Vehicle Gadgets

Love the thrill of adrenaline rushing through your body? The World’s Wackiest Racers might help you out in this department, coming in a wide range of whacked out designs that will definitely put a smile on your face.

You’ll have the pleasure of being a passenger in the following bizarre vehicles as they hurtle around at an indecent speed: a sofa (complete with lamp and TV), a four poster bed, and an office desk (with chairs, computer and water cooler). As a bonus, you’ll also be able to drive the strangest double-decker you’ve ever seen.

They retail for £99 each, so pool some money together with a group of close-knit friends and have a blast of your life with the World’s Wackiest Racers!

Imagine if you were to chop off Johnny Five’s head and put him on your dashboard. I realize that sounds gruesome, and I’m sure someone actually did that at the end of the original Short Circuit, but just imagine that cute little head on your dash having loving expressions, and showing you the way to go home.

This is essentially the role of AIDA (Affective Intelligent Driving Assistant). This robot head not only serves as a GPS Navigation system, but it actually has expressions. It’s eyes will look happy when you’re going the right way, and become a warning sign when you are not. There is a video of this intriguing concept after the jump if you aren’t already sold on it yet.

AIDA is more than a navigation system, though. It is intelligent enough to remember where you have been, and from this information determines your driving habits. It uses a lot of sensors to gather intel, and will even let you know when you’re low on gas, and where is the best place to stop for gasoline on your way.

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Finally, folks living in the US will be able to pick up the TomTom car kit for iPhone, where this accessory was specially designed to offer iPhone users the best in-car experience while driving without compromising on their safety as well as that of other road users. This will allow you to take full advantage of the iPhone’s GPS navigational capabilities, where among the features include secure docking, enhanced GPS performance thanks to a built-in GPS receiver for improved positioning accuracy and an integrated loudspeaker and microphone. Not only that, when docked, your iPhone will be charged to make sure it won’t run low of juice the moment you arrive at your destination. The TomTom car kit for iPhone will retail for $119.95 a pop.

Press Release

I believe that hover technology is possible, and an episode of Mythbusters showed prototypes that were, at best, gigantic slow moving air hockey pucks. This is essentially what the Air Board is.

I even saw a clip from an old Wife Swap episode which had the “Balloon Boy” family playing with hover technology, and it seemed to work better than their little charade.

You can get this air board for about $14,000. If you think that is pretty expensive for this product, then you should know you’ll have to pay for gasoline. The Air Board has a 1.3 gallon tank that it will burn through in an hour.

Of course, some assembly is required, and the Air Board stands four feet high when it is up and running. It can go at about 15 miles an hour, but I’m not certain where you would drive it except a skateboard park or something.

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Some of you might remember when we reported on the Hollywood Rip, Ride, Rockit, a now recently opened roller coaster at Universal Orlando that allows the spectators to choose a soundtrack. Disney’s EPCOT Center has now debuted a new ride called Sum of All Thrills, which allows the spectators to design and ride their own roller coaster.

How is this possible? The spectators use computer tablets to design their “dream track”, and then get into a robotic carriage that uses virtual-reality technology for their pre-programmed ride. Users can even program the ride so it can be a bobsled ride or airplane ride.

This ride is very similar to CyberSpace Mountain, a ride that allows spectators to customize their virtual ride with drops, loops, and other stunts. I’m not certain how loops could work if the user selects the bobsled option on the Sum of All Thrills.

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Apparently, Nissan is making more cars than those EPORO robot cars that we reported on a while ago.

In this case, this is a concept car that a person could actually ride in. In fact, two people could ride in it, as long as the passenger doesn’t mind sitting in the back seat.

The Land Glider is very ultra light, and ultra thin. In fact, it looks like it could take up only half a normal lane. Of course what really makes the Nissan Land Glider awesome looking is that it leans when it turns.

Yes, it leans. In short, Nissan realized that motorcyles, with their cool leaning while they turn, could easily be used on cars. By the way, this Land Glider is totally electrical, and it is a Smart Car.

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Once again, another new perfectly balanced riding vehicle such as the PUMA and eniCycle has caught my attention. I don’t know what it is about these things, I feel like I’m eight-years old looking at pictures of sports cars and longing for the day when I can drive.

Yes, I want to ride those things really bad, and Honda has fulfilled my dreams with the U3-X. There is a wonderful video of it that you can see after the jump, just don’t ask me why there is no sound.

The U3-X has the ability to fold up compactly into a boogie board that is shaped like a figure eight. It is quite light at 22 pounds, and Honda used technology learned from Asimo to make it work.

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Holidays in the form of road trips can be fun if they’re well planned and if you happen to have generally well behaved passengers and a loving co-pilot who won’t get upset at you even though you don’t want to stop and ask for directions, preferring instead to rely on your navigational instincts (or rather, the lack of it), especially after the GPS system has died due to the lack of battery power. Audiovox could come in handy to defer the dreaded question, “Are we there yet?” for the umpteenth time by your once-bundles of joy in the back seat, thanks to their VOD10PS2 Mobile Video PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system.

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