Tech

The rest of us ride shotgun: Five automakers who have driven innovation

From assembly lines to EVs, the auto industry goes forward because of its great minds.

Jonathan M. Gitlin – Feb 2, 2014 6:00 pm | 158

Credit: Photo collage by Aurich Lawson

We may not write about cars every day here at Ars Technica, but as my colleague Sean Gallagher’s recent articles have shown, the automotive world is changing, and the technologies we do write about daily are infusing the vehicles we drive. That should be no surprise since the history of the automobile itself is a history of continuing innovation.

For more than a century, the auto industry has witnessed a succession of inventors, designers, engineers, salesmen, and others trying to transform the way we get from A to B. Some of the ideas have been better than others, and some of the people have been more successful than others—often with little overlap. It looks different depending on what decade you dip into (everything from automatic shifting to electronic fueling can be considered innovative at the time), but this drive for progress is constant.

The vehicles on our roads today have been transformed almost beyond recognition from the hand-built vehicles of the beginning of the car era. We take for granted the fact that cars in 2014 are safe, efficient, and affordable, and those attributes have been made possible by advances in engineering, organization management, and even society (not to mention borrowing the occasional good idea from the aerospace industry). With recent talk of V2V and the next-gen engines fresh on our minds, let’s remember some of the most significant figures to have shaped the cars we drive—and even the world we live in—up to this point.

Henry Ford: A car for the people, production lines, a living wage, and the iconic V8

First up is almost certainly the best-known man on the list. Originally an engineer working for Thomas Edison, by the 1890s Henry Ford started tinkering with gasoline engines and horseless carriages. His very first venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, wasn’t a rousing success. His second, the Henry Ford Company, lasted a year before Ford walked out the door, unable to get along with the company’s stockholders. Third time proved to be a charm, and in 1903 the Ford Motor Company was created, with the original Model A as its product. His investors wanted the company to concentrate on building expensive cars for the wealthy, but Ford had other plans. He turned his attention to building a car for the middle classes, and the result was 1908’s Ford Model T, the car that changed the world.

Demand for the Model T vastly outstripped supply at first—it went on sale for a mere $850 (around $20,000 today). Eager to sell more cars, Ford looked at the production process and began streamlining it where possible. Rather than having workers move from part-built car to part-built car, Ford instead implemented a production line, bringing the cars to the workers. A constantly moving conveyor belt shuffled the cars through the factory in ever-increasing stages of assembly. Completed vehicles drove out the doors at the end. By 1914, in the vast Highland Park factory, Model Ts were rolling off the line every 93 minutes. Model T factories were soon established abroad, bringing mass production and assembly lines to Europe, Japan, Argentina, and beyond.

Of even more significance than the mass-produced automobile, though, were Ford’s decisions in 1914 to double his workers’ hourly wage to $5 and shorten their work day to eight hours. By doing so, he established the idea that a job involving manual labor could pay a middle class wage—a trend soon adopted by other industrialists and maintained for decades. Perhaps his decision wasn’t entirely altruistic, as it meant many more potential customers for Model Ts. All told, Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts between 1908 and 1927, setting a production record that wouldn’t be matched until Volkswagen eclipsed it by building more than 21 million Beetles.

In 1932, Ford’s final contribution to the automobile hit the streets: the V8, an engine that for many would come to symbolize America. Ford wasn’t the first to join two rows of cylinders with a common crankshaft; he wasn’t the first to make such an engine with eight cylinders. But until now, these engines were laborious and expensive to build. Ford’s was the first V8 to have its engine block cast as a single piece, making it easy to mass produce. Robbie Coltrane’s elegant paean to the Ford V8 provides more insight into this iconic engine and its undeniable impact on automotive history. Cheap and easily modified, the V8 gave bootleggers the power to evade the authorities; it gave rise to a generation of hot rods; it even gave us stock car racing.

Malcolm Sayer: Shaping the cars we drive with science

Jaguar’s E-Type sports car seems to regularly top lists of the world’s most beautiful cars, and we have Malcolm Sayer to thank for that. It’s not that designers hadn’t been creating elegant bodywork before him; coachbuilders like Figoni et Falaschi were creating works of art in the 1920s. Sayer, though, brought not just art but also science to the (drafting) table. In 1950, he was hired by Sir William Lyons, the founder and boss of Jaguar Cars, who wanted Sayer to apply his knowledge of aerodynamics—knowledge gained during the war as an engineer with the Bristol Aeroplane Company—to help the company’s racing efforts.

