10 Car Jobs You Never Knew Existed | Big Business | Insider Business
from the engineers who build million dollar crash test dummies to technicians who wreck cars for the big screen to the designers behind fancy cars that never see the road here's how 10 people have turned their passion for cars into unique jobs some people destroy cars just for entertainment at gemfx special effects technicians like Cody Canal destroy cars for the big screen they weaken cars pillars and Frames to guarantee their destruction in movie stunts in real life cars don't always get destroyed in the most cinematic ways [Applause] even when hit repeatedly a car roof won't always cave in on itself like we're used to seeing in movies that's where scoring comes in stripping away the protective sheet metal in a car and gutting it of its support we're going to start by cutting this pillar from here to here so basically weaken the structure so now that we've finished our cut we're going to take a pry bar and simply remove this small chunk of the front a-pillar each cut determines where and how the car will fold we're going to go through and do some weakening cuts to help this fold a little bit easier under a little less weight they target the a b and c pillars of the car now when you're doing this you have to ensure not to cut the outside of the vehicle because then it'd be visible and you could tell something's up with it so we like to try and hide all of our stuff then they put the whole thing back together so we're going to start out by reconnecting our wire harness then we'll take our interior cover put it back on replace our weather stripping and now we're back to the stock interior it looks like a normal car from the inside but it will crush it took four hours to score the car also it could be destroyed in seconds by a 3 000 pound weight and the areas they scored were the ones that folded cleanly the team at gem doesn't go all the way with the scoring process for every job take this bus crash in shangji this shot was filmed on location in San Francisco and the parked cars getting run over are real gem prepped them for Destruction the cars were supposed to get crushed in the bus's path but they also needed to be strong enough to slow down the bus so gem only scored the upper portion of the vehicles to collapse on impact keeping the lower portions strong when the bus would carry over the tops of the vehicles if it went down too far scene wouldn't look right so all we wanted is just so much compression and actually provide a flat platform for the camera to track down the hill with they can also just focus on a few major points of weakening like these hinges on car doors swapping up the steel hinges for Breakaway ones makes the doors incredibly easy to rip off they're made out of a weaker compound which makes them sheer easier so that way it'll snap the door off nice and easy then they cut these wires to make sure the door has nothing to hang on to after the bolts blow out these weaker materials allow for big results the U.S Auto industry spends about 18 billion dollars per year on research and development a good portion of that goes toward improving card design designers spend countless hours making cars safer more fuel efficient and aesthetically pleasing and much of their time is spent on vehicles that will never see the road concept cars a glimpse into the future you may find them synonymous with outrageous designs exaggerated interiors and features that have never been seen in a production car like this floating key they're typically revealed at Auto shows where enthusiasts and the media ooh and ah at the future of Mobility it's no secret that these one-off designs can be expensive to build sometimes with a seven figure price tag with so much invested in these cars why does it seem like we rarely see these Concepts make it to production and why does it seem like the coolest elements are Stripped Away when they do we spoke with the design Department of some of the top automakers to find out why automakers spend Millions on concept cars they don't plan on making [Music] first of all people don't realize that you know concept cars yes we show them at Auto shows typically and they're there for the media to enjoy but long after the media is gone there the auto shows around for a couple weeks and and the public comes around and they may not know much about the brand sometimes they go whoa and they come across this concept car that makes an unmistakable statement about where the brand wants to go with technology that's Ralph giel he's worked on the design of the 2005 Chrysler 300 2014 SRT Viper and many more so Vehicles like the prowler the Jeep rescue and the Challenger and even the Viper all of those were concept cars at one time and what happened there is is again the public reacted to them in a visceral way in a way that says you have to build that car sometimes when people will mail us checks deposits you know to see this car through and very passionate letters none of that would have happened the concept not been there so when we see that we we think we might have struck something here concept cars can also be used to Hype up a model that is actually plan and for production if we have a new launch of a new vertliner in in our portfolio we would tease that with a specific type of concept that would be a slight exaggeration of the production car so it would be slightly