Nissan GT-R tagged posts

In this section, let’s take a look at one factor that determines the location of your car’s brake calipers.

First, we look at the front wheels. You may find many front-wheel-drive cars have their front brake calipers in front of the axle, that is because for FWD layout, the engine is usually transversely placed in front of the axle. With such layout, the steering arm can not be placed in front of the axle because the transversely placed engine acts like a wall to block the passage of the steering shaft. Therefore, the steering arm can only be located after the axle, which means there is no place left for the brake system at the same location...

Suspension Design: Double Wishbone

In part II we briefly analyze the first type of suspension: trailing arm. Now let’s take a look at the second major type: double wishbone suspension.

This type of suspension uses two “A” shape arms, one place on the top and the other in the bottom. Because each A arm can limit 2 degrees of freedom, so the two A arms together limits 4 out of the total 6 degrees of freedom. Therefore we still need one more restriction to make the whole system to be 1 degree of freedom.

For front wheels, the extra restriction is the steering arm; for rear wheels, car designers usually use a toe angle control arm.

In the below chart, the one labeled...

Nowadays, cars usually have their engine bolted to transmission together directly, because it is easy to implement and saves costs. For some sports cars which seek to have a better weight distribution, the engine and transmission are located in different section of the car body, therefore requires an extra solid torque tube to connect them. This is an exotic design, for example, the below image shows the LFA’s torque tube.

But please do not misunderstand that this is a requirement for a good sports car...