UNIMES 2019

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Would you like my car to make you some water?

    A few years ago, Doug Martin, an engineer at Ford, read an article about an unusual billboard in Lima, Peru: It was designed to collect and filter water that condenses on the billboard’s cool surfaces when humid air rolls in from the coast. The billboard produces hundreds of gallons of clean water every week. “Local residents can just come and fill jugs with high-quality water and take it home,” Mr. Martin said.

    A short time later, a thought occurred to him: Why couldn’t a car produce drinking water, too? Air-conditioners in cars do something similar to the Peruvian billboard – generating water by removing moisture from the air. Then he and a Ford colleague, John Rollinger, went about developing a system that dispenses that moisture as cool and filtered drinking water to people inside the vehicle. Now Mr. Martin and Mr. Rollinger are working to turn their system into commercial technology.

    The drinking-water idea points to a wider change rippling through the global auto industry: As cars gain more computing power and adopt new technologies, engineers are finding ways to make cars do much more than take us from Point A to Point B.

    These days, some cars can serve as Wi-Fi hot spots, backup power generators or remote controls for your home. In the future, they might also monitor your health; seat suppliers are tinkering with sensors that can monitor a driver’s heart rate and body temperature.

(Neal E. Boudette. www.nytimes.com, 19.10.2017. Adaptado.)