What's the earliest era in which people could reverse engineer a car?
 

The scenario:

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon, and you decide to go to a car show. There's a sweet 1977 Trans Am, black with gold trim, and you decide to sit in and pretend you're eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking.

In the next stall is a cherry 1988 DeLorean, but unbeknownst to everyone, the flux capacitor is on the the fritz. Some kids are messing with the car and turn it on, and it's accidentally set to transport 12 feet to the left.

Suddenly you and the Trans Am are transported back in time.

Now, we all know that there are three outcomes to this scenario.

1. You will live in the car in squalor until a dinosaur steps on it and crushes both of you to death.

2. You will be immediately burned as a witch or feted as a god by some culture that has little interest in internal combustion.

3. Your car will be seized by the most powerful person around, and they will attempt to reverse engineer it. They will either learn how to build automobiles before Henry Ford, or they'll end up pedaling around in bamboo and palm frond vehicles like Gilligan on the island.

My question to you involves Scenario 3a. What's the earliest culture/era that could successfully reverse engineer a car by studying Burt Reynolds' Trans Am?

The rules:

1. The car does not have to match the performance of the Trans Am. It just needs to run and be capable of achieving a top speed of at least 13 mile per hour.

2. At least half of the accessories must work - headlights, air conditioner, etc.

3. No need for a working radio, and any tape deck or 8-track may use your existing inventory. No need to create new tapes and 8-tracks.

4. All parts of the new vehicle must be manufactured. No scavenging of parts from the Trans Am.

5. Assume that the car is in the hands of the most powerful person in the world.

6. Assume that they are working without your help since they don't trust your accent, and that they have never seen Smokey and the Bandit.

I am disappointed that the scenario did not mention Sally Field c. 1977.

I think it would be very difficult to reverse engineer a car without being able to machine the parts to a very precise tolerance. Hard to imagine a blacksmith being able to do that.

But more than the car itself, aren't you forgetting about two important things:

1) Said society needs to be able to refine gasoline/ethanol to a purity that isn't going to blow the engine

2) How is the air conditioning going to work without refrigerant? Chlorofluorocarbons weren't even synthetically feasible until the 1890s.

That is why I marked post 1850.

I'm going to say Tesla could have figured it out at the height of his powers. So no one before him around 1895.

Bandit car was racist..so I'm not comfortable answering

The closest thing I found (historically) to an ICE after a cursory search was the gunpowder engine of Christiaan Huygens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_engine

This was the late 1600's. With a model to go off of I'll say the late 1500's.

Since we aren't worried about mass production or reliability, machining parts shouldn't be too difficult. Fuel is going to be the main issue along with the battery. The A/C could use a number of other gases instead of CFCs so that isn't a major problem.

I'd say anytime before the mid 1600s and they wouldn't even know where to begin on many of the materials. If you started in 1650 I would think the process would still take 50-100 years before they could complete a working car.

After considerable thought, I went with 1750 to 1799. Steam engines had been around for a while by that point, so the concept of artificial locomotion was understand, and presumably also the ability to build "vehicles", at least in the sense of horsedrawn vehicles. Trains apparently showed up in 1804, so the technology wasn't far away to build things like brakes and gauges and stuff.

I don't know how evolved chemistry was at that point. I looked it up, and the periodic table first appeared in 1869. So per an earlier point, gasoline and oil and lubricants may be the most challenging part of reverse engineering a car, and I guess that would make sense. It was probably the last part that was developed when cars were invented the first time.

So it would have been a stretch in 1775 to build a car, but people are resourceful. I think King George III would have put his best minds on it, and they would have succeeded at great cost and time.

<a href="http://s1260.photobucket.com/user/KCTattoo58/media/Chinese_rocket_zpswyqdc3fg.png.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1260.photobucket.com/albums/ii574/KCTattoo58/Chinese_rocket_zpswyqdc3fg.png" border="0" alt=" photo Chinese_rocket_zpswyqdc3fg.png"/></a>




I think the Chinese in the 9th century could have figured something out to make the Trans Am go vroom. It may explode but it would go vroom then boom.

