My colleague, Mike Heskitt, Chief Operating Officer at Altair ProductDesign submitted the following blog post.

It’s good to see another example of the transportation industry adopting the RIGHT hybrid powertrain for a specific need and vehicle type. A recent article in Fleet Owner reports that UPS has purchased 40 hydraulic hybrid delivery vans partially funded through the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Clean Cities program.

For heavy vehicles with more stop-and-go driving than steady-state drive cycles, we’ve seen that hydraulic hybrids have a clear advantage over electric hybrids in relation to power recovery efficiency and lifecycle cost. Read More

Actually, I made my first trip to Winnipeg by plane, but I thought I’d start with a musical reference. I recently visited to present at Manitoba’s Heavy Vehicle Technology Workshop. The workshop was organized by the Red River College Office of Applied Research & Commercialization, in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada Industrial research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), WESTEST, and the Vehicle Technology Centre.  Read More

Although I didn’t travel to the American Public Transportation Association Annual Meeting and Expo in New Orleans, a number of my Altair colleagues did along with the BUSolutions LCO-140H, the world’s first series hydraulic hybrid transit bus.

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As noted by my colleague Giuseppe Resta in the last automotive blog post, there was justified fanfare for the BMW “i” brand, yet elsewhere in Frankfurt you could see that steel was not going to go away fast. The production version of the Volkswagen up! was said to be 13 percent lighter than the vehicle it replaced (VW Fox). VW pointed to engine downsizing, high strength steel and component optimization as the keys enablers of this. High-strength and ultra-high-strength steels make up 56.5 percent of the vehicle’s construction and achieve class-leading torsional rigidity. With facts like that, what are the compelling reasons to consider structural composites in the short term?

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This week, my colleague Giuseppe Resta has some thoughts spurred by the unveiling of two exciting vehicles scheduled for 2013 production:

The Frankfurt Auto Show saw BMW unveil its new “i” brand of electric vehicles. While both the radical design language and impressive powertrain specifications were eye catching, the fact that these models will represent the first high volume vehicles built with of a carbon fiber (CFRP) body-in-white (BIW) – or body-in-black, if you will – stands out. Is this the dawning of a new era that will cause steel-based auto design to rust away?

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