They are not so good at judging the complex trade-offs in car engineering.
GM's Korean unit handles small-car engineering, for instance.
Apart from scooping up Daihatsu to get small-car engineering and engines years ago, Toyota has concentrated solely on improving its own offering, with a relentless focus on efficiency, cost-cutting and a flood of new variations of successful models brought to market at an increasingly rapid rate.
Building intelligence into a car so that it could drive itself safely will require a significant engineering work on the car and changes to how we design the transportation infrastructure.
"Based on our analysis, the performance of A123's new Nanophosphate EXT at high temperatures is unlike anything we've ever seen from lead acid, lithium ion or any other battery technology, " said Dr. Yann Guezennec, senior fellow at CAR and professor of mechanical engineering at the Ohio State University.
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More importantly to car buyers, all of the engineering upgrades that make the new Accord perform better than expected on a racetrack also give it a quieter, smoother and more responsive ride in everyday driving.
Design the car with parts already being produced, make the engineering data public, and have someone else build it.
K. Venkatesh Prasad, head of the advanced engineering team at Ford, talked about the car as a global platform in which people spend some 2 billion commuter hours a week, which can give people custom information, and act as collective sensors of movement or weather.
The Sector Skills Council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies (Semta) has warned car manufacturers faced a skills gap as existing engineers retire.
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Their plan: to create a "virtual car company" that would farm out most of the design, engineering and manufacturing work for the V-12 to outside suppliers.
Their plan: to create a "virtual car company" that would farm out most of the design, engineering and manufacturing work for the powerful V-12 to outside suppliers.
Despite the residual shadow engineering, though, there are a growing number of car companies that are working fruitfully with suppliers to produce pre-assembled modules, rather than bins of parts.
So that's why the company will build up to 800, 000 midsize cars and car-based crossovers off of one common chassis, saving billions in engineering costs.
However, Tooru Futami, engineering director at electronics engineering development division at Nissan, told Forbes that the car was not yet able to self-drive down the street or park itself in any space.
After a bachelor's degree in engineering he wanted to become an entrepreneur, but joined the local car company and stuck there.
In the mid-20th century, elite car builders reached the effective limit of the materials (steel and aluminum) and engineering (body-on-frame) available.
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While the car models have changed in style over the years, the relentless focus on precision engineering has remained the driving force behind the brand's success.
Those who buy Mercedes are buying German engineering and those who buy an Alfa Romeo Italian design, regardless of where the car is built.
Project integration and other modifications to enable the car to run safely on the salt were handled by A-Salt Racing and Advanced Product Engineering, based in Camarillo, California.
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"The electricity used in building a car is about 20 percent of the cost of the structure, " said Marcilio Alves, an engineering professor at Brazil's premier University of Sao Paulo and one of the few independent researchers in the nation looking at car safety.
You don't get the usual rumbling of an idling engine, just the whisper-quiet whirl of the e-tron's motor (Audi is currently engineering an "e-tron sound" so that outsiders will be able to hear the car) and wind whizzing by.
Consider the example of the Nano car developed by TATA motors which required multiple innovations in technology as well as cross-functional teams working on different engineering disciplines to come together to solve complex issues and provide solutions while at the same time meeting the targeted price point.
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