vehicles

If the scenes in your rearview mirror bore you, why not upgrade from passive mirror to active TV screen?This blogger points out the wide range of mirrors-cum-monitors available in China.

Looking for a parking space is about to get much easier, at least for San Franciscans. Later this year they will be able to use cell phones to access a live online map of where spaces are free in the city, thanks to a huge network of sensors.The devices include a magnetometer that picks up the change in the magnetic field caused by a parked cars. False positives are possible, so there's also an array of other sensors within each device to monitor parking spaces. There are no details yet on exactly what those sensors are.The network is impressively easy to set up.

This new jet plane has just taken its first test flight - but the pilot need not rely on his personal parachute in the event of a problem. The small plane packs one big enough to let the whole craft drift to earth.You can see the new plane take off in this video - it sports an usual split tailplane design.

Image Credit: Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

A Rite of Passage--Going, or Gone?
It's as American as apple pie--teenagers "driving around in a big loop, listening to music, waving at one another and wasting gasoline." It's called cruising, but unfortunately the high cost of gas, combined with a tough economy, has made this rite of passage too expensive for most teens and their parents. As a result, America's youth are being forced to seek out other forms of entertainment, such as "hanging out in parking lots, malls o...

What happens when you bring robotics to a cheap radio-controlled toy car?

This video about a new concept car from BMW shows GINA - a car with a fabric rather than metal skin (direct video link). It has a metal space frame of struts underneath. Among other things, it is claimed this approach can be much lighter than conventional cars.The concept looks great as the material peels open to reveal the headlights, or stretches to let the doors open. But it's all to easy to start thinking of practical problems.Commenters on the youtube video and elsewhere on the web are arguing back and forth over questions like how the material could protect people from objects small enough to get through the gaps in the frame, or resist vandals.All good points - and probably ones that could be got around in one way or another.

Hybrid and electric vehicles are potentially silent killers thanks to their stealthy electric engines that do not warn pedestrians they are coming. So goes the argument for making them produce some kind of warning noise, a proposal strongly backed by the National Federation for the Blind.A bill backed by 16 US members of Congress would require the Department of Transportation to establish minimum sound levels for all hybrid and electric vehicles.

Last month we brought you video (below) showing that traffic jams that seemingly appear from nowhere in free-flowing traffic had been recreated on the test track for the first time.One reader was so excited they commented that they intended to head out in their car and try causing one for themselves.

This video shows Japanese sailor Kenichi Horie setting off in a wave-powered boat that uses two spring-loaded fins to drive it forward using the sea's rocking motion. But powering boats like that is surely not this technology's best use.

Many cellphones are already more powerful than not-so-distant desktop computers, but most of the time that power is going to waste. Researchers at Microsoft have a new idea to keep it busy - monitoring driving conditions like bumps on the road.

By listening using its microphone, feeling for bumps using accelerometers and tracking your location using GPS, phones running prototype software can generate a map showing typical conditions on roads the user drives on.

That could highlight places they may want to avoid in future - because of potholes or speed bumps, or regular honking from other vehicles due to traffic snarl-ups.

Canadian roboticists are giving their amphibious robot a Jaws-like ability to home in on a human diver's beating flippers. Fortunately their six-flippered yellow machine is friendly - the idea is to help it learn routes from humans to patrol endangered marine ecosystems.

A video - also embedded below - shows AQUA swimming in Barbados last year. It can also walk by rotating its flippers like wheels.

Here's a nice engineering project: making bike frames from bamboo in parts of Africa where the materials normally used are hard to come by. Some parts still need to be imported, but making bikes becomes a lot easier.

It's a project that started as a collaboration between specialist bike builders Calfee design and engineers at the Earth Institute, Columbia University.

Why won't the world's biggest car manufacturers enter a $10-million contest to make a production car capable of 100mpg?

It's a question that the organisers of the Automotive X Prize are asking themselves. All kinds of small startups have entered, but the big boys of the car industry don't seem interested. This blogger has a good stab at explaining why.