Category: Transport Tech

John Leonard watched spellbound from the back seat as the Lexus he was riding in drove through downtown Mountain View, Calif., one July day. The steering wheel spun right and left without a driver touching it. The car stopped at lights, switched lanes and even punched its accelerator as it merged into traffic. For Leonard, a roboticist at MIT, riding in a car outfitted with Google’s self-driving technology reminded him of another iconic moment in transportation: when the Wright brothers ushered in the age of air travel 111 years ago.…

Read More

The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) has released its report to the United States Congress assessing the status of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) for connected vehicle technologies. The findings are that they are ready for deployment. DSRC is a Wi-Fi derivative developed to meet the specialized needs for secure and low-latency wireless connections in data communications. It is poised to be the standard for communicating between operating vehicles (moving or not), infrastructure, and mobile devices. The USDOT has been assessing the feasibility of the 5.9 Gigahertz broadcast frequency for short-range communications between…

Read More

Road cars are getting more efficient, but they’ve still got a serious drinking problem compared to the super light creations coming out of the world’s universities. The TUfast Eco Team has proven a little bit of energy can go a long way, having just achieved the Guinness World Record for the most efficient electric vehicle. The car chosen to topple the Guinness World Record was a modified TUfast eLi14, initially created for the 2014 Shell Eco Marathon. In search of even moreefficiency, the motor was upgraded with a custom controller, revised magnet placement…

Read More

The greatest advantage self-driving cars hold over outdated humans is the ability to tune out distractions. No buzzing phone, yelling kids, or lovely daydream will divert attention from their primary task. That doesn’t mean they can’t get overwhelmed with information in much the same way you do. The fully autonomous vehicles that companies like Google, Ford, and Baidu are furiously developing all rely on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) to see and map the world. Those maps are key, because they provide crucial context for the vehicles and let them…

Read More

The electric scooter with the lofty aim of changing urban mobility and the way humanity stores and manages electricity, has reached Europe. This morning, Gogoro launched a fleet of 200 scooters in Berlin, and any grownup with a driver’s license can hop on one to roam the German capital—without burning a drop of oil. The much-hyped, well-funded Gogoro revealed its $4,000 Smartscooter at CES in January 2015. The sleek vehicle delivers nice numbers: zero to 30 in 4.2 seconds, top speed of 60 mph, 50-50 weight distribution. When the two…

Read More

Sun haters, to the left. Solar Impulse 2 touched down in Abu Dhabi today, becoming the first fuel-free plane to successfully circumnavigate the globe. OK, so the 22,000-mile trip took a minute: The solar-powered bird lifted off from the same city in March 2015. But despite a few setbacks, the plane and Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard (who took shifts with fellow flyer André Borschberg) touched down without incident. Solar Impulse 2 is a seriously nifty machine. Its 236-foot wingspan makes it wider than a Boeing 747, but the thing is…

Read More

Bugatti did not design the Veyron to serve any practical purpose. It designed the car to stack up superlatives like a pre-schooler piles blocks: heedlessly. The Veyron was the fastest, most powerful, fanciest, and most completely unnecessary car on the planet for the entirely of its 10-year run. Bugatti made just 450 of them, sold them all for an average of $2.6 million apiece, and reportedly lost money doing it. You almost certainly won’t ever know the God-like power of driving a Veyron, let alone that of its even more…

Read More

Donald Trump builds things. It’s what the newly official GOP presidential nominee does, he says, and it will be no different once he’s elected. In May, he promised to “build the greatest infrastructure on the planet earth—the roads and railways and airports of tomorrow.” And while Trump hasn’t put forward any specific proposals to change how Americans move—by automobile, plane, foot, bike, or public transit—the GOP’s newly released 2016 platform is openly hostile to just about everything but gas-loving cars. Complaining that the current Administration “subordinates civil engineering to social…

Read More

Swiss Post and Swiss World Cargo (the air freight division of Swiss International Air Lines) have joined the likes of Amazon, GeoPost and Alibaba by taking concrete steps toward using drones for deliveries. This week, the corporations announced that they have teamed up with California-based Matternet to trial several of its Matternet ONE cargo quadcopters. Testing of the autonomous GPS-guided drones will be carried out throughout this month, although any widespread use of the aircraft isn’t expected to take place for about five years – issues such as battery life and legislation still need to be worked…

Read More

Earlier this year, Ford previewed its Mode:Me and Mode:Pro electric bike concepts. The bikes were envisioned as key components of a multimodal transportation ecosystem that would also incorporate cars and public transit. Recently, it added the Mode:Flex e-bike prototype, which uses the latest wireless and connectivity technologies to integrate further into a coordinated transportation system. The Mode:Me folding commuter bike and Mode:Pro delivery bike concepts were born out of an internal e-bike design competition. Ford revealed them at Mobile World Congress back in March and has continued its research in the area…

Read More