more idealized and of course that's to generate interest but also awareness that this product is coming to Market you know a year or two later like the Lincoln Navigator concept it boasted Gold Wing doors and steps that deployed when the door lifted open almost inviting the passengers in these exaggerated features didn't make it to the 2018 production car which had standard doors and a single retracting step but the concept did capture attention and brought excitement for the production version of the car those really extreme ones are the hardest but they would still have an influence on the market ahead you know so you might not have seen them in the in the first couple of years after you first experienced them but maybe the longer run you know 10 years down the low line maybe they had a big influence on the trend of automotive design like BMWs Vision efficient Dynamics concept car in 2009 it was designed to be a high Performance Hybrid balancing speed and fuel efficiency five years later it became the BMW i8 the design stayed intact but some of the flashy features like the see-through doors and moving Grille didn't make it to production the I8 was a success for BMW and now we're seeing performance hybrids from almost every brand [Music] the government's national highway traffic safety administration spends as much as 10 million dollars a year on cars for crash testing the real money though is in the crash test dummies humanetics the world's largest manufacturer of Crash Test Dummies Engineers models that sell for as much as one million dollars each in the past decade the company has tripled in size to over 800 employees worldwide one of their Engineers Blake emod explains what makes their dummies so valuable it may look like a simple mannequin but inside the dummy is a lot of engineering and a lot of time and a lot of work a complex combination of metals rubber foam vinyl and Plastics make up each dummy and then inside comes an intricate network of sensors and electronics which beat thousands of bits of data back to car builders about the kinds of force experienced in a crash here a worker pours the vinyl mixture into a face mold before putting it into an oven and the finished product has got to be perfect each dummy needs to survive countless impacts while continuing to relay reliable data since the 1960s car safety improvements designed in part from data provided by Crash Test Dummies have saved an estimated 600 000 lives in the U.S so it has to be reliable not only for one or two crashes but for tens of thousands of crashes over a lifespan that could be 30 plus years after molding each one is trimmed and finished by hand underneath the skin a skeleton provides strength and durability but unlike human bones these ones don't break so easily most of the bone structures are made out of steel and it has to be machined we used numerically controlled Machining to make sure they're precisely manufactured 95th pelvis we have a print where we have to meet all the tight tolerances he's Machining out the hip sockets where the femurs are going to go skulls ribs and pelvises are all modeled after their human counterparts older models are crude compared to the latest high-tech generation this Thor dummy even has a pelvis with movable parts hours scrubbing and power washing dry ice cleaners can remove dirt and debris from cars in minutes at dry's Nation owner Scott Ailes explains how the technology works and how it cuts through oil soot and grime so easily when we're starting the project we're always looking for the dirtiest area first we like to get the hard stuff out of the way so that we get to those surfaces or those Coatings that we're trying to remove that are easy then it makes everything go smoother because you're not double cleaning so you'll notice as I'm cleaning that the gun is never static it's always moving it's always constantly moving and the reason for that is we have the risk of a concentrated 109 negative degrees on a particular substrate or part of the car that you could damage in one spot so I'd like to take a minute and explain how this actually worked there's really three things that are occurring you've got kinetic energy which is driven by the PSI of the air system you've got cold temperature 109 degree negative that causes things to shrink so they lose adhesion and then you've got the actual thermal expansion of a solid chemical going to a gas so that's 800 times its original solid size those three things work very well together to remove this dirt in a way that you've probably never seen before [Music] there's a lot of a technique opportunity here right because in a sense this is this is a bit of a an artist's effort at an industrial job if you will I've found it to be helpful for me to function in a circular pattern so that I never have any hard lines the circular pattern gives me the control that I feel comfortable with there's really nothing that's more fun in this process than doing bare aluminum you really can't hurt bare aluminum and so in that case you can crank it up it's more efficient you feel better about it and and it's it's very satisfying to the eye but dry ice cleaning can't get inside filthy engines that's where extrude honing comes in at extrude home AFL Gary Kubo and his team use silicon putty to remove build up inside Performance Engine Parts they claim this improves airflow to the engine by up to 25 percent