Is the chassis still important in the era of new energy?
The Importance of Automotive Chassis
What are you thinking? How could it not be important! Many car owners, especially off-road vehicle owners, will install chassis armor as soon as they buy the car, in order to protect the automotive chassis.
Without a chassis, where would the battery go? Where would the car wheels be fixed? Where would your comfortable seat be placed? What would the whole car rely on for support?
An automobile is divided into four main components: body, chassis, engine, and electrical equipment. The automotive chassis consists of four parts: the transmission system, the drivetrain, the steering system, and the braking system. The chassis’s function is to support and install the car’s engine and its components, form the overall shape of the car, receive power from the engine to generate movement, and ensure normal driving.
The chassis of a new energy vehicle is even more important. If the chassis is fragile, damaging the battery pack or even causing a fire is very easy, and the entire car may be scrapped directly.
The automotive chassis is related to driving comfort. For fuel-powered cars, the chassis quality is generally proportional to the price. Both buyers and sellers get what they pay for. Electric vehicles still have some issues, such as basic safety concerns, ensuring that there are no broken axles, and basic seat issues that directly affect comfort. In addition, some people may be unwilling to invest in high-quality suspension hardware, resulting in a poor driving experience. On the other hand, some may be willing to spend on good suspension hardware, but the tuning is strange, and the comfort is compromised.
However, the promotion of new energy vehicles mainly focuses on features like refrigerators, televisions, and big sofas, as well as exterior design. The chassis is given less attention. But once you sit in the car, if the seats are well-wrapped, the steering wheel is soft, the center console is soft, and the door panels are soft, all made of genuine or simulated leather, and feel comfortable to the touch! Keyless start, ambient lighting, large screen car multimedia, voice control, 360-degree automatic panoramic imaging, HUD head-up display, and even autonomous driving, all make you feel at ease!
Basically, no one lies on the ground to examine the chassis when buying a car, but the chassis must meet the quality standards when it leaves the factory. It wouldn’t make sense for the car to fall apart while driving, with parts scattered all over the streets. It’s like building a house, if the foundation isn’t solid and the inspection doesn’t pass, even with luxurious decorations, the customer still needs to think twice.
It’s not that people don’t care about the chassis, but rather this concern and responsibility have been shifted to the car manufacturer. The quality of the chassis is essential to the car.
Other components can be replaced if they break, but if the chassis fails, it’s done. Only when the automotive chassis malfunctions or rusts will the user become concerned about it.
The chassis is the foundation of a car. Do you think it’s important?
(Images in the article are from the internet. Please notify me if there is any copyright infringement and they will be removed.)
“If my answer can provide you with helpful information or inspiration, I invite you to educate me.
Thank you for your recognition! Thank you for your contributions to Zhihu!” - Plain and True
“Chassis and Performance of New Energy Vehicles”
Indeed, it is no longer important. When a technology is mastered by everyone, it becomes unimportant. Only a few manufacturers can do it well, while others do it poorly, which naturally becomes the core technology!
The importance of the chassis in fuel-powered vehicles lies in the difficulty of tuning them properly. Nowadays, cars have a load-bearing body structure, which is actually a thin shell structure. With the torque transmission during acceleration, there is a lot of experience and technology required to achieve both stability and quickness. However, for new energy vehicles, the large battery pack on the chassis needs to increase the vehicle’s chassis strength to adapt. The battery pack also significantly lowers the vehicle’s center of gravity, and the stiffness of the chassis combined with the battery pack results in an abnormally high torsional stiffness of the new energy vehicle. These two main reasons make new energy vehicles drive smoothly and have better driving quality than luxury fuel-powered cars. The key point is that this can be achieved without much technical expertise, so the importance of the chassis technology in new energy vehicles is reduced, and instead, the battery, electronic control, and motor become the three main components!
Of course, you can say that new energy vehicles are cumbersome, can only accelerate in a straight line, and are a mess on the racetrack. However, this is determined by the laws of physics, and all new energy vehicles are like this. They can only achieve the driving quality of luxury cars, but not the performance of sports cars.
The Importance of Chassis in New Energy Vehicles
In fact, the significance of the chassis can be understood by looking at the functions and roles of the three major components (engine, chassis, transmission) during the era of fuel vehicles.
In my opinion, the core of the engine lies in power output, and as development progressed, it also took on the indicator of fuel economy.
The transmission coordinates the engine’s speed and adjusts the transmission ratio to adapt to different driving conditions.
For new energy (electric) vehicles, the engine is replaced by an electric motor as the power output, and the electric motor can reach maximum torque when it outputs power, so coordinating the speed is not necessary. Therefore, electric cars do not rely on a transmission to control the speed.
Only the chassis objectively exists in all cars, providing support and accommodation for car components, and also playing a crucial role in four systems: the transmission system, the driving system, the steering system, and the braking system, even in new energy vehicle models.
Similar to fuel vehicles, suspension is still used for support and shock absorption. The difference is that the space previously occupied by the engine is now converted to accommodate the motor and battery. This means that new energy vehicles cannot rely solely on the excellent chassis design of fuel vehicles. They need to be re-planned in terms of layout, design, and safety from multiple perspectives in order to achieve the performance required for new energy vehicles.
A good chassis ensures smooth transmission of energy and power, and also allows for the orderly deployment of various power-assisted systems. The quietness and comfort that new energy vehicles promote are also achieved through the structural advantages of gravity and process design in the chassis.
The Importance of the New Energy Era
Why aren’t you asking whether wheels are still important in the new energy era?