A Jaguar XK-120. Credit: Denis De Mesmaeker

Lyons, like Henry Ford before him, went racing as a way to showcase his cars. Ford used his early success to attract investors in the Ford Motor Company; for Lyons, success at the race track was a way to sell more cars. Sayer’s first job at Jaguar was designing the body for the C-Type racing car. The C-Type was based on the world’s fastest production car, Jaguar’s XK-120 sports car, so winning the 24-hour race at Le Mans in France was the goal. To that end, Sayer designed the body of the C-Type according to aerodynamic principles. The first car designer to use a slide rule, he allegedly learned how to mathematically model the airflow around the complex 3D curves from a German professor he met in Baghdad. Whether that’s true or not, the C-Type won Le Mans in 1951 and again in 1953.

1954’s D-Type was as radical in design as it was unimaginative in name. The C-Type had borrowed from the world of aviation—its disk brakes adapted from the runway to the racetrack by Jaguar’s chief test driver, Norman Dewis. By contrast, the D-Type drew yet more inspiration from the aeronautical industry. Up until this point, the chassis of a car—its structural body—was almost always a frame of some sort, to which the drivetrain, suspension, and bodywork would be mounted. The problem with this approach was one of rigidity; a car’s suspension works best when the springs do the bending rather than the chassis. Commonly, a chassis would be a ladder frame of wood or steel, but the loads created by the car at speed, especially when cornering, would cause the frame to bend without a lot of heavy crossbracing. Spaceframes of welded tubing could be made quite stiff with enough bracing, but they were complex to design and labor-intensive to manufacture.

A D-Type (right) and C-Type (left) at a classic car race in 2008. Credit: DoudD

Rather than a tubular spaceframe like the C-Type, the D-Type’s body was designed around a tub of lightweight aluminum alloy panels riveted and welded together into a unibody, or semi-monocoque, chassis. This idea wasn’t entirely new—that honor falls to Lancia back in 1922—but such cars were few and far between even by the 1950s. The monocoque design was both light and stiff, and Sayer clothed it with a curvaceous body that gave it a much lower drag coefficient than its predecessor (without the C-Type’s rather alarming habit of generating rear lift at high speed). Speed sold in those days, and the key feature of the Le Mans circuit was the three-mile Mulsanne Straight. The D-Type could reach 175mph here, 25mph faster than the earlier car.

When Jaguar pulled out of racing in 1956, Sayer adapted the lessons learned from the racing D-Type into the road-going E-Type. Capable of 150mph, or near enough, the E-Type offered the car buyer of 1961 performance that would rival anything Ferrari or Aston Martin could offer for less than half the price, $5,595 for the convertible, $5,895 for the coupe (a bit less than $47,000 in today’s money). The E-Type’s shape, as with Sayer’s other work, stemmed not just from his skills with a slide rule, but from constant testing and experimentation. Body shapes were tested with scale models in a wind tunnel belonging to the UK’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Once satisfied, lots of 3″ strips of wool were stuck to full-size cars to visualize the airflow at speed, and Dewis would then pound around a test track with Sayer in the passenger seat, observing the results and issuing commands via hand signals. The result, in the case of the E-Type, was a car that many have called the world’s most beautiful.

Fast forward several decades, and you’ll struggle to find a car that hasn’t benefited from either a wind tunnel or complex fluid dynamics. Meanwhile, a Jaguar E-Type is sitting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bought by the museum as part of its permanent collection back in 1996.

Ferdinand Piech: The most extreme cars on the road or the track

Ferdinand Piech was destined for the car industry, if you believe in such things. His grandfather was Ferdinand Porsche, the designer of the VW Beetle and founder of the company that still bears his name. Before starting high school in 1952, Piech spent nine months as an apprentice with VW learning how to build engines. Fast forward to 1963, and, now armed with a master’s degree in engineering, he joined the family firm. As an engineer he worked his way up, starting with development work on the engine for the 911 road car and ending up just three years later as the head of Porsche’s Experimental Department. From 1966 until 1971, Piech oversaw a succession of racing cars that were the equal of anything in the world. His most significant achievement with the company was the Porsche 917, a car so fast it went on to dominate the most extreme racing series the world has ever seen, though not before co-starring in a movie with Steve McQueen.

