Vehicle

• 1. Introduction

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  A vehicle is a machine built to move itself, carrying people, cargo, or both. That definition sounds simple, yet it stretches from a child's bicycle to a rocket that left the Moon. In 2010, the number of motor vehicles in operation worldwide passed one billion, roughly one for every seven people on Earth. And that figure counts only motorized machines. There are over a billion bicycles in use as well. How did the human urge to travel produce such an astonishing range of devices, from logboats carved before farming to ion thrusters that only work in the vacuum of space? What links a horse-drawn stagecoach to a maglev train that never touches the ground? The answers run through tar-sealed reed boats, a south-pointing chariot, and a rocket generating 180 million horsepower.

• 2. From Logboats To Launch Vehicles

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  Rock paintings in Australia, dated from around 50,000 to 15,000 BC, depict boats, suggesting watercraft reach back into prehistory. The oldest boats recovered by archaeologists are logboats. The Pesse canoe, pulled from a bog in the Netherlands, carbon dates to 8040 to 7510 BC, making it 9,500 to 10,000 years old. A 7,000 year old seagoing boat made from reeds and tar turned up in Kuwait. By 4000 to 3000 BC, boats plied the waters of Sumer, ancient Egypt, and the Indian Ocean.

  Camel-pulled wheeled vehicles appear in the record around 4000 to 3000 BC. The earliest known wagonway, a forerunner of the railway, was the Diolkos in Greece, running 6 to 8.5 kilometres to haul boats across the Isthmus of Corinth from around 600 BC. Its wheeled carts ran in grooves cut into limestone, which kept the wagons on their intended route. In 200 CE, Ma Jun built a south-pointing chariot, a vehicle carrying an early form of guidance system. The stagecoach, a four-wheeled vehicle drawn by horses, began in 13th century England.

  Railways reappeared in Europe during the Late Middle Ages. The earliest known record from this period is a stained-glass window in the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau, dating from around 1350. In 1515, Cardinal Matthaus Lang described the Reisszug, a funicular railway at the Hohensalzburg Fortress in Austria, which used wooden rails and a hemp haulage rope. That long apprenticeship of human and animal power set the stage for machines that could drive themselves.

• 3. The Self-Propelled Breakthrough

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  In 1769, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is often credited with building the first self-propelled mechanical vehicle. In Russia in the 1780s, Ivan Kulibin developed a human-pedalled, three-wheeled carriage that already included a flywheel, brake, gear box, and bearings, though it went no further. In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers launched the first balloon vehicle, sending humans aloft on heated air.

  In 1801, Richard Trevithick demonstrated his Puffing Devil road locomotive, which many regard as the first steam-powered road vehicle, even though it could not hold steam pressure for long and proved of little practical use. In 1817, the German Baron Karl von Drais invented the Laufmaschine, or running machine, the first human transport to use the two-wheeler principle. It is regarded as the forerunner of the modern bicycle and motorcycle.

  In 1885, Karl Benz built and patented the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first automobile, powered by his own four-stroke gasoline engine. That same year, Otto Lilienthal began experimental gliding and achieved the first sustained, controlled, reproducible flights. In 1903, the Wright brothers flew the Wright Flyer, the first controlled, powered aircraft, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1907, Gyroplane No.I became the first tethered rotorcraft to fly, and the Cornu helicopter became the first rotorcraft to achieve free flight that same year. The pace then accelerated toward the rocket. In 1928, Opel launched the Opel-RAK program, and the Opel RAK.1 became the first rocket car, then the first rocket-powered aircraft the following year. In 1961, the Soviet Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin into space, and in 1969 NASA's Apollo 11 made the first Moon landing.

• 4. The Most-Made Machines

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  At least 500 million Chinese Flying Pigeon bicycles have been built, more than any other single model of vehicle. The most-produced motor vehicle is the Honda Super Cub motorcycle, which had sold 60 million units by 2008. Among cars, the Toyota Corolla leads, with at least 35 million made by 2010. In 2002, the world held an estimated 590 million cars and 205 million motorcycles in service.

  The Cessna 172 is the most common fixed-wing airplane, with about 44,000 built as of 2017. The Soviet Mil Mi-8, at 17,000, is the most-produced helicopter, and the Boeing 737, at about 10,000 in 2018, tops commercial jet airliners. Rail and street transport have their own champions. The KTM-5 and Tatra T3 tie as the most-produced trams at around 14,000 for both, while the ZiU-9 is the most common trolleybus. These totals show how a handful of designs ended up carrying a disproportionate share of the world's journeys.

• 5. Where The Energy Comes From

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  A vehicle needs a source of energy, and the options range from the simple to the exotic. Human power asks for nothing but a person, yet humans cannot exceed 500 watts for meaningful stretches. The land speed record for an unpaced human-powered vehicle stood at 133 kilometres per hour as of 2009, set on a recumbent bicycle.

