Join Head mounted camera so you can see how your mechanic is doing
We have all had our car in the shop, and received a bill that we knew was not equivalent to service rendered. Usually it is a very high price.
It makes one wish that one could look into that room and see exactly what is being done by the mechanic. This is what the Audi-cam is for.
The Audi-cam is a simple over-the-shoulder mounted camera designed to see exactly what the mechanic is seeing. This way, you can see exactly what the maintenance person is doing to your car in repair.
Video is then live-streamed to you, and I imagine that you can record it to be used in a court case later. By the way, you can put a two-way radio on the camera so you can even talk to the mechanic as he or she works.
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Washington State to have an “electric highway”
This is a stretch of Interstate Highway 5 (I-5), which is not far from where I live. I’ve just learned that a part of I-5 spanning from Oregon to Canada is planned on receiving a huge makeover.
In fact, the government has granted $1.32 million dollars to turn this part of I-5 into an electric highway. This is not a highway that is completely electric, but one set up for the electric car. It will have 10 Level-3 charging stations at 80 mile intervals. Considering that the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf can handle about 100 miles on a single charge, that sounds like good spacing.
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RoboCar from ZMP one more step for AI: Automotive Intelligence
When I saw this photo, I couldn’t help but think that it was cute. After all, it is a car with a cute little robot head on it. I started to have Speed Buggy flashbacks.
As it turns out, this car is part of a serious car robotics platform study by a Tokyo-based robotics company ZMP. Apparently, these people believe that cars of the future will be intelligent vehicles, able to move and interact with each other independently.
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California to get digital license plates?
I’ve learned that there is a group in San Francisco that wants to make license plates digital. This doesn’t surprise me. I suppose that print is a slowly dying medium, and I think we all knew that all road signs are going to be replaced with video displays.
License plates are things that change all the time, and if there was some digital way of tracking them and changing them when needed, then new ones wouldn’t have to be printed all the time.
Sounds good, right? Here is the kicker. Apparently, the same group that wants to do digital license plates wants to make it possible so you can put ads on them. You might want to read more after the jump.
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Scarab: A self-driving, electric police pursuit vehicle
Once again, it would appear that science fiction has somehow turned into fact with the Scarab car.
Basically, the Scarab is a car that is self-driven, like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. This self-driving car works a little different than the one from the TV show.
In other words, there is no David Hasselhoff sitting behind the wheel to patrol the streets. The idea behind the Scarab is to to have an officer “tag” a speeding vehicle with a radar gun, and the Scarab then takes over with the chase.
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Electric Car to make 16,000 mile trip
Anyone remember when we reported on the electric car that goes 1,000 km on a single charge? Well, there is an electric car from the Racing Green Endurance Team that plans to take their SRZero Electric car 26,000km (16,000 miles).
The SRZero electric car is sponsored by Imperial College London, and the trip it plans to make is down the Pan-American Highway, starting in Northern Alaska and going to Tierra del Fuego on the tip of South America.
As you can see here, the SRZero car is it weighs just 1,433 lbs and has a 363 V8 in the back. Of course, the batteries will make the car weigh more at 2,600 lbs, and they have a 248 mile range at 386 horsepower. I have included a video of it in action that you can see after the jump if you want to know more about its history.
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Swing Beginner Concept Car
This is the Swing Beginner concept car. As you can see, even the artistic model is impressed.
The Swing Beginner car concept is like nothing that I’ve seen in a car as it relies not on a wheel to steer, but the driver’s leaning.
Yes, the driver must lean to go in a certain direction. You might just wonder what the heck this is good for, but as you can see from the diagrams on the photo, it can do some interesting turning.
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The YEE Flying concept car: So this is love
I’ve been seeing this image on many a tech blog this morning. Everything that I have read about the YEE car that transforms into a plane is always so negative.
Most people say that it is just too good to be true, and for that I will have to agree. Then again, I’m sure that people in Da Vinci’s time thought that airplanes and helicopters would never be made.
In other words, do not doubt cool concept technology like this. Don’t assume that there is some jerk in charge of new technology who will never approve of it because this person is satisfied with the technology that we already have.
Continue reading » The YEE Flying concept car: So this is love
