Cars

Introduction

I want to talk about cars. I have divided my report in three parts. The History of automobiles, the different types of cars and drivers and finally the problems and dangers of cars in our world.

The History of automobiles

The first gas powered car was independently from each other invented by Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany  in the year 1886. In the beginning the production was made by hand, but an American named Henry Ford changed this. He got famous because of his partly automatically production and his first car - the model T. Already in 1909 there were 131000 cars produced in America. In 1920 already 8,1 millions car were driving in the USA. Soon there were also produced large cars for transporting things and also militaries used cars and for example the first tanks were nothing more than cars with a heavy amour plating.

Nearly every year new and more efficient and better technologies improved the cars and their power which is specified in horsepower. Since the seventies scientist also tried with success to decrease the dangerous exhaust gases that are produced by cars. For the great masses cars got affordable in the fifties, when the mass-production allows low prices (example: VW-Beetle). The automobile industry was since its beginning in a strong upward trend and today it is one of the most important factors in most of the industrialised countries. Today some companies have taken a leading position in the automobile section like Mercedes (that has fused with Chrysler), the VW concern and Ford.

1995 the world car production reached over 50 million cars - 72 percent were personal cars.

The types of cars and drivers

Today cars are a very important part of our daily lives. I don´t think that our world could exist without any cars. We use automobiles when we drive to school, in our holidays, go shopping or transport something. The main works they do for us is transporting anything and anybody to any nearly any destination we want.

If you buy a car you have many possibilities to choose between, because nowadays a car is more than just a medium to bring you from place A to place B. A car is for many of us some kind of status symbol - some persons love their car more than anything else and clean it every day. It is not easy to generalise the types of car drivers, but I want to list up some typical car driver types for you.

The sporties:
They like fast cars with a huge amount of horsepower, to drive fast and often aggressive and to show their cars in public. Most of them are young and want to impress others, but some of them are also real car freaks who simply like cars.

The big ones:

For them a car is a sign of social and financial status. They like big, precious and important looking cars and they also like to show their status symbol in public.

The economics:

This group buys the car with the least gas consumption and with the best price-performance level. They buy a car not because of the design or the power, but because of their personal needing. They also try to minimise the environment damage.

The minimalists:
For the members of this group a car is not very important it just has to bring them to their destination. They don't invest a lot of money, because they don't care very much about their car.

The problems and dangers of cars

The main dangers of cars are accidents on the streets, which occur in the time of too many, too fast and  too powerful cars more often than ever before. Everyday some hundred people all over the world die and some thousands are badly injured because of car accidents that are mainly caused by drunkards behind the control, risky manoeuvres, self-overestimation and human fail. In the least accidents the technique of the car is to blame. In the last years automobile manufacturers have highly improved the safety in cars for example with the airbag, the side bounce protection and many technical details, so we can only minimise crashes if everyone of us keeps the traffic rules.

The problems of the automobiles are the high environment pollution because of the gas output of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide. The enormous mass of cars on our world makes this fact to a real problem. Here the automobile-industry has also done made a great advancement. In the last 8 years the fuel consumption has been reduced by one third and the emissions by nearly fourty percent. And also the cars themselves are today mainly produces of recyclable materials than can be reused in new cars.