The development of automobiles in the Daheng Empire has a history of more than 20 years. In the 39th year of Xuanping, Xihu Automobile Company launched the Xihu brand automobile to the market.
It's just that in the early years, the development of automobiles was very limited. It seemed that there were several major automobile companies, but in fact the early cars were expensive and lacked performance. Therefore, for many years, automobiles were just a
Just a toy.
This situation has been initially changed even after Qixiang Automobile Company launched a series of relatively cheap models.
But even so, cars are very expensive, and only families with middle-income and above can afford those so-called relatively cheap cars.
At the same time, the power of early cars was relatively limited, with low horsepower, poor performance, short cruising range, many faults, and the price of oil was not cheap. These problems all existed objectively, which also led to the actual use cost of the car being relatively high.
This also limits the rapid development of cars as a cheap freight vehicle.
This is why the early development of automobiles was mainly concentrated in the field of private cars.
But this situation is gradually changing. With the continuous improvement of technology, several major automobile companies are sparing no effort to develop more powerful gasoline engines and constantly introduce new ones.
This has also enabled the performance of automobiles to be rapidly improved in the past two decades.
Especially in the 55th year of Xuanping, Zhongyuan Automobile Company launched their new generation truck series. This series is called Beifeng series of trucks. The power of this truck is actually not that outstanding.
, it only has over 50 horsepower, it is not very fast, and even its comfort is not very good.
However, the fuel consumption of this thing has dropped significantly compared to the previous truck.
At the same time, the entire Beifeng truck adopts many mature technologies, which not only has low production cost, but also has excellent reliability, low failure rate, good passability and strong gradeability.
Even in order to reduce costs and ensure high reliability, designers are not willing to make progress or even go backwards in design, adopting simplified solutions in the design of the carriage.
What are the characteristics of the Beifeng truck produced in this way?
Low purchase cost, low usage and maintenance cost, and many usage scenarios!
This series of advantages is to meet the huge demand for trucks in the freight market and to meet the market's requirements for low-cost use of trucks.
As soon as Beifeng Truck was launched, it ushered in an explosion. The first order was not even for the civilian market, but for the military!
The Army was very generous and placed an order for 2,000 units. The Navy and the Guards also ordered a lot.
Even other official law enforcement agencies, such as patrol police or other departments, have ordered a lot.
Of course, what really brought Northern Trucks to the fore and became the most powerful freight truck in the Tang Empire in recent years was because this truck was welcomed by a large number of freight companies, construction companies and other enterprises with huge land transportation needs.
.
Within five years of this truck being launched on the market, more than 200,000 units were produced!
Strictly speaking, this is the Beifeng Truck, the first ordinary truck to be mass-produced and used on a large scale in the Tang Empire. This is of great significance.
In the past, although several major automobile companies, including Zhongyuan Automobile Company, also launched a lot of trucks, pickup trucks and other types of vehicles, pickup trucks were more aimed at high-end customers in rural areas, while trucks were more
It is concentrated in the engineering field or military field.
As for ordinary trucks that specialize in road transportation, although there are some, they are very few.
This situation has changed dramatically after the appearance of Beifeng Trucks.
The emergence of Beifeng trucks is a typical feature of the Tang Empire's years of accumulated experience and technological explosion, and this feature has actually been seen earlier in the field of passenger cars.
Qixiang Automobile Company has always been committed to promoting the popularization of automobiles, and has launched several models that are affordable.
Datang's automobile industry, which has continued to develop to this day, is actually quite large in scale, with a huge number of cars, but the corresponding highway construction has failed to keep up.
The current land transportation of the Tang Empire still relies heavily on railway transportation, and automobile transportation is only a very limited supplement.
This is not only due to the shortcomings of automobile technology, but also a major reason is that highway construction has not kept up.
This cannot be blamed on the imperial officials. This is because most of the cars developed in the early stage were driven in cities, and even trucks were mainly driven in cities.
At most, we have to add another suburb, but the suburbs of Datang City are different from the suburbs in the usual sense. The suburbs of Datang City are often rich areas and living areas. To a certain extent, they are still cities.
Part of the infrastructure is very good.
There are cement roads, asphalt roads in the city, and even worse, cinder roads and gravel roads. Even the dirt roads in some suburbs are generally in relatively good condition.
In other words, the road construction developed by local governments in the past twenty years was actually able to meet the needs of cars and horse-drawn carriages at that time.
However, this kind of road condition is better, especially hardened roads, which are generally limited to cities.
Although there are official roads connecting cities, except for a few roads that are hardened, most of them are ordinary dirt roads, and there are even few gravel roads. And most importantly, there is a lack of unified planning, or even no
A clear technical standard.
Songjiang Prefecture has long built a high-grade asphalt road with a width of hundreds of kilometers and a width of hundreds of meters along the Huangpu River. This is just a special case.
In fact, even now there is no complete hardened road from Jinling City to Shanghai!
The construction of inter-city highways is lagging behind, especially the lack of hardened pavement, which has also seriously restricted the development of highway transportation.
In response to this situation, the Ministry of Transport has actually been advocating for the construction of a large highway network more than ten years ago. It is necessary to widen, straighten and harden the existing official roads, and then upgrade the official roads across the country.
For the national cement/asphalt road network.
However, this kind of nationwide road upgrade and construction work is too expensive, so it has never received comprehensive support at the Gyeonggi level. Therefore, in the past ten years, the transportation department has relied on limited funds piecemeal.
Just build a few intercity highways.
Among them, the most exemplary one should be the asphalt road from Jinling to Zhenjiang. This asphalt road with a length of more than 100 kilometers is also the first intercity hardened road in the empire.
The more than 100 kilometers of asphalt roads in Songjiang Prefecture are not intercity highways, but are internal roads in Songjiang Prefecture.
In addition to this highway, the Imperial Ministry of Transportation has also contacted local governments and built inter-city hardened highways such as the Shanghai-Suzhou Asphalt Highway and the Shanghai-Hangzhou Asphalt Highway through multi-level financial joint funding.
At the same time, various places will also build some roads of their own. For example, Guangzhou built the Pearl River Delta Highway.
However, the roads built in various places are good and bad. Rich places build asphalt roads or cement roads, while poorer places can only make gravel roads.
This also makes it difficult to form a road network that runs through the country.
Now, taking advantage of the opportunity of the second great industrial development, the Ministry of Transport has once again proposed a national road network plan, and this time it has received the full support of the Emperor Taisun!