  Fuel powers most vehicles, with internal combustion and rocket engines burning specific fuels such as gasoline, diesel, or ethanol, while external combustion engines can burn almost anything. Food is the fuel for cycles, rickshaws, and other pedestrian-controlled vehicles. Batteries store chemical energy and are responsive and efficient, but they carry low energy densities, short service life, and long charging times. One workaround swaps a discharged battery for a charged one, though that demands standardized batteries to function at a station.

  Nuclear power remains an exclusive option, currently limited mostly to large military ships and submarines, with two experiments in nuclear-powered aircraft, the Tupolev Tu-119 and the Convair X-6. Flywheels store energy in a spinning mass and have been tried in gyrobuses, though a light, fast rotor poses a safety hazard and affects steering through the gyroscopic effect. Wind drives sailboats and land yachts, and aircraft in the jet stream can catch a boost from high-altitude winds. Gravity itself powers gliders, skis, and bobsleds heading downhill. Solar energy is more recent, demonstrated by Helios, a solar-powered aircraft, and it points toward how that stored or captured energy must finally be turned into motion.

• 6. Motors And Their Trade-Offs

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  Most motor vehicles run internal combustion engines, which are cheap, reliable, and small, with long ranges, though they pollute. Steam engines, an external combustion type, also need water and time to warm up, and burning coal releases sulfur that causes acid rain. Gas turbines have largely replaced piston engines in aircraft because they are light and efficient, but they cost more, demand careful maintenance, and can be wrecked by ingesting foreign objects.

  Pulse jet engines have almost no moving parts, which once appealed to designers, but their noise, heat, and inefficiency led to abandonment after uses such as the V-1 flying bomb. The pulse detonation engine, more efficient still, was successfully tested on a Rutan VariEze, yet it suffers extreme noise and vibration. Ramjets work only at high speed, restricting them to tip jet helicopters and fast aircraft like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

  Rocket engines are extremely powerful and need not push off anything, a fact the New York Times once denied in error. The Saturn V, the heaviest vehicle ever to leave the ground, was powered by five F-1 engines generating a combined 180 million horsepower, or 134.2 gigawatts. Electric motors commonly exceed 90% efficiency and can be built to any size, limited mainly by the difficulty of supplying electricity. Ion thrusters, used on some satellites and spacecraft, reach extremely high speeds on little propellant such as caesium or xenon, but they are power-hungry and work only in a vacuum.

• 7. Turning Power Into Motion

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  Wheels are ancient technology, with specimens discovered from over 5000 years ago, and they let a vehicle roll along a surface and, except on rails, be steered. Continuous track sometimes replaces wheels, offering a larger contact area, easy repairs, and high maneuverability, as on tanks, snowmobiles, and excavators. The largest land vehicle in the world, the Bagger 293, moves on continuous tracks.

  Leonardo da Vinci devised one of the earliest propeller-driven designs, the aerial-screw, and in 1661, Toogood and Hays adopted the screw as a ship propeller. Propellers, fans, and rotors move a vehicle through a fluid and now dominate watercraft and aircraft. Screw-propelled vehicles use auger-like cylinders with helical flanges to produce thrust on both land and water. The ZiL-2906 was a Soviet screw-propelled vehicle built to retrieve cosmonauts from the Siberian wilderness.

  Wings can propel as well as lift. Sailboats and sailplanes are driven by the forward component of lift, and ornithopters generate thrust aerodynamically. Research at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies led to a flight with an actual ornithopter on the 31st of July 2010. Paddle wheels push against water on paddle steamers, and the oldest such ship in scheduled service is the Skibladner. Once a vehicle is moving, the harder problem becomes friction, control, and bringing it to a stop.

• 8. Steering, Stopping, And The Law

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  Friction is both enemy and ally. Almost all the useful energy an engine produces is dissipated as friction, yet land vehicles rely on traction to accelerate, slow, and change direction. Wheeled vehicles steer by angling their front or rear wheels, while the B-52 Stratofortress can angle all four main wheels. Ships, submarines, dirigibles, and aeroplanes usually steer with a rudder, and airplanes bank using ailerons.

  Nearly every vehicle carries a braking system. Wheeled vehicles use friction brakes pressing pads against rotors, and a Boeing 757 brake has 3 stators and 4 rotors. High-speed trains sometimes use frictionless Eddy-current brakes, though overheating and interference have limited them. Parachutes slow very fast vehicles, deployed on the ThrustSSC, the Eurofighter Typhoon, and the Apollo Command Module, while boats use sea anchors for stability in rough seas.

  The law sorts vehicles into categories: M for passenger vehicles, N for the carriage of goods, and O for trailers and semi-trailers. In the European Union, a manufacturer can win whole vehicle type-approval in one Member State and then sell EU-wide without further tests. Licensing tightens with risk, reaching its strictest form for school buses, hazardous materials transports, and emergency vehicles, and an aircraft pilot must hold a license at all times. Registration tells its own story. In Canada, boats with engines of 10 horsepower or greater must be registered, which is why the 9.9 horsepower engine became so common.