Green Cars
"Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option ... they will become a necessity."- Fujio Cho
Safe Cars
"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." - Albert Einstein
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
New automotive R&D facility from MG Motors
MG Motors has set-up a new research and development facility for the University of Oklahoma. This could help turn OU into a world-class automotive engineering school reports OU Daily.Thomas L. Landers, Dean of the College of Engineering said that MG Motors North America Inc. plans to set up shop somewhere on campus this fall and will eventually construct its own facility near the Stephenson Research and Technology Center south of the main campus.
The facility will employ a combination of company engineers, OU faculty, and students with paid assistantships, and there will probably be one student for each full-time engineer.
Chinese automaker Nanjing Automobile Corp., which last year purchased the assets of legendary British sports carmaker MG from a bankruptcy court, announced July 12 that it had picked Oklahoma City as the headquarters for its new MG Motors subsidiary.
The company plans to employ about 550 people in Oklahoma, with some 150 at the Oklahoma City headquarters, 325 at a manufacturing plant in Ardmore, and about 35 at the research facility in Norman. The engineering and research team will require people with a variety of backgrounds and skills.
The facility will also provide work experience and research opportunities for aerospace and mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, industrial engineers, computer scientists and chemical engineers who will work with materials, fuel mixtures and combustion processes.
The OU program with the most direct connection to the auto industry is aerospace and mechanical engineering, and there is a number of Oklahoma University students with an interest in the auto industry. The university has a chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers, which sponsors a racing team.
Only a few professors at OU do automotive research and students interested in the automotive field have had few opportunities to get into the industry so far.
Having an R-and-D facility in OU's backyard will be a huge step forward for the automotive education in the academic institution.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
BMW chooses Zenon software
The BMW Group has chosen to use zenOn software solutions for their plants world-wide. Copa-Data zenOn will manage the security and reliability at all production plants. The German car manufacturer is confident that it could increase efficiency and productivity considerably across their plants. The BMW Group decided in favour of world-wide implementation of zenOn. It's not all news though as the visualization solution of Copa-Data has already successfully operated the surface technique across the BMW Group for 5 years.The software makers point out that with the decision to use zenOn company-wide, BMW has entered a strategic partnership with Copa-Data.
For car production, the automotive specialist chose the contractor who could offer the most standardisation, and thus create the greatest possible internal synergy between operations. Furthermore, the automotive manufacturer requires a universal solution from the plant pictures to the alarm management. This universality not only increases quality, but also the overall productivity of their equipment.
As zenOn 6.20 can be used on all Windows operating system and platforms, from Windows CE up to Windows Server 2003, a transparent flow of information throughout the company network can fully be guaranteed.
Supervisory control to operator terminal transparency offered by zenOn makes it possible for the production team members to come to the right decisions at any time irrespective of their location.