and improves horsepower the putty is made out of a proprietary silicone polymer and it contains a specialized silicon carbide particles and as the process of flowing goes through a part it it's a cloning effect so a silicone polymer the putty carries an abrasive material the silicone carbide particles let's make this simple and see how the process works on an intake manifold the intake manifold is responsible for evenly Distributing the air into each cylinder of an engine as the particles are pushed through the intake manifold via hydraulic pressure they begin sanding or grinding away at buildup and smoothing imperfections this is what increases airflow and turns your car into a certified Speed Demon but not every time what will the results will vary depending on the part uh if you're starting from scratch say like a rough unshaped ported head I mean the the results improvements could be drastic so when we talk about airflow we have to talk about balance um the exhaust has to be considered as well um it's the engine in in its basic form is an air pump so if we have a increased volume of air coming in we have to be able to reject the spent gases out so if we have a very large intake but a smaller exhaust the diameter for instance it can actually choke the engine so if you noticed your car losing power over time you may not need that new fancy turbo to reclaim your precious speed some classic cars require more than a simple deep clean that's a job for restoration Specialists like Trevor Malloy he uses chemical dipping to strip away years of rust and old paint the customer starts off by completely disassembling the vehicle then we will take it and we will dip it in our Auckland paint stripper and they'll remain in the tank for about a day who take it out every other day and then we'll pressure wash it until all the paint is removed because there can be different layers of paint you got your paint then you got your primer you got your putty undercoating once all that's removed then it'll move to the Acid Bath and the Acid Bath actually takes a little less time our Acid Bath is for removing rust specifically that's all it does and we'll pull it out every other day also and it will be neutralized after it's pulled out into our alkaline bath that way there's no further rusting from the acid because the acid does attack the metal slightly [Music] then it'll be pressure washed until all of the rust is removed [Music] once all the rust is removed our third step in our third chemical is our water-based rust inhibitor and we dip it in a water-based rust inhibitor to stop further rusting until you're ready to paint I think chemical dipping is the most thorough way to remove all paint and rust from a car body it gets to places that physical Medias can't like sandblasting or Media Blasting and one other plus is it doesn't damage or warp the metal at all are chemical dipping gets in everything since it's submerged everything is taken out so you're left with completely bare metal you don't have to worry about later down the road that it's going to start rusting from the inside out since our chemicals are environmentally friendly uh it takes four to five weeks uh minimum depending on certain variables uh depending on the age of the paint uh older paints tend to be taken off easier since paint technology has improved over the years um Bondo the amount of Bondo it has or putty the amount of undercoating and the amount of rust it has so there's variables sometimes it can take two weeks but usually we say four to five the only problem that we come in contact with is our alkaline paint stripper actually eats soft Metals so if there's aluminum magnesium or a pot metal on the car uh it'll react and it'll dissolve it so we'll dip the car and we'll look for any reaction if there's a reaction we'll pull it out we'll go over the car with magnets to find specific Parts you'll usually be able to see the part that's reacting and it's a slow reaction so it's not like you put it in there and it's ruined it would take a few days but we find that we remove it and solve the problem that way [Music] but it's not just classic cars that need restoration just ask Rich Benoit or as he's known on YouTube Rich rebuilds Tesla claims that only they can fix their cars but Rich has made a career out of proving them wrong once you build and repair a Tesla you kind of fix it and you go from there there's no real upgrades for it so many things are electronically controlled it doesn't make it as fun for the hot rodders out there so I said to myself you know what how do we mix the two things how do we have you know a really good looking car and combining it with a tunability of a of a classic V8 engine so we decided just to combine the two a lot of people think that oh you took a brand new Tesla and Twitter parties like no no it wasn't a flood and Tesla won't sell you batteries and motors to repair it so I said you know what if Tesla won't then uh General Motors will so there's a Camaro SS that was completely destroyed and the engine was available and uh decided to put it in the Tesla for me it's one of those things where it has to do with recycling so they were both just like wrecked cars sitting in the field and I said why have them both just sitting there why not combine the two and make something that actually runs and functions so I spent the first few months actually stripping it down taking