Noise cancellation is a technology of which I wholeheartedly approve. After suffering through years of earplug use in college and grad school, I was gifted with an early generation set of noise-canceling headphones that, combined with a brick of a portable CD player, got me through the final years of my education and life as [...]
At the same time that Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe was announcing lowered sales forecasts for the automotive giant through 2009, he also released info that fleet testing for the Plug-in Prius has been moved up a year. No doubt, the two are related. Even though Toyota is still locked in a race with General Motors [...]
Controversies notwithstanding, the Olympics are gearing up and they’re doing so with a green presence courtesy of Volkswagen. The Beijing Olympics will make use of a fleet of 5,000 green cars made by official sponsor VW. They’re using the following models:
- Magotan 2.0 TDI
- Magotan BlueMotion
- Sagitar 2.0 TDI
- Touran EcoFuel
- Tiguan 2.0 TDI
Essentially the [...]
Hat tip to Engadget for this one. Audi is rumored to be working on a system that will tell drivers “how fast to drive to catch a green light.” Traffic signals in Ingolstadt, Germany have been configured with sensors that send information to allow traffic patterns to shift around for “optimum light switching.” The [...]
Last night my housemate and I went out to the drive-in. While we ate our less than healthy but every so tasty meal, we engaged in our usual habit of trash talking the SUVs that came driving by and approvingly noting the compacts and hybrids. We both pointed to a yellow Mini with white racing [...]
Prius to Catch Some Rays?
In an interesting development, word has it that Toyota has plans to add solar panels to the roof of its popular Prius hybrid. The panels, built by Kyocera, will be used to run the air conditioning. It will be two or three years before the Prius line gets a retooling, at [...]
Just this week General Motors announced a commitment of $5 million for a five-year joint venture with Carnegie Mellon to work on driverless tech. The press release talks about a vision of folks eating breakfast and checking their email while the car does the driving, but the real goal is to merge existing monitoring systems [...]
Plug-in. Those just seem to be the magic words in the automotive world these days. The latest on the bandwagon, going up against the Chevy Volt destined for showrooms in 2010 and the long-rumored Prius plug-in is venerable VW. Yep, Volkswagen has cooked up a “Twin Drive” Golf sporting a diesel engine with 122 hp [...]
I haven’t succumbed to the iPhone temptation yet. Even though the shiny new second generation models to be released shortly are very tempting. Oddly enough, I have a lot of loyalty to my carrier because it’s the one tech company that has never driven me to near madness with incompetence. That deserves some reward. But [...]
Well, hang on to your hats for innovation to come. Tata Motors of India has signed up to compete for the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize to be awarded in 2010. And they are the first bona fide automaker to do so. The goal is for participating teams to build cars that will get [...]