European buyers of the Ford Focus, a mid-sized car, can now leave it to drive itself and maintain a safe distance in steady traffic. The car can measure a parking space and steer itself into it. It reads road signs and admonishes the driver if he breaks the speed limit. Such gadgetry also increasingly makes decisions on the driver’s behalf and overrules him in an emergency, for instance, braking to avoid a crash.
(via Organic advertising | Amsterdam Ad Blog). I’m stunned that spam is now something to be proud of in advertising. Besides the fact that it is only very temporary and for a pointless set of keywords virtually no one would ever use. The value is in the stunt factor I suppose but frankly it doesn’t exactly show the VW brand in a good light that they’d be party to this… Although as it was done by students I’ll give VW the benefit of the doubt they weren’t involved.
Cheki is a used car classifieds business that serves up about a billion page views a month, mostly in Kenya and Nigeria. Most of the one million people using the site are looking at it with Android-based smartphones
All stand please for the MINI horn section (by MINIUnitedKingdom)
Coming Soon (by chuckachucka2012)… Dear Honda, I promise to buy one of your cars if you make not just an ad but a proper Ferris Bueller sequel.
Every car in history has had a windscreen wiper, but recently I went to an Air Force base and asked them why modern aircraft don’t have windscreen wipers. I was told that they have this very inexpensive technology, which means absolutely nothing sticks to the windscreen, but nobody uses it in the automotive industry. What if we use this technology in our cars? You might put out of work all the windscreen wiper companies and windscreen washer fluid companies, but that’s the cost of innovation. Whenever you take a new direction you’re always going to sacrifice something.
Nissan - Damned Ponies - EN-US Subtitles (Pôneis Malditos) (by lezherus)… I’ll never look at a Pony in the same way…
Gartner found that 46 percent of people 18 to 24 would choose access to the Internet over access to their own car. Only 15 percent of the baby boom generation would say that, the survey found. “The iPhone is the Ford Mustang of today,
TomTom records Bert and Ernie’s navigation voices (by AmsterdamAdBlog)
Volkswagen Fanwagen (by fruitel1a) - Oh, how I would LOVE the campervan, I was even going to enter (and I so seldom do for this kind of thing). And then I saw the conditions - you have to be resident in the Netherlands to be eligible. Unfair!!
Ford’s planners, engineers, and scientists with the intention of evolving Ford’s SYNC and re-envisioning how the connected car will work. According to Connected Planet, the team is working towards developing:
a high-powered, heavily encrypted Wi-Fi that establishes point-to-point connections between cars within a half-mile radius… because these cars are networked — the car in front of yours is connected to the car in front it and so forth — in a distributed mesh, an intelligent vehicle can know if cars miles down the road are slamming on their brakes, alerting the driver to potential traffic jams
Backseat Driver, the first product introduced by ToyToyota, is an iPhone application which allows users to enjoy driving from the back seat of their car.
The player controlling My Car follows Papa Car, whose moves mirror the route of the real car in which the player is riding, using the iPhone’s GPS functionality. By steering My Car left and right to follow Papa Car’s path and pick up objects, the player can score points
John Leonard, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical and ocean engineering professor who led that university’s team to a fourth-place finish in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, thinks that major technological hurdles in robot perception need to be overcome before self-driving cars can be deployed on a large-scale.
“I have tremendous admiration for my colleagues at Google,” Leonard says. “The performance that they have achieved is amazing—for example, their ability to drive at highway speeds. However, because they are building the maps in advance and then having humans pick out stop signs and street lights and crosswalks and so forth, it’s very different than turning a robot loose autonomously in the world with very little prior information.”
Volkswagen UK’s Infographic site experience, True Life Costs.. invites you to learn about the cost of living – and how your decisions add up…
Your exploration of the site – and the costs involved in the average life of a UK resident – begin with the declaration that the average UK citizen will spend £1,758,914 in his or her lifetime. You’re then invited to explore what ‘life’ costs across different categories, based on some of the decisions you’re making – like high street dressing vs. a more DIY sense of style… the tie-in to the brand – the cost of a VW auto vs. other brands – is subtle but natural within the grand scheme of living expenses.
