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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by antonia and rwayda to talk about cars, motoring and gearboxes, and speculate about what the future might hold for driving and roader the inspiration for this episode came about because you were looking for some driving lessons so can you tell us more about that oh yes i've
been trying to find driving lessons for about six months to uh pass my test with an automatic car for for a few reasons and and the foreseen features won't seem to be a thing to drive a manual and the other reason is just i find manuals are a lot of work you know when you mentioned that to me a while ago i assumed that the reason lessons for cars with automatic gearboxes were so popular is because electric vehicles are also becoming more popular and they don't need to change
gears when you're driving them i guess we'll get into that in a minute but antonia i think your experience at driving is probably a little bit different to awaiters yeah i think in past episodes when rorain was talking about learning to drive um i could i could agree because i learnt on a on a manual and i drove manual a couple of times and then i think our first automatic car was a hybrid and now i you know i'm not worried about the the fun of driving and the total control
that people say you get from a manual i like i like having two hands on my steering wheel having good control um and yeah just not having to worry about um stalling the car that's nice like there's there's hill assist it's pretty good i can't agree more antonia for this besides the emerging going around about with an automatic so i guess my experience driving or starting off driving is probably similar ish to antonia's because i also learned in a manual but i do have a confession
that was well over 12 years ago and i haven't really driven a lot since i haven't driven in over 10 years so all i've driven is a manual and the control of the car was not the thing that wasn't enjoyable to me knowing when to change gear and how to change gear smoothly was a thing i took a lot of pride in but i am curious about the changes in car technology even though i don't drive anymore so i guess that leads in nicely to the focus of this episode and antonia
i think he mentioned something in the past in past episodes about the efficiency of traditional cars with internal combustion engines so i guess that's a good place to start yeah so i think an an internal combustion engine car is quite quite a classic example um and a classic example of efficiency from a fuel so a lot of the fuel you burn um is lost as heat rather than converted into kinetic energy or work to drive the car so i think i've seen figures where the
efficiency is something between 20 and 30 efficient whereas if you look at the efficiency of a uh from an electric vehicle i'm sure there are some cool sankey diagrams you can find online where they sort of say you know from the point of generating electricity down to a point of driving an electric vehicle what's the final amount of energy coming out of it um but also the interesting point is you know regenerative braking so it's not it's not really worth regenerative braking unless you a big
enough vehicle that it warrants having a heavy flywheel because flywheels are basically a large mass that store rotational energy that you can then bring back at some point um so they tend to be reserved that's mechanical regenerative braking and so that's reserved for large vehicles otherwise regenerative braking is more efficient when you have an electric battery in storing it electrically is this a different point to what i said in the past um i think that probably does summarize
the episode we did about um oh geez i'm terrible at remembering episode names yeah me too we did that yeah was it about batteries i think it was about ev batteries oh i was thinking the one about how science engineering changed our lives we were looking at transport which was about a year ago i definitely remember you mentioning flywheels because i didn't know what it was at the time i had to look it up and now i understand it i i get what you mean about it you'd use it in a bigger car a
bigger vehicle because they're heavier anyway so that extra mass wouldn't be a huge percentage in greece but i think you also said something about how internal combustion engines need gearboxes because they're only really efficient at certain rpm revolutions per minute yeah that is that is also another aspect i thought it was partly because of that but when i was reading in preparation for this episode i found another fact which is actually when you first start up an engine it's got too much
so if you didn't have a gear a lower gear you'd almost go from like naught to 60 too fast for a for a road so it wouldn't be safe so actually we have gears to step it down i guess there are two components to that there's speed and then there's torque or turning force what can you really do you can control airflow you can control fuel and temperature so i guess those are the main factors but you also want to get the most out of your fuel so instead of controlling these and getting less efficient
burning you would rather use a mechanical way of turning the crankshaft and you know we have gears and you use different gear ratios so you can get either more torque or more speed so with a now i'm trying to remember which way around it is big wheel is driving a small wheel then you have lots of torque and it rotates fewer and then you would get a the smaller gear would then spin faster so you kind of get the speed out of that one and then the other way around if you had
