How are cars built?

Cars are such a common view we don't realize how much engineering and design efforts are behind them. Think how much cars (and the technology they incorporate) have change since the crude Model T Ford produced to any of the cars you can see today in the road: electronic control, ABS, cruise control.. there are even cars that park themselves!!!

But how are those features developed? Well, let me show an example. There is a number of companies working of a feature called "active suspension". Don't you know what I'm talking about? Check this video





But how is 'active suspension' design? It would be inconvenient to have a car on your desk to go trough the design process. One option is to build something similar but to a smaller scale. This is what Quanser has done. This portable plant simulates the action of the road over a wheel and the body of a car and allow users to design and test their algorithms with a real system before actually building a prototype on a areal car






And this is the Active Suspension working with LabVIEW and cRIO