"Engineering" of automobiles

[richard bies <bies@infobahn.icubed.com>]

Apologies to the practicing engineers out there...

Engineering is a recent profession.  The target is not absolute, but "good
enough".  (I got a pretty good vision of the technical precision involved
when my son took his degree in Physics, and I discovered how approximate
my textbooks were -- it didn't help when my daughter tested into the same
math course starting college as I had taken as a graduate-level elective. 
My son skipped it completely.)

What engineers really do is encapsulate prior experience in their work,
and cut and try is a time-honored technique.  That Alfa has done that is
no surprise.  But those guys have been there before -- many times -- and 
they will ususally know the car and how it is supposed to function
intimately -- it may be a guess, but it is very much an educated guess.

r.m.bies