Results tagged “car”

Cian O'Luanaigh, reporter
(Image: Stéphane Couturier/Photographer Shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Third Edition - Growth)

An unfinished car seems to float in space, whilst technicians and robots appear around it in a blur of colour. This dynamic multiple exposure image shows the inside of Toyota's assembly plant in Valenciennes, France, and has won photographer Stéphane Couturier a nomination for this year's Prix Pictet, on the theme of growth.

The picture - Usine Toyota n°20 - is one part of a series entitled Melting Point and explores the perpetual movement of industry in vivid, large-scale prints.

Launched in 2008, The Prix Pictet has become a leading photography prize focused on bringing messages of social and environmental sustainability to a global audience. Previous themes have been on water and earth.

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

With little fanfare on Saturday night, Google revealed that it has been furtively testing and refining driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, clocking up an incredible 225,000 test-driving kilometres as they did so. 

Google says it has quietly gotten into the automotive automation research business by hiring some of the robotics engineers who won (or at least, performed well) in the Pentagon's 2004, 2005 and 2007 self-driving car competitions - the so-called DARPA Grand Challenges. DARPA wants Humvees and trucks to drive themselves so supplies can be delivered without risking the lives of troops.

But where the DARPA competitions started in a desert and ended up in a simulated city, Google has taken to real streets with real people in them. While that raises all kinds of legal and insurance issues, Google told the New York Times that it has stuck to the letter of Californian law.

Duncan Graham-Rowe, contributor

If you have ever wanted to send a grumpy message to a fellow driver telling them what an inconsiderate road-user or parker they are, you can now do so.

First take a snap of the other vehicle's licence plate using the phone's camera. Then a smartphone app called Bump will forward it to a database where Bump's recognition software will match the car to the owner's phone number, provided they have registered for the service. Bump will then forward messages without revealing the phone number, effectively putting strangers in touch with each other.

The app was launched this week in California, where the La Jolla company is based, as part of the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara. Bump already allows iPhone and Android smartphone users to pair devices and exchange information simply by physically bumping them together.

Gareth Morgan, technology news editor

Driver error and not technology glitches were the root cause of accidents in which Toyota cars accelerated out of control. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which has spoken to people involved in US Department of Transportation tests.

Those tests involved analysing dozens of data recorders from cars involved in crashes. And the initial results show that in an unspecified number of cases throttles were wide open and brakes were not engaged - consistent with the driver inadvertently stepping on the gas when they intended to slam on the brakes.

Tom Simonite, online technology editor

Wired's car blog Autopia has posted about Better Place's automated battery-swapping stations for electric cars. As noted in our special report on electric cars, battery life is the main problem holding back the technology, which can otherwise already deliver quiet, efficient cars that only cause emissions back at the power plant.

Better Place thinks that the battery problem can be alleviated by setting up a system of battery-swapping stations, where you can rapidly swap your depleted energy store for a full one. The video below shows how they intend to do it. When the driver parks in the right place, a robotic battery switcher does the honours - watch the clock in the top left corner to see how long it takes.

Tom Simonite, online technology editor

Faltering auto giant GM today announced it will be working with the manufacturer of the Segway to make an odd "self balancing two-wheeled vehicle" called PUMA. The advance pictures show something like a giant Segway on which you sit rather than stand. Visitors to the New York Auto Show this week will be able to see the real thing, and you can see a video of a prototype below.

Information released so far says it will be capable of up to 35mph (56km/h), travelling 35 miles between charges from the mains and will "represent a unique solution to moving about and interacting in cities, where more than half of the world's people live," according to Larry Burns, GM vice president of research. Future versions may even carry more than four passengers.

But despite the PUMA's original design, I don't think it is going to catch on.

Michael Marshall, reporter

So it seems Google has mastered artificial intelligence. Its genius researchers have laboured night and day and have come up with CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity.

CADIE has since gained access to the internet, and based on an analysis of how most websites are designed, she has come up with her own homepage, which exemplifies what she's learnt about web design from us humans.

[*cough* check the date *cough*]

Nora Schultz, contributor

News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.

At the root of the stir was a presentation (pdf) by the Environmental Protection Agency's Air Resources Board (CARB). The Cool Paints initiative suggests that the state should set a minimum level of reflectivity for all car paints and windows.

More reflective vehicles, goes the idea, could stay up to 10 °C cooler in the sunshine state - this in turn could reduce the need to have air conditioning on and thereby cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

However, as black paints can't currently achieve this level, every cool dude's favourite hue would effectively be banned. Motoring blogs lamented the end of consumer freedom to buy a car in their preferred colour, saying that "mud-puddle brown" could be the new black, as that's what you get once you've added the reflective ingredients.

Tom Simonite

A shock absorber for goods vehicles that generates power with every bump strikes me as a good idea, and has also impressed the firm that makes jeeps for the US Army.

GenShock is also a neat complement to a plan we wrote about in December to trial energy harvesting roads in Israel, which generate power from the vibrations made by vehicles rumbling overhead.

Ford has been doing a lot of headscratching recently. The troubled car company has pledged to go green, and now it thinks it's identified the perfect place to begin - the dashboard.

The new dashboard, developed in collaboration with design consultants Smart Design, is supposed to encourage drivers to become more economical. Extensive research suggests drivers interested in fuel efficiency treat driving as a game, with fuel efficiency as a 'score'. The new display should give those drivers all the info they need to beat their high score but avoid distracting them.

Cellphone anthropologist Jan Chipchase poses an interesting question: when self-parking cars become the norm, will they all be indistinguishably perfectly lined up? Or will different brands park in identifiably different ways?

Perhaps people will eventually customise cars to park up in their own quirky style. I can certainly see an ability to park manually becoming a more impressive skill as people come to rely on automated parking.

Tom Simonite, online technology editor

The second attempt at a federal bailout for the Big 3 US automakers fell apart early this morning when their union refused to trim their workers' rather cushy benefits packages.

I say good riddance. Let the dinosaurs die. It's time for auto industry version 2.0.

One alternative getting a lot of attention recently is Better Place, a Silicon Valley start-up with a business model that could quickly turn the automotive industry on its head.

The US taxpayer is in a pickle. It's being asked to hand out $400 million to support Tesla Motors, a pioneering startup working on electric cars as part of a programme to support fuel-efficient cars.

That might sound like a no-brainer, since electric cars are widely acknowledged as a way to cut harmful air pollution in cities and greenhouse emissions.

But here's the catch: Tesla has so far only shipped about 80 cars, and they were all $109,000 convertibles. These aren't cars for the masses, and they are some way from making any kind of dent in US air pollution or greenhouse emissions.

Last week the list of teams formally registered for the Progressive Auto X Prize was announced. Entrants are in the running for $10 million to create commercially viable cars that can go 100 miles on a single gallon of petrol, or the equivalent energy in another form.

As this XPrizecars blog noticed, although 22 teams are registered, only 20 have been identified. The organisers say only that the others "have been accepted, but remain confidential". The blog suggests the "stealth" teams could be Fisker - known to be working on plug-in hybrids - or even auto giant GM.

What happens when you mix bored, thrill-seeking teenagers, cars and surfer culture? A national epidemic of car-surfing, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A study out in the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report documents the rise of the dim-witted practice, in which passengers stand atop a moving car.

Ford has good news and bad news for teen drivers. On the plus side, the 2010 version of the Ford Focus will come with an extra set of keys specially geared towards adolescents.

But young drivers using those keys won't be able to take full advantage of the car's features - worried parents can use Ford's MyKey system to cap the car's maximum speed and limit the car stereo's volume when their children are in the driving seat.