsorship, the New York Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Test Site and Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research (NUAIR) Alliance conducted a year-long research project that culminated in a UAS technology flight demonstration. The research project included the creation of a concept of operations, and development and demonstration of UAS technologies. The concept of operations was focused on an unmanned aircraft transiting from cruise through Class E airspace into a high-density urban terminal environment. The terminal environment in which the test was conducted was Griffiss International Airport, under Syracuse Air Traffic Control (ATC) approach control and Griffiss control tower. Employing an Aurora Centaur optionally piloted aircraft (OPA), this project explored six scenarios aimed at advancing UAS integration into the National Airspace System (NAS) under both nominal and off-nominal conditions. Off-nominal conditions were defined to include complete loss of the communications link between the remote pilots control station on the ground and the aircraft. The off-nominal scenarios that were investigated included lost-link conditions with and without link recovery, an automated ATC initiated go-around, autonomous rerouting around a dynamic airspace obstruction (in this case simulated weather), and autonomous taxi operations to clear the runway

Downtown Providence Farmers Market Design

This market essentially combines a marketplace with an existing or new industrial building. The hybrid created results in space that has daily retail sales and hours, as well as other goods available at other times. The industrial aspect typically acts as the anchor, as the market’s activities help attract a different group of consumers at other business times. An example of this would be a seafood supply warehouse that also provides dining and entertainment as a nightlife destination

An investigation on the effect of driver style and driving events on energy demand of a PHEV

Environmental concerns, security of fuel supply and CO2 regulations are driving innovation in the automotive industry towards electric and hybrid electric vehicles. The fuel economy and emission performance of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) strongly depends on the energy management system (EMS). Prior knowledge of driving information could be used to enhance the performance of a HEV. However, how the necessary information can be obtained to use in EMS optimisation still remains a challenge. In this paper the effect of driver style and driving events like city and highway driving on plug in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) energy demand is studied. Using real world driving data from three drivers of very different driver style, a simulation has been exercised for a given route having city and highway driving. Driver style and driving events both affect vehicle energy demand. In both driving events considered, vehicle energy demand is different due to driver styles. The major part of city driving is reactive driving influenced by external factors and driver leading to variation in vehicle speed and hence energy demand. In free highway driving, the driver choice of cruise speed is the only factor affecting vehicle energy demand

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (3/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 3 of