Economy Cars Research Articles

Shifting towards luxury cars: The price and environmental effects of Beijing’s vehicle lottery system and an alternative policy

This paper investigates changes in the composition of vehicle fleets after Beijing implemented a vehicle lottery system (VLS) in 2011 that randomly allocates a quota of license plates to lottery participants. Using the car registration data, we examine the consumption response at the beginning of the restriction. Our analysis reveals that VLS effectively eliminated over one million additional car registrations in two years, however it also increased purchases of cars that are heavier, have larger engines, and are less fuel-efficient. We highlight that the change was associated with a greater reduction in the retail price of luxury cars compared with economy cars post-VLS implementation. Through a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis, we show that the average retail price in Beijing dropped by an additional 2 percent (about $0.4k) for economy cars and 5.8 percent (around $4.3k) for luxury cars, compared to cities without VLS. This price change increased the attractiveness of luxury cars relatively to economy cars. Furthermore, we build a structural model to estimate the consumer demand on vehicles as well as to simulate and compare other potential policies. Given the drawback of VLS that partially offsets the policy goal of emission elimination, we propose a market-based policy to save fuel consumption while achieving the same target of controlling vehicle growth as VLS.

Effects of expectation on auditory impression of car door-closing sounds

If consumers have preconceptions or expectations about a product, these may influence their evaluation of the product sound. In this study, a psychoacoustic experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of preconception about the product on the perceived quality of the product sound. First, participants were presented with information about three different classes of cars (kei car, economy car and luxury car), including pictures, prices and displacements, and were asked to imagine the door-closing sound of each class of car, and evaluate the auditory imagery of door-closing sounds recalled from the three types of car information using the semantic differentials method. Next, five door-closing sounds were presented, assuming that they were the sounds of each car type. Participants rated perceived quality of stimuli using the same method. As a result, the stimulus of a kei car presented as the door-closing sound of a luxury car was rated as more luxurious than the same stimulus presented as that of a kei car. Similar results were obtained for the stimulus of a luxury car. These results indicate the effect of preconceptions (or expectations) on the auditory impression of the door-closing sounds.

The Growing Preference for Electric Vehicles from a Political and Economic Point of View

This paper examines the political and economic views of the benefits of electric vehicles, through government funding and consumer taste, the preference for electric vehicles has been growing as the years progress. The current problem of global warming caused world leaders to fund and subsidize more and more electrical vehicle components and research on these components. The funding and subsidizing results in Consumer able to buy these electric vehicles for cheaper. The electric vehicles are also cheaper for consumers to maintain as of the gradual rise in oil prices becoming harder to maintain traditional gasoline powered cars. The finical crisis and the plummet of the stock market, especially during COVID 19 also contributed to consumers favoring electric vehicles. Consumer favoring SUVs also contributed to the growing preference for electric vehicles, as consumers see SUV as a type of status symbol, but as SUVs are low fuel economy cars, meaning they contribute a lot to carbon emissions, and are hard to maintain as they need too much oil, drove consumers to purchase electrical SUVs, as it can fulfill the sense of status and be cheaper to maintain at the same time. The future of the electrical car market seems to be on the positive side, as more and more funding by the environmentally-conscious governments allows for more research and time spent on finding cheaper and better ways of producing the components these electrical cars need, making it more accessible for a even wider range of consumers.

Current situation and looking-forward advancement of internal combustion engine

With a history of over 100 years, the internal combustion engine has undergone continuous technological advancements, making it widely utilized in various sectors such as industry, agriculture, and transportation. This is due to its high thermal efficiency and broad power range. However, the rapid growth of the global economy has led to a significant increase in the number of internal combustion engines, resulting in heightened energy consumption and environmental pollution concerns. Consequently, new technical requirements have been imposed on internal combustion engines. One key focus for researchers in this field has been improving the fuel economy of internal combustion engines. Through relentless efforts, remarkable progress has been made in producing economy cars with fuel consumption as low as 3 liters per 100 Km. Additionally, the growing demand for environmental protection has sparked increased attention toward reducing harmful emissions from internal combustion engines, which has become a topic of shared concern. In this article, the researcher will delve into the developmental journey of traditional internal combustion engines and explore the advantages and disadvantages of each engine type.

