DOHA: Making cars lighter, thus fuel efficient and improve their navigation through wireless technology are the two challenging new researches making their way to the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP).
The Volkswagen XL1 which made its world premier here late last month with its highly reduced fuel consumption at only 1 litre per 100km is a prelude of a new generation of vehicles to come.
"The biggest challenge is to make the car lighter, more fuel efficient and to use wireless technology to make car navigation more timesaving," says Dr Tidu Maini, QSTP Executive Chairman.
Currently navigation systems operate only in one direction through GPS, but what is lacking is a feedback from the street through traffic signals and traffic management connected to the car GPS so as to optimise navigation and enable road users to get to the destination more easily.
This is just one of the projects the Qatar University's Wireless Innovation Centre at QSTP is actively working on to develop intelligent traffic management system that would improve cars' navigation by indicating to road users for instance busy roads or the route to take to reach faster the destination.
With the forthcoming FIFA World Cup, such a system would come in handy with lots of traffic on the roads and the need to manage people's directions.
"The system that would connect to a car being developed here will be one of the world's first," Dr Maini said in an interview to The Peninsula and its sister daily Al Sharq recently. "There are some systems in Europe, but they are not fully functional yet. Everybody is working in this area."
Meanwhile, the Volkswagen XL1 which was showcased here during the Qatar Motor Show not only demonstrates the way forward for extreme economy vehicles and clean technologies, but also shows the progress that has been made by manufacturing body parts from carbon fibre reinforced polymer parts, a technique used in Formula1 car construction.
Next generation hybrids
Besides, the Volkswagen XL1 prototype is designed as a next generation hybrid vehicle which can run up to 35km in pure electric mode, which means zero emissions.
Reducing the weight of cars and thus making them fuel efficient and easy to make is the main challenge and the use of carbon fibre for car manufacturing is very promising in achieving this objective.
"Today cars are made of steel which are very expensive to make and very heavy," says Dr Maini. "What VW is thinking more and more is to make complete cars from carbon fibre, a composite material which today is only used to make small parts of the car such as steering wheels."
"Composites being an oil by-product and in order to bring the price down for this to be used in cars, it has to be done in countries like Qatar which is an oil producer and since manufacturing composites requires a lot of energy, the country can be very much more competitive because of the availability of cheaper energy," said Dr Maini.
There are good prospects for the material, but "in order to go into this you need to use the composites that exist already.
So the first step for VW and Porsche is to make a laboratory here at QSTP to test the composites, to see how they perform and to figure out how to improve the quality. Besides, they will be training Qatari engineers in this field."
"Eventually the composite will be made in Qatar. But the first step is to make a composite laboratory to train people and to use existing composites as well as improving the knowledge and then in time you begin to produce it as well," he added.
As to when such hybrid, carbon composites-made cars would be available on the local market, Dr Maini expects that from 2013 these cars will begin to roll out with many more models.
© The Peninsula 2011
