Automobiles play a vital role in our daily lives. Without them a person cannot enjoy the luxuries of modern world. The Automobiles are mainly used for passenger transportation as well as transporting goods. Automobile Engineering is the branch of engineering which deals with the manufacturing and technology of automobiles.
Automobile is a four-wheeled, self-propelled, motor vehicle designed for use on public roads. Almost 1.4 billion cars are in operation worldwide, with most of them being passenger vehicles. The word car is generally applied to all motor cars, but the term automobile itself was coined to distinguish these from horse-drawn carriages.
The scientific and technical building blocks for the automobile go back several hundred years to the late 1600s, when Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented a type of internal combustion engine sparked by gunpowder. The first steam-powered cars could reach moderate speeds, but they were cumbersome and difficult to start. Electric cars had the advantage of quiet operation and good fuel efficiency, but they were too expensive to dominate the market. Gasoline-fueled automobiles finally prevailed, with the emergence of the Model T and Henry Ford’s revolutionary production process.
By the 1920s, automobiles accounted for one out of six industrial jobs in America and were the main force driving economic change. They were the chief consumers of petroleum and steel, the lifeblood of ancillary industries and the cradle of a new consumer goods economy. But by the 1940s market saturation had coincided with stagnation in product and production technology. Many of the basic innovations of the twentieth century—the self-starter, the closed all-steel body and the syncromesh transmission—came into being during this period.