loads of speed you could then get more torque which is why tractors are terrible on a road if you've ever been stuck behind one uh some of them are reasonably fast but yeah they've got all the torque and none of the speed yes yeah exactly well people keep on saying that they have more control on the car though i think that's because you can dictate when it changes gear so like say i wanted to accelerate to overtake something really quickly i'd drop it down again if i'm in manual
and then put my foot to the floor and the car should jump forward but in an automatic you don't necessarily get that control your what how you drive is dictated by how the gearbox is set up so if i put my foot to the floor on an automatic it wouldn't necessarily leap forward in the same way i was like i don't want to change you now you're pushing me too fast no that's that is true but there is sports mode and then you have all the power that the car has available rather than
trying to do it efficiently or fuel efficiently it will just go i would say that putting a car into sports mode also makes me it makes me less carsick anyway i think it also tightens up the suspension as well i know it's just an interesting car my boyfriend hires a few years ago to do some driving in the mountains sports mode was comfortable eco mode was not at all i'm not entirely sure what all the difference was that's interesting i i never use sports mode
because you know i like i like driving automatics it means i don't change gears so i just i just leave it in the default and whatever happens happens maybe i could be a little bit more conscious of what's going on but i guess i've kind of weighed up that i get the benefit of focusing more on the road so i'm gonna do that instead of trying to work out how the car works at the same time good point because i think it's better to keep your eye on the road isn't it i
can't remember a time when i've been sitting there going what gear am i in what gear i'm meant to be in and looking down at it and trying to change things my hand just automatically went to the gear stick regardless of which car i was yeah i don't yeah i didn't like stare at my gear stick but it's just more of a more of a you know it's mental load it's not like my eyes are off the road but just like i might not be as mentally focused on everything that's happening and potential hazard you know
like that has an awareness test where you click so every time you see like someone on the road they could cross time to click but you have to click at the right time oh [Laughter] and and what he said laura is kind of like my dad been driving an automatic for a very long time now but he learned and driven a manual for about 20 years and he still have his hand on his gear when he's driving because i think his brain is wired to have his hand covering gears i had to
get into the right habit of not trying to press the clutch because in a in one of my cars where the clutch would have been is now the handbrake that's not a good design it's a lot out of the way but still occasionally i'd be like oh time to go for the clutch nope that's no keep the left foot down and still for me still feels very normal not to have my left foot moving at all for me just like it's labor i've got to say even though it's been over 10 years since i was behind the wheel of a car
if someone asked me how do you start a car and drive off i would be moving my hands and feet the way that i would if i were driving a manual it depends on the first car you learned and it dictates your big muscle of the brain there maybe and i gotta say i've looked at the cars that i've been in recently so my boyfriend now drives a hybrid a plug-in hybrid and i don't even know how to start it you have to put don't you have to put your foot on the brake or something yes because you will release
the hand brake and the car will start moving for you and you don't have to clutch in first gear so you need to stop it with the brake i don't have enough control if i've not got a clutch in a physical handbrake that i can actually pull up and feel that it's on there tight some some do have a handbrake it depends on the car you know you can you could still do that yeah if you if you hang on a handbrake you'll find that in automatics i still find that handbrake not handy because i
had driven before in baghdad and it's flat so it's for me it almost does not exist you didn't fancy putting your foot the floor and try and do 100 turn then but i understand i really need it here for safety and if i'm stopping on a traffic light or on a hell even in an automatic i will need to put my hand to break up even though for me this is just an extra move i don't need this have it safety first yeah all right so i guess we've talked a little bit about how traditional cars
with internal combustion engines work that they're only efficient a particular what's the best way would i want to say power output but that doesn't sound right it is right it is right i think i think i think that is essentially what it's doing fair enough i feel like saying like they only have a certain amount of power they can give and that's it and then you use the gears to convert that power into whatever you need it to be well i guess when you say power output i think of
like your your experience of the power like the delivered power but it still has yeah now i see what you mean i've totally derailed the conversation with semantics about what does power mean flashbacks to the the electricity grid episode when i was trying to explain a voltage and and power and potential difference oh man we got there though that's how i we did get that's how i felt when i was looking into how electric uh vehicles how the motors in them work because i found so