Petroleum has been known for 4000 years, but the ability to distill kerosene from petroleum was only discovered in 1847, despite the fact that kerosene was a very useful means of providing artificial lighting at the time. I think this would have been one of the most challenging things to develop early.

Electric light bulbs (headlamps) were invented in 1879. I don't think they would have had good methods of determining the composition of the filaments to reverse engineer them.

The lead acid battery was first developed in 1859, although I don't think that would be too difficult to reverse engineer.

Rubber vulcanization was developed in 1839.

So it sounds like your theory is that a fifty-year advance in one step would be too much. Maybe it is, but I guess I would hope that it would accelerate development to some extent. Ten years? Twenty years?

The obvious next question is about alien technology. Looking at the voting, does everyone pretty much think that we couldn't advance more than 50 years in the current day? If an alien ship landed that was 100 years more advanced than we are, would we just scratch our heads and give up? Would it shorten our development timeline from 100 years to XX years? What would happens?

Look at nuclear weapons. That technology is now 70 years old. The key concepts about how to do it have been public knowledge for decades. Yet there are many countries who want that capability that are struggling to achieve it. You have to have the fundamental knowledge and the infrastructure to exploit the known technology. Now, it can be argued that if North Korea didn't have any knowledge from outside about the existence of nuclear weapons that it would take their own scientists even longer to come up with that technology on their own. Maybe hundreds of years longer.

When the US developed the atomic bomb, I'm not sure the science of the device was even the rate limiting step. I'd lean more to figuring out how to separate Uranium 235, building the factories to do it, and then the inherent time it took to do the separations were rate limiting.

Even though developed countries now have the scientific infrastructure in place to better exploit advanced technology than we did 150 to 200 years ago, it might be questionable how many steps ahead we can jump.

Let's take the example of the microcomputer chip. If we had dropped a modern day laptop into the labs of Bell labs in 1950 (shortly after the invention of the transistor but 2 years before the patent of the first integrated circuit) how fast would it have sped things up? I think it would have been less than a factor of 2. In other words, I don't think that we would have had today's computers by 1983 if a lap top got dropped into Bell labs in 1950. There are too many advances needed in materials science, growing silicon crystals, material deposition, photolithography, wire bonding, doping, that would not be revealed by just being given a laptop. Those would have to be learned the old fashioned trial and error way.

If we speculate on alien technology, we can start by thinking of technology as the ability to manipulate matter, energy, and information. What if the device manipulated dark energy or dark matter? We don't know what these are. Similar to an 1820 automotive engineer may be puzzled by the substance gasoline with very limited analytical chemistry tools to figure it out and where it came from. Having the vision provided by the prototype can speed things up, but only by so much.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know you're stuck until November 5, 1955: when the flux capacitor was conceptualized.

Excellent answer.

No way they could reverse engineer car before 1850.

You have to create the machines that create the machine tools to make the car.

Electronic components before you understand the electronic general practices? Not happening.

At the EAA airshow this weekend, I bought up the subject wondering if the Wright brothers, Martin, Curtis, and all the initial early 1910s aviation innovators could have imagined the F22.

If a Raptor went back to 1910; they could have not figured how to reverse engineer it...too much leap of technology. The jet engine and advanced materials was a HUGE game changer. Piston aircraft was made obsolete. Our WWII military technology was scrapped over the next 20 years.

If an NASA atomic powered satellite had fallen back in time to 1850, how many people would have died before they realized that the funny looking material was killing people? Or the energy conversion, filtering, and conducting circruity that was contained within?

Alien technology? If an vehicle appeared that was powered by anti gravity and control units were solid material not on our periodic table or polymer; would we know to take it apart?

It's interesting to me because it implies that we can't make a huge technological leap forward. I like the point that one can't understand how to manufacture a material by studying the material.

When we think about the Chinese bootlegging products, there's obviously some time jump available through reverse engineering, but maybe that's more design than actual materials manufacturing.

Sure, on the time scales that military and high tech commercial technologies are important, a few years advance is not that difficult to reverse engineer and is relevant to their goals.

Tesla and Edison could reverse engineer that shit!

Tesla could have. Edison was a hack.