Negotiating to Buy an Economy Car, KIA: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Sales Messages and Dealer Concessions

Negotiating to Buy an Economy Car, KIA: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Sales Messages and Dealer Concessions

Environmental impact of material selection in a car body component – The side door intrusion beam

As the impact of transport on the issue of global warming is considerable, the fleet-wide average emission target for new cars is continuously lowered. Car weight reduction is considered as one of the possible strategies to pursue in the perspective of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Part design based on the use of new lightweight materials is fundamental to reduce fuel car consumption. This production strategy has to be achieved also by taking into consideration the car safety standards. Hence, the employing of these promising materials has to be evaluated in designing specific components aiming at increasing the car body performance in crash energy absorption.In the research, herein proposed, the environmental impact, quantified by the life cycle assessment tool, was executed on a number of side-door intrusion beams made of different materials. Specifically, the analysis was performed focusing on the global warming potential and the cumulative energy demand of the entire life cycle of different beams considering: the material production, the manufacturing processes employed to produce the intrusion beam and the product use phase. The evaluation was conducted taking into consideration the fact that each beam was mounted on an economy car, and the end-of-life scenario was strictly connected to the recycling properties of the selected materials. The obtained results highlighted that the glass-fiber reinforced thermoset (3 kgCO2eq) and the carbon-fiber reinforced thermoplastic (4 kgCO2eq) show the lowest environmental impact among the analysed materials. Their low impact is mainly due to, respectively, product manufacturing and use phase. However, for each case, the units of the beam life cycle can affect the natural environmental, differently. Therefore, various solutions can be competitive in an optimization perspective aiming to the achievement of zero emissions per km that is the final target of the research.

Negotiating to Buy an Economy Car, KIA: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Sales Messages and Dealer Concessions

Negotiating to Buy an Economy Car, KIA: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Sales Messages and Dealer Concessions

A Case study on Automatic Smart Headlight System for Accident Avoidance

The recent developments in the sensors and the IoT (Internet of Things) technologies are transforming many of the devices smart and to act independently or with minimum human intervention. The researchers are identifying many existing systems and trying to address the current problems in the functionalities or limitation of these existing devices. The researchers are also working to discover the technologies which are very expensive and not in the reach of the common man so that it would be possible to bring out the better solution for the ever-growing mankind with suitable affordability.
 The functionalities of IoT are not limited to a specific field and outweigh the other traditional methodologies; it is being used in many of the life saving applications in recent days including health care, emergency care, accident-aids and many more. The recent survey reveals that the accidents percentage is high between evening 6 to morning 6 compared to the day time. The top most reason for these accidents are temporary blindness of the drivers caused by the headlights of the opposite side vehicles. Another study shows that the accident chances are high during raining or foggy season than a normal day. To avoid these accidents, we are mainly depending on the fog lights. There are few technologies already existing with the luxury cars but these are highly expensive to be adopted in the economy cars. 
 This paper proposes the technology which can be used to make the headlight system to be smart to avoid many existing reasons for the night time or bad weather accidents on road. The researchers’ main objective is to design an economic Automatic Smart Headlight system which can be used by the automobile industry. The second main objective is to design the headlight system for the two and three wheelers also, which is not actually considered by many of the researchers or the automobile industries.

Enhancing the consumer-perceived benefits of a mass-customized product through its online sales configurator

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on online sales configurators (SCs), also known as mass-customization toolkits, which enable consumers to self-customize their product solutions online. The paper aims to provide new insights into which characteristics of an online SC increase the consumer-perceived benefits of possessing a mass-customized product.Design/methodology/approachPrevious studies on mass customization (MC), sales configuration, and learning psychology are used to develop the research hypotheses, which are tested by analyzing data from 675 configuration experiences from a convenience sample of potential consumers using 31 real online SCs for laptops/notebooks, economy cars, and sport shoes/sneakers.FindingsThe paper finds support for the hypotheses that SCs with higher flexible-navigation, focused-navigation, and easy-comparison capabilities enhance not only the traditionally considered utilitarian benefit (UT), but also the consumer-perceived uniqueness benefit (UN) and self-expressiveness (SE) benefit (SE). Furthermore, consistent with the study’s hypotheses, SCs with higher benefit-cost communication and user-friendly product-space description capabilities are found to improve UT. The hypotheses that these two capabilities enhance UN and SE, however, are not supported. Post-hoc analyses suggest that the examined SCs are generally UT-centered and need improvement of their ability to communicate the UN and the SE a consumer could derive from the purchase of his/her configured product.Originality/valueWhile prior research has primarily been concerned with conceptually arguing and empirically showing that uniqueness and self-expressiveness are two additional sources of consumer value in business-to-consumer MC, this is the first empirical study that offers insights into which characteristics online SCs should have in order to draw from these two value sources.

