Interesting Snippets

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.

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.

One of Volkswagen’s two Super Bowl spots, ‘The Force’… went live Wednesday, a full three days before the game, when it’s slated to run in the second quarter, but has already reached a tremendous audience…

‘The traction Mini-Darth has gotten on the web is mind blowing’, says Eric Springer, group creative director at Deutsch LA. ‘We went from 100,000 views to over 1,000,000 in the first couple hours. Now, a little after 24 hours into Mini Darth’s web life, we’re up to 5.3 million. And counting.’

By 2050, Maskus thinks elevated tracks will separate high-speed Acabions from antiquated automobiles, just as horse-drawn carriages aren’t allowed on interstates. “The speed potential of the Acabion is so dramatically higher than the speed potential of any car or motorcycle, that future perspective will most likely call for tracks allowing much more speed much safer than today’s highways do,” Maskus said.

Elevated tracks over highways would be automated, much like high-speed rail but with individual cars. And when the elevated highways end, Acabion users can still drive on existing roads.

Next up is a network of intercontinental vacuum tubes — a “traffic internet” — that probably sounds as far-fetched today as an undersea telegraph cable did in the 1850s.

“Two tubes between New York and Paris, 1.5 meters in diameter each, maglev driven and fully automatic controlled, will move three times more people between America and Europe than all airplanes do today,” Maskus said.

General Motors has announced that it plans to offer wireless charging technology across a number of its vehicles from the second half of 2012, with Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid Volt likely to be the first car fitted with the charging mat that sits in the centre console…

“Imagine a mat or shelf where you could put your iPhone, your Droid or other personal device and charge it automatically while you commute to work, run errands or as you’re driving on a family vacation,”