The mechanical parts can actually be manufactured relatively early in Northern Europe. Probably the 1300s. Mechanical clocks were mentioned in writings as far back as 1280. The Northern Europeans had a very good grasp of mechanization based off of water mills, partly why they industrialized so quickly they had all the components figured out just need to hook up to a different power source.

The problem is something to power the engine. The earliest possible would be with steam and you would be looking at more locomotive than car at that point.

Think about this, the prototypes for airplane wings (birds) have been around for a very long time and it took humanity forever to figure out how to fly. That doesn't require advanced manufacturing facilities either. I'm thinking we might be giving out ancestors too much credit. It's an interesting question though.

Sorry, but it's "truckin'"

I can't type a text with those little abbreviations, either. Cultural relevance is no excuse for bad grammar.

If a car was dropped into 1700 England, and it still worked, and they didn't ruin the carb, or drain the battery while playing around with it, would they be able to reproduce? No.

As was said earlier, technical advances would have been made in select areas by observation and testing; but mfg of working components....no.

People thoughout the ages have been as innovative and smart as our inventors today; ever since the western world mindset of patent ownership, its been the MATERIALS that have determined the rate of innovation.

When I was in the composite industry, we made communication towers 300ft long that weighed 500lbs. Try making that in 1700 or 1850 of wood or cast iron or steel.

So what you're saying, then, is that we might as well not make contact at all with aliens. There's no huge upside for us. They're either going to be tech-savvy and view us as savages, or they're just going to go on the welfare rolls.

I loved the SiFi shows Stargate and Stargate Atlantis. However, one of the major flaws was they went through the galaxy picking up new technologies and 3 months later had it reversed engineered and creating power supplies and star vessels.

A better example may be "Interdependence Day 2. I've read that in the movie script...it's been twenty years since the aliens were defeated and left their technology all over the planet. Apparently, the humans can't figure out how the power technology works; but have managed to attach to our technology to make very powerful weapons. (Can't wait to see it.) Eventually, we would figure it out in the real world; but not for a very long time.

Is the car still running? Fresh gas and oil in it?

If people saw it in action, working, then i'd guess they'd figure it out mechanically kinda quick. If the car isn't operative, then i'd imagine it'd take much longer.

I have no idea what it takes to make Gas & oil, so i'd imagine that would be the biggest limiting factor. Mechanically, i doubt it would take long to figure out at all.

After thinking about this awhile I'd say 1950. The few computer circuits in the car would be a complete fail. No idea what would make any of them work. The 8 track player would never be figured out.

Bullshit question.

They only built the deloreon until '83.

considering the task is to make something that can go 13 mph, I'm with you on figuring out the mechanics early. Again within the scope of the challenge, clearances and requiring all iron/steel shouldn't be too big a deal. Replace critical rubber with cork for gaskets, tires could be wood too like wagon wheels (mythbusters used log slices semi-successfully). Also does vulcanized rubber smell like rubber trees? maybe that would lead people to discover the process quicker.

Same thing for fuel, maybe the gas would clue people onto the untapped potential of crude oil earlier. Otherwise, nat gas was discovered in the 1600's in the US, there was a wood burning car prototyped at some point I heard about on Car Talk once.

I think once they got down the idea of compressed combustion they would be up and running pretty quick somewhere around 1750.

The fact that the most powerful person in the world is trying to figure it out would have something to do with it too. If they got to see the Bandit's TA in action they would figure it out, knowing it would be a key to military/
industrial dominance. I bet the english would get it first, but what the hell do I know. This was a fun question.

WTF are they going to find blinker fluid in 1750?

The car is definitely still running, though you only have one tank of gas and probably not much windshield washer fluid.

That's surprisingly hard to get even in the modern world. It seems like I'm always going to two or three auto parts stores before someone will sell it to me.

Your most likely refrigerant that they could synthesize during your time period would be ammonia, but it wouldn't be anywhere near refrigerant grade.

This is true. It required the production of the largest industrial buildings ever known to man, using more power than the city of Los Angeles running for years, producing little more than a handful of U-235, for a crude gun device that slammed two subcritical masses together.

Reading your post in many ways undercuts the feasible importance of Cyberdyne in Terminator 2