SpaFIND: an Effective and Low-cost Feature Descriptor for Pedestrian Protection Systems in Economy Cars

Pedestrian protection systems (PPSs) are crucial for reducing road traffic fatalities. However, the relatively high cost of today's PPSs prevents the majority of economy cars from receiving their benefits. In this paper, we propose an effective and low-cost sparse feature interaction descriptor (SpaFIND) that is designed for real-time pedestrian detection with limited computational power in economy cars. SpaFIND extends the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature and selectively computes the pairwise relationships between neighboring components of the HOG. Therefore, SpaFIND can capture the second-order properties of object appearance while maintaining a low computational load, which is the main contribution of this paper. During the experiments, we performed comparative evaluations of the proposed system against several baseline methods on the Caltech Pedestrian Detection Benchmark in terms of detection accuracy and computational load. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed low-cost SpaFIND feature, which can meet the requirements for implementing a PPS with limited computational power, thereby contributing to the massive deployment of PPSs in economy cars in the immediate future.

Highlight: Old but Changeable-On the Family History of Nuclear Lamina.

There are many ways to build a car: from stretch limousines to tiny economy cars, as long as the vehicle drives and is reasonably safe, no one design is inherently right or wrong. Comparing different models is useful, says Mark Field of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, because it quickly makes clear what the essence of a car is. Early cars tended to be very similar to each other. Now cars are more variable, versatile, and complex than ever. Some use petrol, some diesel, some use electricity, others run on hybrid systems. All something need to pass for a car is four wheels, a means to take in energy, and a propulsion system that is geared so it can speed up and slow down. As a biologist interested in the mechanics of eukaryotic evolution, Field applies the same sort of comparison to living organisms as well. If you look at what’s different between one car and another, it can tell you something about its owner or its purpose, he says. And if you look at how organisms have changed over time, you can learn something about the complexity of evolution.

Identifying and characterizing potential electric vehicle adopters in Canada: A two-stage modelling approach

This article presents a two-stage structural equation modelling and segmentation process to identify likely electric vehicle adopters in Canada. Using a sample of 3505 households who have expressed an interest in the future purchase of an economy car, the paper operationalizes an extended version of the Theory of Planned Behaviour in a structural equation model to quantify the impacts of personal beliefs on individual adoption intention towards electric vehicles. Model results show that attitude, perceived behavioural control, and norms (moral and subjective) have significant direct impacts on behavioural intention, while a household's concern for the environment has an indirect impact. Age, level of employment, and employment status are identified, among other variables, to significantly influence the adoption intention. Collectively, findings indicate that beliefs vary across socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. To best characterize the most likely group of early adopters, we then conduct a Two-Step cluster analysis on households with a high demonstrated intention to adopt EVs. This results in three distinct socio-economic and demographic segments: Typical Early Adopters, Emerging Early Adopters, and Interested Retirees. Each have their own unique socioeconomic and demographic profile. Insights derived from this work can help tailor marketing strategies that are important for accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles in the future.

Redução do imposto sobre produtos industrializados e seu efeito sobre a venda de automóveis no Brasil: uma análise do período de 2006 a 2013

In the period between 2006 and 2013 the tax rate on industrialized products for cars was reduced in two stages, with the aim of increasing their demand and stimulate the economy. Thus, the aim of this paper is to verify whether the reduction in the rate of tax on industrialized products caused alterations in auto sales. Through regression analysis, was tested the influence of the reduction in of tax on industrialized products on the cars sale. The results showed that it is not possible to state that the reduction in tax on industrialized products rate was able to change the behavior of car sales. As additional results, can be seen in the period the expansion of credit to the natural person, even in a situation of worker’s real income declining. Another observation was that the price of the economy car had an increase below inflation, indicating a change in relative prices.

Integrated Marketing Communication to Influencing International Standard Energy Economy Car Buying Decision of Consumers in Bangkok

Integrated Marketing Communication to Influencing International Standard Energy Economy Car Buying Decision of Consumers in Bangkok

A comparison of simplex and simulated annealing for optimization of a new rear underrun protective device

In this paper, two optimization approaches to improve the product design process have been analysed. Through the analysis of a case study, concerning the designing of a new High Energy Absorption Rear Underrun Protective Device (HEARUPD), two different optimization approaches (simplex and simulated annealing) have been compared. In the implemented optimization processes, the crash between an economy car and the rear part of a truck has been simulated by dynamic numerical (FEM) analyses. Moreover, authors have proposed the use of a suitable linear function of four variables with the purpose of reducing the multi-objective optimization processes to mono-objective ones. That has been made to simplify the analysis procedures without affecting the quality and the completeness of the optimization processes. The obtained results, as well as showing the high effectiveness of the integrated use of numerical crash analyses and optimization methods, demonstrate that simplex method is more effective than simulated annealing one for optimization problems where the single analysis loop requires much time. Even if the solutions are quite similar in terms of calculated values of the objective function, design and state variables, simplex method needs shorter computational time than simulated annealing to obtain an optimized solution.

