Vehicles
Engines, turbines and everything that moves you.
- How a 4-Stroke Engine Works — Suck, squeeze, bang, blow — the four strokes that power almost every car on the road, running live under your fingertip.
- How a Car Airbag Works — A controlled explosion that is already letting go by the time you hit it. A sensor decides in about 20 milliseconds, a pellet ring becomes gas, and vent holes turn the bag into a cushion.
- How a Hybrid Engine Works — A hybrid has no gearbox. One small set of planetary gears joins the petrol engine, a generator and the wheels, and how fast the generator spins is the gear ratio.
- How a Hydraulic System Works — A fist-sized gear pump lifts a tonne without effort, and it never makes pressure. It only pushes oil. The load decides how hard.
- How a Jet Engine Works — Suck, squeeze, bang, blow — the same four beats as a piston engine, but happening all at once, continuously, at 10,000 RPM.
- How a LiDAR Sensor Works — A spinning black can on the roof of a self-driving car, firing invisible five-nanosecond flashes and timing how long they take to come back — sixty-four stopwatches building a 3D map out of nothing but arithmetic.
- How a Manual Gearbox Works — Five speeds, three shafts and a brass ring that kisses gears up to speed — how a stick-shift trades engine revs for wheel torque.
- How a Turbocharger Works — A windmill in the exhaust, spinning a fan in the intake — one shaft between them at 200,000 rpm, riding on nothing but a six-micron film of oil.
- How a V-Twin Engine Works — Two cylinders, one shared crankpin, and a 90° secret: why a V-twin balances itself perfectly — and why it thumps with that offbeat heartbeat.
- How ADAS Lane Assist Works — A camera behind your mirror that only looks for bright stripes, a radar that times echoes off the car ahead, and a steering motor that leans on the wheel with about the force of a bag of sugar, so your hands always win.
- How an Automatic Transmission Works — No clutch pedal, no lever — a doughnut of spinning oil and two gear sets that change ratio by holding one part perfectly still.
- How Anti-Lock Braking (ABS) Works — ABS does not brake harder, it lets go on purpose. A toothed ring counts wheel speed, and valves release and reapply pressure up to 15 times a second so the tyre keeps rolling and the car keeps steering.
- How Automatic Emergency Braking Works — Your car never measures the distance to the car ahead. Its radar hums a rising note and listens for the echo, and the brakes trust a clock, not a ruler: how many seconds until impact.
- How Car Suspension Works — A spring that turns a pothole into a slow squeeze, a tube of oil that refuses to give the energy back, and a 22 mm bar that only wakes up when the two sides of the car disagree.
- How Disc Brakes Work — Your foot, a column of fluid, and a 27× force multiplier ending in two pads squeezing a spinning iron disc — how a car turns motion into heat, on demand, hundreds of times a day.
- How Downforce Works — An aeroplane built to fly into the ground: upside-down wings, and a floor that turns the road into one wall of a tunnel and sucks the car onto the track.
- How Power Steering Works — Your hands never turn the wheels. They twist a pencil-thick steel rod a few degrees, and that twist opens a valve that sends 100 bar of oil to do the shoving.