Why? Women can park just fine.
Posted on 01/15/2004 10:24:36 AM PST by RoughDobermann
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:03:42 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Your hands don't even need to be touching the steering wheel for it to start spinning back and forth aggressively, all by itself -- slowly guiding the car into the parking spot.
Parallel parking is designed to be a breeze with the Intelligent Parking Assist system, part of a new $2,200 option package for Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius gas-electric hybrid in Japan.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Why? Women can park just fine.
The 1933 Dymaxion Car was intended to fly, jump-jet style, when suitable alloys and engines became available. Meantime, it did pretty well on the ground: It got about 30 miles per gallon, and could smoothly hurtle eleven passengers at 120 miles per hour--far better performance than a 1996 minivan.
Though not much heavier that a VW Beetle, the Dymaxion was nearly 20 feet long. That was too big for urban traffic, despite extraordinary maneuverability--it could U-turn in its own length.(qt movie, 2.7mb) The adroit rear-wheel steering also proved counterintuitively tricky, especially in a crosswind. A fatal crash, wrongly blamed on the steering instead of the other car involved, was also fatal to investors, and the project failed.(qt movie, 2.3mb)
Ten years later, Bucky put what he'd learned to work in a much handier five-seater with a tiny engine at each wheel. This time, the front wheels steered, but all three could be steered for tight city turns and crabbing sideways into parking spaces. High speed stability was enhanced by extending the rear wheel on a boom to lengthen the wheelbase.
Toyota was working on four wheel steering a few years ago, too, but we never saw that come to the market, at least not in the US, as far as I know. Looks like the system has quite a few bugs still in it, but give them credit for trying. The car that drives itself is still quite a ways off, but its little steps like this that make it possible.
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