many resources that just confused me so i think the reason that electric vehicles don't have gearboxes is because you can just control all off the motor so you can change the speed by either changing the voltage or the frequency of the alternating current so you don't need the torque anymore so the torque is governed by the amount of current and obviously your battery can only supply a particular amount of power any one time power is voltage times current the torque is important and the torque
does drop off when you get to really high speeds you'll start off with all the torque and you'll get to a high speed quite quickly and then the torque starts to drop off unless you do some fancy things to get around that and apparently some electric vehicle manufacturers are thinking of introducing gears for that reason having a gearbox that will switch between two different gears would that mean an electric can go manual again it could that's a sad move laura it's only two
gears is what they're talking about so at least it's only like high and low i want zero gear zero gears you can control i think they all have gears in there somewhere because again they still need to convert the power output all that torque and whatever else into something that the car can handle again electric motors are really powerful so you need to step it down so the car doesn't just break as soon as you put your foot on the accelerator apparently on the plus side there could be you know
software or even ai to solve that issue maybe maybe you don't have to worry about the gears you know it'll figure it out oh it's getting up to this speed and we're not running very efficiently let's go into the other gear fair point as long as i don't have to do it manually i'm happy that sort of thing does make me wonder about the future of car technology if you can incorporate artificial intelligence into it and it can sense the road in front of you i think some
cars do do this to an extent where they sense how rough the road surfaces and they adapt accordingly what else could they do well they started doing self-driving now well even before like we get to the fancy self-driving cars like my car already supposedly keeps you within the lanes and uh anti-collision pool detection but i'm i'm too scared to try the lane thing i'm not gonna test it as well it seems a little risky to test this out but the anti-collision right if it sees
the car in front of me break or like there's a sudden change in our distance it actually beeps up to let me know yeah see i think that's quite a good idea where it alerts you that you need to do something rather than like the lane changing one where it just kind of takes control away from you and i kind of imagine you could feel the steering wheel moving under your hands i would find that very creepy it was really creepy i tried the parking there's a parking one where you can get it to to
parallel park for you it like uses the reversing camera and you can highlight the bot where the bay is and then it will automatically turn the wheel for you but it was too weird it was too weird for me yeah that's that sounds quite creepy and like it's from a future movie i like though also they have sensors to tell you that you should put your light on or something when when you go through a tunnel yeah don't some turn them on anyway or am i imagining that yeah it's
just it got dark put your headlights on yeah mine has the daylight sensors yeah sometimes i like if i did put on the lane assist and and there's cruise control then i'm on a motorway what else do i need to do kind of worrying isn't it pay attention to what's around you i don't know like what if someone merges really quickly what if they're not paying any attention either and they merge into the lane that you're in what happens then whose car does what oh yeah they both try to do the same
thing that could be a problem if they both try and break at the same time yeah automatically is it a game of chicken like one car thinks ah but if i'm not in that same space it's fine and the other car like way over accelerates i don't know can you imagine the ai sitting there going do i play a chicken with this car but i mean i've heard talk of cars sort of talking to each other so if you pass a car coming from the direction it can tell you what is happening ahead
of you because it's just been there that'd be pretty cool sounds really matter yeah so it could tell you like is the road really slippery because there's a diesel spill or something or is there a dead cheap on the road which might happen around here because i live in a cheap country so like the car if the car starts talking what next knight rider i don't suppose you remember that dude it's very very old tv series i guess say very old it's been revived there is a
new night rider oh is there i mean i say new when it's like the past 10 15 years new i think that one might have passed me virus i can't like brand new like it's just come out now on netflix no i think it was all right i feel like this was before netflix was really that popular i mean so would we have a car whisperer at a point like the horse was i feel like if cars were made by humans then we wouldn't need to have a whisperer to interpret hope not and communicate with him i hope the cars
know what we intend otherwise we are just being taken on a ride maybe they would develop their own language just don't get into it then this this is where we're going we're just totally abandoning cars all together because they're going to take over i mean they could if we give it ai without much limitation what's to stop it like i don't know i don't know what what what could it what can a ai do if all it has is the car as this body go on a rampage kill all humans
