How these films were made
Nothing here was photographed. Every part is drawn in code and "x-rayed" in your browser: each piece of metal adds a little light where the beam would be stopped, so thick steel glows and thin aluminium stays grey.
What really moves
Each plate runs a small model of the real thing. The engine is an exact slider-crank with cams that lift the valves at the right crank angles. The gearbox counts real teeth and works out road speed from them. The differential splits speed the way its gears must. The suspension is a quarter-car model with a spring, a damper and a springy tyre; the brakes simulate a tyre that grips best at a little slip, and an ABS that lets go when the wheel starts to lock; the steering solves its own linkage, so the inner wheel turns more without being told to.
Where real machines are too fast to follow, they are slowed down, and each plate says by how much.
What we simplified
- The car is generic: a small front-engined, front-wheel-drive hatchback of no particular make, assembled from how most such cars are built.
- The engine plate shows one cylinder of an inline four from the side, so the timing chain at the front overlaps everything, as it would on a real film.
- The gearbox is a two-shaft, five-speed transaxle with tooth counts chosen to give typical ratios.
- Temperatures, currents and pressures are typical values, not measurements of one car.
- Real radiographs of a running engine exist, but they need industrial machines. These films are an illustration of the idea, not a medical or industrial image.
Checked against
The numbers on every plate were checked in a separate pass against engineering references and manufacturers' technical literature. If you spot a mistake, it is ours.
Part of Whyarium
Anatomy of the Car is encyclopedia No. 29 of Whyarium, a growing set of small, hand-made encyclopedias. No ads.