Valuation of quality attributes in the price of new economy cars

The purpose of this study is to value the quality attributes of economy car models, that is, vehicles with a 1000 cc engine. With the liberalization of the domestic automotive market, the sector has been experiencing a growing market development and technology expansion which allows for the sale of more varieties and types of vehicles, each with a wide range of options, accessories and comfort items available as options for consumers. Based on the available attributes for each item, the consumer will choose those he perceives as useful depending on his perception of usefulness and quality. Among the different methods of quality valuation, this paper explores the theory of hedonic prices. According to the model proposed, it is possible to identify that the brand is the main attribute of valuation in the composition of the price of economy cars. At this point, it is possible to observe the companies’ actions in the attempt to reposition their products in the consumer’s mind. In comparison with similar studies, it is possible to notice that economy cars have evolved in terms of accessory availability. These results can also contribute as a point of reference for the automakers to better plan the vehicle, giving priority to types of vehicles that are consistent with the preferences of their consumers.

Climate Change Abatement Strategies Which Way is the Wind Blowing?

The mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, already one hot topic, got even hotter with the 16 June 2009 publication of the White House report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. “Choices made about emissions reductions now and over the next few decades will have far-reaching consequences for climate-change impacts,” warned the strongly worded report, which emphasized the growing sense that action must be taken soon to avoid catastrophic public health fallout from accelerating climate change—a sense echoed in a proposed ruling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seeking authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a potential public health threat. How best to drive the United States toward mitigation goals is a matter of disagreement among experts and politicians, however. The task is dauntingly complex because so many sources of greenhouse gases exist. The major sources of U.S. emissions are industry at 30%, transportation (including all forms of mass transit and shipping) at 28%, residential and commercial at 17% each, and agriculture at 8%, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. There are other ways to slice the emissions pie. For instance, the electricity industry, which cross-cuts the above sectors, accounts for 30% of U.S. emissions. Past regulatory efforts aimed at reducing fossil fuel use—which were geared toward problems other than greenhouse gas emissions, such as trade deficits and traffic congestion—illustrate the need for market forces to get the job done. For instance, it was only after gas prices soared past $4 per gallon in summer 2008 that sales of high-mileage cars finally surged, while SUV sales tanked. But gas prices’ tumble back below $2 per gallon has once again dampened demand for economy cars and raised light trucks’ market share back to roughly half, underscoring the mantra of economists, which has gained adherents among the major environmental groups: when it comes to changing human behavior, prices trump rules and regulations. Thus, almost everyone who is concerned about climate change mitigation favors putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. The question is, what strategies will yield the most mitigation bang for the investment buck?

Noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) criteria as functions of vehicle design and consumer expectations

The criteria for NVH design are to a large degree determined by the types of vehicles and the perceived desires of the purchasers of vehicles, as well as the cost of incorporating NVH measures. Vehicles may be classified into specific types, e.g., economy car, midsize passenger, near-luxury and luxury passenger cars, sports cars, vans, minivans, and sports utility vehicles of varying sizes. The owner of a luxury sedan would expect a quiet ride with minimal vibration and harshness—however, if that sedan is to display sporting characteristics, some aspects of NVH may actually have to be increased in order to enhance a feeling of driver exhilaration. A discussion of the requirements for specific types of vehicles is provided, with due regard for effects on the usability of installed sound/video systems, driver and passenger fatigue, feel of steering mechanisms and other mechanical components, consumer market research, etc. A number of examples of vehicles on the market are cited.

416 省エネカーエンジン用可変ベンチュリ気化器の吸気特性 : モータリング法によるベンチュリ部圧力測定

High performance fuel consumption engine on economy car has simple carburetor with variable venturi. But it is very difficult to keep steady air-fuel ratio by the carburetor as engine runs from low to high speed. As the air-fuel ratio is got by the venturi pressure, it is necessary to know the venturi pressure caused by engine rotating. As a simple method to measure the pressure, motoring metod was employed.

The new oil crisis and fuel economy technologies: preparing the light transportation industry for the 1990s

Introduction Future Fuel Economy Technologies Fuel Economy Cars for the Future Tradeoffs for Fuel Economy: Fact or Fiction? The Innovation Leaders: Who and Why The Role of the Market. What About Alternative Fuels? Making the Transition: Policy Options The Case for the United States Bibliography Index