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Car body construction
Published in Andrew Livesey, Alan Robinson, The Repair of Vehicle Bodies, 2018
As you can see it took 200 years from concept to production of the first useable car. As the year 1900 approached, truck and van bodies started to appear. Prior to this, the of cost manufacture was so high that only very rich people could afford them – and they were very much curiosities or toys, like hyper-sports-cars are now. A rolling chassis was made to which a car, a van or a truck body could be fitted. The bodies were made by body-building companies using a mixture of wood, metal and fabric as had been horse-drawn carriage bodies – these were in fact the same companies responding to the new market. Customers could order bodies built to order to fit onto a rolling chassis. Larger cars had their chassis extended to accept limousine bodies – rather like the extended limos used by rock stars and others for fun evenings out.
Benefits and costs of shared, modular automated vehicles for freight and passenger transport: the case of U-Shift
Published in Transportation Planning and Technology, 2022
Ines Österle, Christian Ulrich, Sebastian Herwartz-Polster, Sebastian Sigle, Jürgen Weimer, Marcus Conzelmann, Tobias Fleck, Marc Zofka
The vehicle concept U-Shift, developed at DLR (Friedrich, Ulrich, and Schmid 2019; Ulrich et al., ‘Technologies for a modular vehicle concept’ 2019), is a modular vehicle at driving automation level 4 as defined by SAE (2018).1 The vehicle is modular as it consists of a ‘self-driving’, electrically powered rolling chassis (‘Driveboard’) and an interchangeable vehicle body. The modularity allows to separate the Driveboard from the vehicle body; quickly and without an external device. For example, U-Shift can be equipped with a people-mover body (see Figure 1) to provide ride-sharing service, offering seats for nine passengers and including a wheelchair area. For freight tasks, cargo bodies with up to 1.6 t payload can be mounted.