out all the interior components pressure washing everything and just getting all of like the stench and like the sewage out of the car so I took both Motors out both Motors were toast water wow man there's tons of water in there oh the battery pack was pretty much toast because underwater for so long you know anything sort of aluminum was shipped out of the car so I think a lot of measuring and prep was the hardest part making sure the engine sits straight and true in the car because don't forget not only do you have to have make sure the engine sits well in the car but there's also a transmission that adds another few feet and there's also a really long drive shaft that spins thousands upon thousands of RPM that are really sitting right between your legs that has to be straight as well like a lot of different angles and things have to be straight in order for the car to even roll down the road believe it or not it almost makes sense that the V8 fits so well once you take out the front motor there's so much room in there and the LS3 is actually so narrow it actually fit in there pretty well so what we noticed was that when we brought the car to SEMA we had the hood open everyone would just walk by it because the install was so clean it was only until they saw the Tesla logo that everyone just kind of rubber neck stopped and went towards the car the exhaust fabrication process was interesting because battery pack for a Tesla Model S weighs about I would say between 11 and 1200 pounds so because the old battery was you know about four inches thick and so heavy and it tucked in so well underneath the car once he removed it and we made the exhaust system we decided to go with oval tubing so when you go with oval tubing kind of like NASCARs use you actually save a lot of space going oval versus completely circular so if you notice we have a side exit exhaust system most cars have a rear exit exhaust where it actually comes right onto the rear bumper we couldn't do that because the independent rear suspension was so large the exhaust actually couldn't go past it so we just terminated the exhaust system right to the sides right before the the rear wheels foreign challenges was the fabrication of the transmission tunnel you know in the tassel it's one of the few cars that are made it has a completely flat floor you know most cars nowadays that are rear wheel drive there's a tunnel going from the front all the way to the back this one didn't have that so we had to make our own and it was it was definitely challenging uh so we have a great fabricator Joshua that actually was able to cut the car in half down the middle and actually build a transmission tunnel one of the other difficult issues that we want to do with this car was the wiring so we can completely strip the car down to the bare frame it was just literally just a shell and we had to rewire the entire car all over again and we actually removed about 50 to 60 percent of the car's entire wiring harness but the battery pack was not there that's one set of Winery High Voltage cables uh there was a wiring to the rear Motors the front Motors those are both gone you know we saved a significant amount of weight going from the older Olympic empowered battery pack to the uh to the internal combustion engine the car still has the touchscreen uh it still has the instrument cluster and all the functions of work the navigation works the Bluetooth works so when you sit in the car you could you know push buttons and play with different functions of the vehicle and it does work I am very satisfied with how it runs yeah we still need to do some fine tuning to it but at the end of the day when you sit and you drive it you I you almost forget that it's a Tesla like you're just thinking that you're driving like a regular you know powerful V8 engine car and it's it's it's really weird because if you don't think about it you're like okay this is pretty cool it has a manual I'm doing my thing but you really have to take a step back and say to yourself this car never had any of this spinning is a barely legal Motorsport that involves performing stunts outside the vehicle the South African sport is growing fast in 2022 Red Bull hosted its third official live spinning competition which drew a record-breaking 4 000 spectators one of the Sport's biggest stars Stacy Lee May explains the risks involved at first glance it might look like drifting that's Until you realize the driver's body is hanging out of the window and their head is inches from the pavement my dad actually came up with the idea we were driving home one day and he decided that it would be cool to hang upside down after the moving car and I haven't seen anybody do it before that 25 year old Stacy Lemay describing her iconic spinning stunt the suicide slide the South African law student is a veteran of the sport coining other moves like her Superwoman where she hangs horizontally out of the window of the car as it spins at full speed its daring Moves Like These that quickly made her so popular and gained her the nickname queen of smoke these are only a few of the death-defying stunts you'll see at a spinning show [Music] [Applause] drivers and their co-pilots either perform for a panel of Judges or to entertain a crowd but no matter the type of show the stunts always require hours of practice creativity and most of all faith I always pray before I go in I