During the late 1960s, the French organizers of Le Mans became rather disgruntled after races kept being won by American Ford GT40s and their giant V8s. Preferring that victory rather go to French efforts that used smaller, more highly strung engines, they altered the rules to make this more likely. Piech spotted a loophole in the rules: although the top-class prototype cars were limited to 3l engines, if you were prepared to build 25 examples at once and have them inspected by the sport’s sanctioning body (a process called homologation), engines up to 5l were okay.

The flat-12 engine that powered the 917. The engine cylinders are air-cooled (the circular device in the middle is a fan). Credit: bjmullan

Piech persuaded Porsche’s board to back his gamble and design and to build 25 examples of the 917, each of which would be hurled down the road by 580hp, thanks to a 5l flat-12 engine (imagine a V-shaped engine but with a 180-degree angle between the banks of cylinders). This vast amount of power was coupled with a lightweight construction and aerodynamics that prized drag reduction over everything else. If that sounds scary, it should. By all accounts, the 1969 car was incredibly fast and very, very dangerous.

A Porsche 917 wearing Gulf Oil colors, a paint scheme made even more famous by the film *Le Mans*. Credit: Jim Culp

It took a couple of years (and the contribution of John Wyer’s team in the UK) before the 917 got past this first impression, winning Le Mans in 1970, and then co-starring in that McQueen movie. Le Mans is arguably not the finest, or even the most coherent, movie ever made, although if the idea of watching McQueen and a bunch of real racing drivers go at it for 106 minutes sounds intriguing, you’ll be glad to know there’s now a Blu-ray version. The 917’s film career was short-lived. With Europe and Le Mans locked down, Piech brought the 917 to America.

The insane 917/30, the car that conquered Can-Am. Credit: oalfonso

The late 1960s and early 1970s were somewhat halcyon days for racing in America. The rulebooks of sport’s European organizing bodies were fairly prescriptive descriptions of what was or wasn’t legal on-track, and they weren’t averse to changing those rules in response to a particular car or technology dominating. On the other side of the Atlantic was the closest anyone’s really come to an open rulebook for racing, the Canadian-American Challenge Cup (Can-Am). Pretty much anything was legal as long as the cars had two seats and the wheels were covered by the bodywork. If the promise of unlimited technology wasn’t enough, the prize money on offer was light years beyond anything anywhere else in the world. Can-Am attracted the world’s best racing drivers and engineers—and evermore outrageous racing cars. Seeing the next hunting ground for the 917, Piech lobbied for a more powerful flat-16 engine to compete with the massive V8s, but cost and complexity led to a turbocharged version of the existing flat-12 instead. By 1972, the 917/30’s engine was making more than 1500hp, comprehensively destroying the competition and becoming, for some, the ultimate expression of automotive power in pursuit of flat-out speed. Porsche’s rivals found it impossible to match the 917’s speed, especially once the oil crisis made such extreme cars socially irresponsible. Can-Am soon faded into a shadow of its former glory.

Various iterations of 917 on display in Porsche’s museum. Credit: Andy_BB

Piech, though, had risen as far as he was going to at Porsche. Familial relationships between different branches of the Porsche and Piech families weren’t always very harmonious, and in 1972 a decision was made to bar all family members from managerial roles at the company. Porsche’s loss was Audi’s gain. Audi hired Piech to lead their engineering efforts. Piech’s most notable contributions to Audi were quattro (all-wheel drive) and turbo diesel (TDI) engines, both of which we now think of as synonymous with the brand. Not content with transforming Audi into a company that legitimately rivaled Mercedes and BMW, Piech left Audi in 1993 to become CEO of its parent company, Volkswagen AG. Running an enormous multinational corporation didn’t leave much time for engineering, but Piech was still the driving force behind the Bugatti Veyron, a car that managed to make the Porsche 917 seem slow, even though it was civilized enough to be driven by your grandmother. Volkswagen AG bought rights to the Bugatti name during an acquisition spree that included Lamborghini and Bentley, and Piech gave the newly revived company the engineering challenge of building a car with at least 1000hp, capable of 260mph. It’s a challenge Volkswagen AG met.

