Technology Innovation Today

The Transit Elevated Bus Ever spotting a frustrating problem in your daily life? While you are still silently enduring the inconvenience it brings, some sagacious minds have been trying to solve it. As trafic problems haunt cities all over the world, a novel bus design recently presented in front of the public sheds a beam of refreshing light on the problem. Early this year in May, on the 19th China Beijing International High-tech Expo, inventor Youzhou Song published a intriguing design of a “tunnel-shaped” bus. The design is named “Transit…

Japanese telecom SoftBank and automaker Honda have announced a unique partnership to develop technology that would allow future Honda vehicles to both talk to its drivers and read their emotions. At an event in Tokyo on Thursday, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son invited attendees to imagine robots, with super intelligence, devoting themselves to humans. Taking it a step further, Son asked people to imagine a future in which cars themselves become supercomputers before vowing that Honda would be the first to adopt such technology. As The Verge notes, the two will do…

I am from a different land—a different time, maybe—where the car people resist the circling. No circles at all costs, they say. Straight ahead is the way forward. But in this place, across the sea, the cars circle in all directions, within and without each other, a tango of mystery. This place is Swindon, they tell me. It is in south England, a land recently torn asunder. They call this swirl of movement the “magic roundabout”. But how does such sorcery work? The roundabout in its common form is already…

A new hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle prototype has been launched with a claimed fuel economy equivalent to 250 mpg (0.9 L/100km). Dubbed “Rasa,” the new car has a lightweight carbon-fiber monocoque shell, in-wheel electric motors, a bank of supercapacitors charged by braking-regeneration, and a host of other features that enable it to travel up to a claimed 300 miles (483 km) on just a 3.3 lb (1.5 kg) tank of hydrogen. A road-legal two-seater engineering prototype, the Rasa by Riversimple Movement Ltd UK has been designed from scratch to meet the company’s brief of…

Mercedes-Benz has brought autonomous public transport another step closer. The automaker unveiled its self-driving Future Bus in Amsterdam yesterday, sending it on a 12-mile route between Schipol airport and the nearby town of Haarlem. The vehicle’s CityPilot program is adapted from Daimler’s Highway Pilot system that aids truck drivers with long-haul highway journeys. Future Bus uses GPS, long- and short-range radars, and 12 cameras to identify pedestrians, obstacles, and bus stops. It can navigate busy city traffic, go through tunnels, and brake when something moves into its path. The bus is able…