yeah um there must be a kill switch in this thing yeah i was just thinking that yeah i guess if they're all sort of connected to each other via bluetooth or whatever there must be some way to infiltrate that network and take them down like skynet yeah this has gotten very dystopian i mean i'd like to think you know through exploration and sci-fi we've worked out to not do that to to our to our robots and our ai yeah i've got to say i do quite like the idea of self-driving cars because the
reason that i don't enjoy driving is it's not control of the car it's more knowing what other people are going to do and if you can take that component out of it and all the cars kind of obey the same rules the rules of the road then that seems more pleasant and it means you don't have to pay attention to the road either and it's like getting on a train and you can sit there and read a book or sleep or do some work that would be interesting but you would need a lot of infrastructure to get that
functioning yeah this is what i wonder about because part of the ai component is to recognize the features that are around the car and this this is what i've been wanting there are a lot of roads around me that don't have an obvious side to them like they don't have paint on the edge or there isn't a curb either there's just kind of this hedge that starts to overgrow the road depending on the time of year how easy is it for the ai to know that there is a bit of road
under that hedge and if especially because they're quite narrow roads around here so you can't always pass an oncoming vehicle how does the ai know that it can kind of scooch into the hedge and let the other car pass where's the next like passing um hedge yeah i mean i guess that but if they do know what's heading behind them they can figure out the easiest passing place but yeah how do they decide which is the best hedge to scooch into i think though that would require to
specifically train a car for an area or download something for that area like when you download offline maps but we have got pretty good sat nav like google maps with its traffic conditions and also i don't know how it does this whether it's from people who are passengers reporting accidents or road blockages or does google figure that out from the speed of the cars that's connected to it i've always wanted this and you know maybe in your case the ai of all the computer of all the cars will know
from just ah this is the path that all the all the vehicles go through this is where there is space and not hedge oh i'm good point i've never considered google to be that intelligent to pay enough attention to are you 10 centimeters closer to the hedge than this other person oh i don't know if it's quite accurate yet but maybe it could be maybe it could work it out from ultrasound so it doesn't have to visually see it's like you're saying the car will be a bad bat mobile's for everyone
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maybe i don't know maybe we'll use combination of things i guess it could use color as well so it'll know if it's green it's probably leaves and combine that with the ultrasound sensing yeah actually because what if it's just a single branch that sticks out and it thinks oh no can't drive into that this is a this is a danger and it's just this one stray brand that everyone would drive through like it wouldn't really bother people like buses have you ever gone on buses and country lanes and you
just hear it hitting the top of the trees it's a bit creepy i would really like cars that drive themselves so i can still be independent and not have to think about what other people are doing on the road but also it just sounds a bit creepy and it's been quite a long time in development has it and it's still not really here yet it's kind of here how efficient it is now i i don't know uh something else i was reading about now that i think about it is people deliberately stepping out in front of
self-driving cars just to be a nuisance because they know it'll stop and they just think it's funny to interrupt your day that is something that i've always thought about them which is kind of morning on the moral perspective of what is the ethics of a self-driving car if there were i don't know a line of people in front of it and then the line of people behind who does it choose to hit or if there was a danger to the passenger would it protect the passenger over the bystanders
because no one would want a car where they are more likely to die than the bystanders but then what if someone else has a opposite logic and then you you know you've got different companies doing different things yeah or i guess you can set the car to do what you think is morally right this is taking away turn again we talk about the morals of car technology i think we we will need a new highway code if that happens yeah because someone need to set the rules it can't be the
drivers no that's that's very true i've got to say that all the advantages that new technology has given us um my boyfriend's fairly new hybrid broke down few miles from home not so long ago well we think we had driven all the way out and most of the way home on just the battery and then when the battery went flat the petrol motor obviously tried to kick in but it couldn't so we ended up coasting all the way downhill and just managing to get off the main road before we came to a complete stop