Bugatti’s extreme Veyron. Credit: Wikipedia

That’s not even the extent of Piech’s work. In the early 1980s, Porsche designed and built a gearbox with two clutches, one for the odd gears and one for even, the idea being very rapid gearchanges as the transmission switched seamlessly between shafts, ratios, and cogs. The Porsche Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, or PDK (German for dual clutch transmission), transmission was complicated, heavy, and not particularly reliable. Factory racing driver Derek Bell was rather vocal in his displeasure at being forced to use the experimental equipment while attempting to win the 1986 World Sportscar Championship. Piech could see past PDK’s teething troubles to the tantalizing benefits to fuel economy and performance that the technology offered. After years of championing by Piech, 2003’s VW Golf R32 became the first road car available with a dual clutch gearbox, now called Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG). DSG soon spread across the Volkswagen AG ecosystem and beyond, igniting much debate about whether the loss of a clutch pedal, and therefore the possibility of a perfectly executed gearshift, leaves the art of driving poorer as a result.

Gordon Murray: A purist’s approach to car design that might revolutionize the way we build cars

Until Bugatti’s Veyron arrived in 2005, the title of world’s fastest car belonged to the McLaren F1. A product of the British Formula 1 team of the same name, the F1 was unlike much else on the road in 1994. Its chassis was the first to be made entirely from carbon fiber composites. By then, this was the norm in the rarified worlds of top-level motorsport and aerospace, but it was still considered too costly and complex for production road cars. Inside the cockpit were not two but three seats, with the driver in the very center of the car and the two passenger seats set back to either side. Behind the cockpit was a 6l V12 engine, designed and built specifically for the F1 by BMW. With 627hp on tap and a curb weight of just 2500 lbs, the F1 was able to propel three people and their luggage to 60mph in 3.2 seconds, not running out of steam until the car hit 240mph. All this was made possible thanks to the singular focus of Gordon Murray, a South African engineer who moved to the UK in 1969 and rapidly began to make his name as a race car designer.

McLaren’s 1988 F1 car, the MP4/4. Between them, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost won every race but one that year. Credit: Ken

Murray’s car designs proved highly successful on track during his stint as chief designer for the Brabham F1 team, and as McLaren’s technical director in the 1980s, he oversaw the development of the MP4/4. In the hands of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, the team came closer to a clean sweep than anyone else in the sport’s history, winning 15 of the 16 F1 races held in 1988. After achieving just about everything achievable in F1, Murray’s attention shifted to designing the ultimate supercar. Dismayed with the best Ferrari or Lamborghini had to offer customers, Murray set out to build the world’s best sports car. Almost no expense was spared nor compromise made in pursuit of an ambitious 2,204 lb (1,000kg) weight target. For example, only two thicknesses of washer were used on the entire car, and Murray reportedly required written justification if an engineer wanted to use the thicker one. The three-seat layout with the driver in the middle was something Murray first sketched as a youngster in South Africa, sacrificing ease of entry for driver involvement.

The central driving position makes the F1’s cockpit a pretty special place, even if getting in there isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Credit: Robin Capper

The F1’s eye-watering specification came with an equally eye-watering price, £540,000 before tax in 1994 (a little under $900,000 today). Those of you with long memories might remember that the world’s economy wasn’t in the best of shape in 1994, and McLaren only sold 71 road cars, far short of the 300 they predicted. The F1 was never sold in the US, an omission that contributed to its lack of sales success, although they have become eligible for import in recent years. A few extremely well-heeled customers begged the company for a competition version, and that appeared the following year. Having been designed strictly for the road didn’t prove much of an impediment, and the car’s debut at Le Mans in 1995 saw F1s come home 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 13th, beating supposedly faster racing prototypes along the way.