always pray and when I'm about to do a stunt I never second guess myself I always just jump out and do it but while most professional Motorsport athletes get suited up in flame retardant suits and helmets Pro Spinners like Stacy prefer the comfort of just the t-shirt and ball cap it would be kind of difficult to do the suicide slide with a helmet on even their cars lack the safety professional Drifters get with roll cages harnesses and modern suspension systems the majority of spinners stick to using a modified BMW E30 325is released by BMW South Africa in 1990 the old performance car nicknamed gusheshe has a rich history in the country and has grown to be synonymous with spinning we use it mainly because it's a smaller car that pedals are closer together so it's the closest to a race car because it's easy to move your feet and it's easy to get into small Corners this is a standard 2.7 motor original Moto of this
car some of the guys have souped up engines but I'm staying true to math and through to the gushes you know foot really sets spinning apart is that it's been regulated for barely a decade started in the 1980s by South African gangsters as a way to show off their stolen rides for years it remained an underground hobby it wasn't until 2014 that it was formally recognized as a motorsport by Motorsport South Africa Bates continue about the safety regulations required for formal events with Motorsport South Africa settling for now on ensuring the safety of crowd members with mandatory barriers clearly it could be a while before spinning goes mainstream some Motorsports Stars don't even drive the car rally car racing features co-drivers who sit shotgun and read directions to their drivers for co-drivers competing at the highest level like Nicholas gilsol and Krista skukas one wrong direction can send them flying off the track clocked in and flat right over Quest slowing for line lines man talking non-stop is what's known as a rally team's co-driver he never touches the wheel never touches a pedal but he's just as important as the driver and all those words he's saying their directions and one slip of the tongue and disaster could await [Music] rallying is hands down one of the most dangerous Motorsports around drivers race down narrow public roads covered in everything from dirt and gravel to snow and ice at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour instead of drivers racing all at once they go one by one around sharp blind corners and fly hundreds of feet off of sudden jumps just like airplane pilots have their co-pilots rally drivers have a co-driver sitting right next to them during each race the co-driver's main job is to read out loud a series of pre-written directions called Pace notes that the driver uses to navigate each stage it's these notes that allow the driver to continue at full speed without hesitating at the course's most dangerous sections in order to get the best possible time one of the co-driver's most important job starts days before the race has even begun during an activity known as recce during recce is um when the driver and co-driver will take a car out and that is when they go onto the stage roads and write the notes that they will be using when they're racing so this is done at low speeds 35 miles an hour is usually tops the mental strain that it takes to 100 just focus on the road in front of you for sometimes 45 minutes to an hour of just paying attention to every deviation in the road and not missing anything but while recce may seem time consuming and mind-numbing mistakes made or obstacles missed during it can lead to some of the biggest disasters Nicholas gilsul co-driver to one of the world's best rally drivers tierry Newville explain just how important reki is to A team's success and safety we had last year a big accident with cherry but it was not due to misunderstanding it was due to the fact that during the hickey we did it in the fog and the visibility was really bad we were driving quite slow even slower than usually and we underestimate the angle of a turn a newly commissioned Rolls-Royce can easily cost half a million dollars a big chunk of that price tag is in its special paint one of the automaker's trademarks is the Sleek Pinstripes painted down the side Mark Court has been doing this for almost 20 years remarkably the detailed paintwork on Rolls-Royce cars is done by hand by just one person my name is Mark Court and I am the coach liner for roll four smoker cuffs a coach liner means that I am able to put this pinstripe onto the side of the car the uniqueness is the fact that I do it completely freehand and I'm the only one within Rolls-Royce that can do this that's like worldwide within the Rolls-Royce BMW group so the brushes I use is made of squirrel hair we found that most brushes nowadays are man-made and which tends to leave brush marks within these lines this is a natural hair this natural hair tends to leave no marks at all so we work to one standard which is the highest then so we use one that leaves no brush marks at all and if customers without a Coach Line decide to add one to their car Mark is on hand to travel worldwide with his paintbrush as normal with Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce never comes back to us we go to it so if it's in Dubai so I'd be that's where I have to go [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]
2023-01-07 08:46
