Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Cars are more like sail boats than airplanes. They surf the interface between two media.
Rather than biasing the body toward lift, perhaps a dynamic suspension system that reads the weather and the approaching road surface to control ride height (front and rear) at high resolution.
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But that wouldn't improve rolling resistance. Or would it?
One thing we do know, cars can be made much lighter than they are now. Even big cars, trucks and SUVs.
Now that does impose a couple of disadvantages. While I'm not in favor of excessively large vehicles there is a certain safety benefit in having more mass in a vehicle. But prehaps with self driving and maybe even exterior air bags that can detect an impact before it happens and deploy in time to further cushion the force of a collision we could maybe make cars much much lighter than they are now.
The other thing is that if the world is going to transition to battery electric vehicles then, well, batteries are heavy.