The 1995 Le Mans race-winning McLaren F1. Credit: tomfkemp

Even if Murray’s story ended there he’d still easily earn inclusion on our list. But it’s his most recent project that cements it. Obviously, the natural follow-up to a supercar handcrafted in unobtainium for the 0.00000001514286 percent is a city car with a sub-$10,000 sticker price, and that’s what the T.25 and its electric sibling, the T.27, are, complete with F1-inspired central driving seats. However, Murray wasn’t content just to design the cars, he also took on the entire manufacturing process at the same time, with the aim of cutting the energy involved in building new cars by 60 percent (and the price by even more). The result, called iStream, does away with the stamped steel panels that would have been familiar to Henry Ford. Instead, steel tubes are cut, bent, and welded together with computerized precision, and next combined with body panels made from injection-molded plastics to create a lightweight monocoque.

The T.25 is unlikely to ever go on sale, as Murray’s goal for the entire project has been to license the IP to others, rather than build the cars himself. Initially I was skeptical that existing car companies could overcome significant investments in the current resource-intensive status quo to license iStream, but late last year Yamaha announced plans to build the Motiv, a two-seat city car that uses the iStream construction process. A few Is remain to be dotted and Ts to be crossed, but with any luck we may see the first Motivs hit the road in 2016.

Elon Musk: How a tech icon made the electric car cool

The final innovator in this list is a newcomer to the automotive world. Like Murray, Musk was born in South Africa, and, like Murray, he emigrated, but to Canada rather than the UK. Unlike Ford, Sayer, Piech, or Murray, Elon Musk never trained as a mechanical engineer. Instead, he studied business and physics as a student before abandoning grad school in favor of making money in the late-1990s tech boom. He sold his first company to Compaq, then co-founded the company we now know as PayPal, making rather a lot of money following its sale to eBay in 2002.

That same year saw Musk found SpaceX, a startup that appears to have successfully challenged United Space Alliance (a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing) who had until recently been holding down somewhat of a monopoly when it comes to launching things into space for the US government. Shaking up the world of space launches is an impressive feat, but rockets still aren’t cars, and so we finally arrive at the reason for his inclusion, Tesla Motors. Yes, Elon Musk is the man who finally made electric cars cool.

A Tesla Roadster proves you can charge an EV in the rain. Credit: Frank Schmidt

Tesla was created in 2003, and it eschewed Ford’s approach of making cars for everyone, concentrating on the top end of the market instead. Its first car, the Tesla Roadster, answered the question “what happens if you cross a Lotus Elise with a lot of lithium-ion batteries?” After a series of delays, the first cars went on sale in 2008, and what they lacked in range they made up for with extremely rapid acceleration accompanied by a complete absence of noise. At more than $109,000, the Roadster wasn’t cheap, and when production ended in 2012, the car had spread the word that Tesla was serious. The Roadster might have taken good advantage of someone else’s product as a starting point, but the Model S that followed in 2012 was all original.

The Tesla Model S. Credit: Wolfram Burner

With styling reminiscent of Ian Callum’s work at Aston Martin and Jaguar (plus a splash of Maserati Quattroporte for good measure), the Model S is a sporty fastback with room for five (or even seven, if two of them are little). My colleague Lee Hutchinson spent a few days with a Model S last year, an experience that still causes him to break out in a smile when thinking about it now. The Model S appears to be quite a sales hit, if their ever more common presence on the streets of DC is anything to go by. That’s something I couldn’t say for any other EV today. Bravo, Mr. Musk.

An incomplete list with more additions to come

Looking ahead, there’s no reason to expect that this constant development will slow down. The world is changing along with the automobile. The energy-intensive mass production ushered in by Henry Ford seems less appropriate for a future where the impacts of industrial rapacity on the environment are taken into account. Thankfully, Gordon Murray is unlikely to be the last person to suggest a better way to manufacture. Car companies will continue borrowing from IT the same way they imported good ideas from airplanes. Will autonomous, or as is more likely, semi-autonomous vehicles completely change the way we view personal transportation?

Finally, lists like these are never complete; for every Malcolm Sayer or Elon Musk that makes the cut, there are other notable figures whose omission you may be railing about right now. Take Alec Issigonis, for example, the designer of the original Mini, whose transverse engine and front wheel drive layout went on to become the dominant drivetrain. Or Bob Lutz, who fought the bean counters in Detroit and flies a Czech L-39 in his spare time. Did we get this list right? Take to the comments and let us know.

Listing image: Photo collage by Aurich Lawson

Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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