Safety

While road traffic injuries represent the leading cause in worldwide injury-related deaths,[18] their popularity undermines this statistic. Result of a serious automo Mary Ward became one of the first documented automobile fatalities in 1869 in Parsonstown, Ireland[19] and Henry Bliss one of the United States' first pedestrian automobile casualties in 1899 in New York.[20] There are now standard tests for safety in new automobiles, like the EuroNCAP and the US NCAP tests,[21] as well as insurance-backed IIHS te...

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Fuel and propulsion technologies

Most automobiles in use today are propelled by gasoline (also known as petrol) or diesel internal combustion engines, which are known to cause air pollution and are also blamed for contributing to A radio taxi in New Delhi. A court order requires all commercial vehicles including trucks, buses and taxis in India to run on Compressed Natural Gas climate change and global warming.[17] Increasing costs of oil-based fuels, tightening environmental laws and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions are propelling work on alternative power systems for automobiles. Efforts to improve or replace existing technologies include the development...

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Production

Production Ransom E. Olds. The large-scale, production-line manufacturing of affordable automobiles was debuted by Ransom Olds at his Oldsmobile factory in 1902. This concept was greatly expanded by Henry Ford, beginning in 1914. As a result, Ford's cars came off the line in fifteen minute intervals, much faster than previous methods, increasing productivity eightfold (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower.[16] It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only Japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1914, until fast-drying...

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History

Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, designed a steam-powered vehicle around 1672. It was a 65 cm-long scale-model toy for the Chinese Emperor, that was unable to carry a driver or a passenger, but possibly was the first working steam-powered vehicle ('auto-mobile').[7][8][9] It is not known if Verbiest's model was ever built.[8] Leonty Shamshurenkov, a Russian peasant, constructed a human-pedalled four-wheeled "auto-running" carriage in 1752, and subsequently proposed to equip it with odometer and to use the same principle for making a self-propelling sledge.[10] Although Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is often credited...

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Automobile

"Car" and "Cars" redirect here.An automobile, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.[1] However, the term automobile is far from precise, because there are many types of vehicles that do similar tasks. There are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide (roughly one car per eleven people).[2][3] Around...

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