Airplanes fly because their wings generate lift. Their engines provide thrust, the aircraft races forward, and the wings’ lift helps the vehicle take to the sky.
ars are different, of course. They don’t have wings, and they can’t fly, unless you’re watching a scene in a Fast and Furious film or some sort of dangerous stunt. (Although some companies are indeed working on flying taxis.) But car designers still need to consider how a vehicle’s aerodynamics affect its performance on the road, and not just in terms of factors such as drag or gas mileage. They want the tires to have a good level of grip on the asphalt so that the driver can have a sense of control on the highway.
“Cars tend to act like a wing at speed,” says Tony Roma, the chief engineer of Cadillac’s 2022 CT4-V Blackwing, a performance luxury sedan from the GM-owned brand that comes out late this summer. The main reasons they tend to do that, he says, is because of the effect of the air accelerating over the top of it, as well as the air rushing into the radiator and pushing the front-end upwards. It was a bigger problem with older cars. “We’ve all driven cars and trucks at high speed, and you can feel the steering start to get lighter.”
So with vehicles like the Blackwing, engineers carefully tune the aerodynamics so that the vehicle doesn’t get lighter on its tires and thus lose performance and stability. If the aerodynamic design on an aircraft exists to make it fly, the design on a car like this one exists to keep it pressed down on the road. “We don’t want it to leave the ground,” he says. “We want it to stay as firmly attached to the ground as possible, because unlike an airplane, we don’t have a rudder in order to change direction—we need the tires to do all that work.”
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