Overview and introduction

This section is a general introduction to the car as a whole. Over the years many unusual designs have been tried, some with more success than others. The most common is, of course, a rectangular vehicle with a wheel at each corner! To take this rather simple idea further, we can categorize vehicles in different ways. For example, by layout ( Figs 1.1-1.4 ), such as:

The following paragraphs and bullet points highlight features of the vehicle layouts mentioned above. Common abbreviations for these layouts are given in Table 1.1 .