it turns out the control of the fuel injection had broken the electric controller done something it shouldn't have done my boyfriend works on cars an awful lot and he's like if this was not all electric weirdness i'd be able to get this thing home yeah and we were waiting so so long for recovery we probably could have walked home in that time but we had to sit and wait for someone to come and rescue us which seemed a bit silly in the middle of nowhere that was
not found fun no it wouldn't it wasn't we were there for hours just staring at the window and listening to the radio yeah that is the difficult thing with software because people can sort of protect it and say proprietary whereas mechanical things you can physically change it and fix it and then you could have been on your way so yeah is there right to repair software coming i don't know exactly what failed with the component i assume it was just like some sort of circuit board and a
resistor or a transistor or something went but i don't know we didn't ask i think if they become more and more i think we would need a new training for simple repairs just to switch it on enough not to be in the middle of nowhere like we do with normal cars do we really need such complicated technology why do things keep getting more complicated what's wrong with riding a bike that's what i do i can see how my bike works i can see how it breaks i can see how to fix it well i
agree with you in this but if i need to drive between sterling and dundee for work that won't work [Laughter] what if we meet halfway with a electric bike well what if it was heavily raining wear a jacket that's what i do or i just get wet sometimes it's nice to be if i'm doing a lot of exercise out in the rain the rain cools me down if you're going to work you don't want to arrive at work soaking wet get changed so can wet and tired maybe well no because you do it every day so
you're really fit and everyone's used to you turning up being totally soaked this is what i did for my entire phd cycling around manchester yeah my manchester is friendly to cycling but the highway between two cities maybe that could be changed though i mean instead of self-driving cars let's just have more efficient you know public transport like rail it's pretty good at mass transport of people it's just we don't always want to go a to b they're quite expensive and
also sometimes they're terrible so the other day that train was two hours late but is it the train's fault or is it the system around the train the people that manage them well they had to drive on a slower speed because they were suspecting the landslide because it was heavily raining but that's a civil engineering problem though is narrow ada and you're a civil engineer can't get off the train and tell them and check a ticket for them that would be rude yes that's true but
would you have been able to get around it if you're in a car like the landslide would still be there yeah well i could have timed it to go earlier in the day and strive slowly and i don't have to to depend on a technology to take me from a to b i would love to do the trains to be honest but this is what it is which i think it might be convenient to have a flying cars i i think that will just make things more complicated i agree i think if we were talking about people not
following the highway code before can you imagine what the airway code would look like yeah if you introduce that third dimension and people don't stay in that invisible lane oh my god right or just land on your house or whatever they want to do yeah how i'm just trying to pitch how do you stop someone landing on your house put a laser on it [Laughter] we can leader them away or like a mosquito not you know those little boxes that make awful sounds just like somehow have a hover car mosquito
to stop it from landing yeah i'm also not too convinced about the future of flying cars because i assume that they would use some sort of um fossil fuel based propellant to get enough energy density and if everything is meant to be moving to reducing greenhouse gas emissions which means not burning fossil fuels this is the point of the electric vehicles right that they're meant to be lower emissions and therefore more environmentally friendly but um yeah unless someone can
crack like how how you can make vehicles fly without producing any greenhouse gas emissions at all and figure out what the rules of flying them are i don't know people have talked about hydrogen for vehicles as the alternative to you know internal combustion engines and also alternative to electric vehicles but i think it's kind of fallen away because of the cost of making it but i think that's just because everyone was looking at steam methane reformation which is the most common way
but still requires fossil fuels yeah there's stuff like storage you get hydrogen and bottom and i feel like we're going really off topic now as well talking about hydrogen this seems like another episode doesn't it the ins and outs of hydrogen economy so so to sum up it kind of sounds like we're saying that we don't necessarily want to rely on cars but they're going to be around for quite a while and if there are ways that we can make them more comfortable without them being
weird like just wrestling control away from you then that's what we should go for is that what we're saying i think so yes cool and if public transport were everywhere and took you wherever you wanted to go that would be marvelous but i'm really not sure i can see that happening not where i live not in a rural area so i think that is probably a good place to leave the episode so if you've enjoyed this one you can find us on social media to ask us any questions or
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