Category: Car Tech

Share How far will travelers blindly follow a GPS device? According to The Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian family of four (and their poor pup) followed directions given by their GPS onto a road closed by heavy rainfall and became stranded for three nights in a pickup truck. The family, believe it or not, ignored posted warning signs and turned onto the Darling River Road while traveling ...

Share What's the best way to get kids interested in science? A supersonic, rocket/car hybrid that might be able to travel across land at 1,000-mph. According to Autoblog, that's what the guys behind the Bloodhound Education Program, which is a super-expensive albeit cool way to get youngsters' attention, is banking on, anyway. The team, which includes speed-record legend Richard Noble and ...

AJ is a lime green, decal-bedecked 2011 Ford Fiesta. Like HAL from '2001,' he has his own man-made intelligence, and thus the gendered pronoun. He's been making his way around the country, sending messages to anyone who will listen. You see, AJ is a car that tweets. Ford engineers gave AJ (short for American Journey 2.0) the ability to connect to the Internet by outfitting him with a Dell ...

Our most common objection to green cars, whether electric, hybrid or alternative-fuel, is that they are -- always it seems -- plagued by goofy looks, poor performance and featherweight construction. Though not an exception to any of those rules, the T.25 is still impressive in that it gets a whopping 74 miles to the gallon, and that it costs -- right off the showroom floor -- no more than $9,000. ...

Designer du jour Yves Béhar loves electric cars, as we saw when he unveiled a concept for a hackable vehicle at the Greener Gadgets conference back in February. In addition, his company fuseproject helped develop the drool-inducing Mission Motors electric motorcycle, the fastest vehicle of its kind on the market. Now Béhar has teamed with GE to unveil a new design for an electric ...

Surely to become the vehicle of choice for environmentally-minded celebrities and athletes, an electric Range Rover with a whopping 200-mile range will become available in the U.K. later this year. According to the Telegraph, the E-Range, which was developed by Liberty Electric Cars, is the world's first totally electric SUV. The vehicle tops out at 110 mph, thanks to six Lithium Polymer ...

Share When it comes to finding prime parking spots in the middle of dense, concrete jungles, even the most mild-mannered of drivers can revert to their more primitive, animalistic roots. As summer road warriors jockey with each other for curbside position, tempers flare, heart rates rise, and torrents of expletives gush out of driver-side windows. That inherently cutthroat atmosphere, however, ...

A researcher at Yale University has developed a car-safety system that uses touch, rather than sight, to warn drivers of potential danger. According to Tech News Daily, John Morrell lined a car seat with a bunch of cell-phone vibration motors that warn drivers of approaching vehicles. The motors continuously (and lightly) vibrate as the driver cruises down the road. When another car ...

The Directly Downwind Faster Than the Wind (DDWFTTW) debate provides one of the most entertaining geek arguments of all time, and that's a hardy feat, given the glut of endless discussions about preeminent sci-fi franchises, video game violence and Internet addiction. A (brilliant) kill-joy, Rick Cavallaro, may have just rendered the debate obsolete, though, as his wind-powered car recently ...

After three years, thousands of dollars, and a run-in with the law, Dutch designer Allert Jacobs has built one of the most fuel-efficient motorcycles on the planet. According to Popular Science, Jacobs designed a fiberglass shell for his Honda Innova 125i bike that allows it to get more than 200 miles-per-gallon. To master this aerodynamic design, Jacobs first built a small-scale model of the ...

GPS sheeple have blindly followed their navigation gadgets 400 miles away from their intended destination, to impassible avenues, and even through closed gates and stacks of rocks. But could the devices actually kill their owners? Well, maybe if that owner attempts to listen to 25 of them at once. To investigate the "influence of others onto one's own path of life in an abstract way," artist ...

After decades of failed promises, flying cars may soon crowd the nation's streets and airspaces -- as long as shoppers can afford those $200,000 price tags. The FAA recently approved the Terrifugia Transition two-seater for takeoff, but another company's design may allow even unlicensed consumers to drive and fly, without the federal agency's stringent pilot requirements. Logi AeroSpace's ...

Not content to rule the PC market, Intel is trying to shoehorn its chips into everything it can find. The latest target of the chip giant is the automobile, which it hopes to make truly "smart" by way of processors, sensors and wireless transmitters. At the company's latest Research Day event, it showed off an electric vehicle equipped with cameras and sensors that stop just short of turning it ...

This is Matthew Riese. That thing next to him? That's his hover DeLorean. Seriously. This 26-year-old grad student and San Francisco resident is building one of the most amazing and ridiculous things we have ever seen -- a completely custom, wood and fiberglass hovercraft, modeled after one of the most iconic failures in automotive history. For the past two years, Riese has been working ...

Environmentalism has a new face, and his name is J Brave. Instead of penning an ode to his gas-guzzling Escalade or Hummer, Brave, you see, decided to wax poetic about the luxuries of "Dippin' in My Tesla." Much to our delight, "helpin' the planet" while "feelin' real sporty" in your electric car is, apparently, well within the Code of Thug Life. The song itself is awesomely awful (dare we even ...