Ever the innovative pioneer that they are, Ferrari is now working on a new type of car door that’s designed to improve passenger and driver access for all of its vehicles.
The Italian supercar makers recently applied for a licensing patent on a revolutionary door that should rival those that we’ve seen from Lamborghini and Mercedes over the years. For their design concept, Ferrari is working on a door that’s attached to the car’s front wing where the door hinges upward when it is opened allowing the drivers to get in and out of the car as effortlessly as possible.
There’s no word yet as to when Ferrari will be introducing these doors but despite the uncertain timeframe, rumor has it that these doors are perfectly suitable for mid-engined cars, which incidentally is fast becoming a Ferrari trademark.
’Ferrari’ and ’trailblazer’ are two words that have long been synonymous with each other, and these new doors are just the latest example of the many ideas that pop out of the heads from the folks at Maranello.
There’s something innately kooky about being an contemporary artist. For the most part, a lot of these people have come with the weirdest and most oddly-sighted creations known to man.
Take Garnet Hertz, for instance. He calls himself a contemporary artist and his latest creation is definitely more than just ‘contemporary’. What he did was take a Sega Outrun arcade game and fused it with a three-wheeled scooter to create – yes, you guessed it – a drivable arcade game.
To spice up his new creation, Herntz also added an iPhone and a customized GPS software in his creation. What for, you ask? To the best of our rationalizing capabilities, the GPS software finds the vanishing point of the road ahead and, with the use of Google Maps, puts the game’s Testarossa into a live-action setting.
According to Herntz himself, the whole project was born out of two concepts: Un-Simulation of Driving and GPS Navigation Parallax & Mixed Reality.
There could have been well over 1 Million horsepower from all the high performance machines both inside and out of the Las Vegas Convention Center last week at the 2009 SEMA Show. Aside from the seat of the pants the only way to measure the amount of thrust that an automobile can make is with a dynamometer. It is not every day that you get to see the inner workings of a dyno, how the tires turn a large metal drum which then spins an electromagnet which through the beauty of math and science is able to calculate just how much power realy is making its way to the pavement. So it was quite a treat to see this display from Mustang Dynos at SEMA exposing all its inner workings for all of the crowds to see.
Two of the foremost authorities when it comes to luxury in their respective fields recently teamed up to create a mobile phone that symbolizes the prestige and status of these two companies.
Tag Heuer, one of the premier watchmakers in the world, recently added a new mobile phone to their burgeoning Meridiist line with a design that is inspired by no less than Lamborghini.
Housed in a black titanium carbide coated stainless steel casing, the Meridiist Automobili Lamborghini is the epitome of both class and elegance, two qualities both Tag Heuer and Lamborghini have in abundance.
The Meridiist Automobili Lamborghini is hand-assembled, with most of its components – almost 400 unique mechanical parts – created by and assembled by the prestigious watchmaker. All in all, only 1,963 – the year Lamborghini was founded - units have been produced and most of them are now on being sold in selected watch, jewellery, and Lamborhini stores all over the world.
General Motors may be in the works of introducing an in-car Internet service for a number of its brands, but Chrysler is mixing in their cars with some technological firsts of their own, namely, in-car live television.
The FLO TV Auto Entertainment, as it has come to be known, will be offered by Chrysler through its Mopar aftermarket unit in over 100 metro areas, as well as a number of interstate highways. The in-car live TV service goes for$629 with a monitor unit coming in the form of a seven-inch DVD screen courtesy of Audiovox. FLO TV also comes with up to 20 different channels, including the likes of CBS, CNBC, Comedy Central, Fox
News, MSNBC, MTV, NBC 2Go and Nickelodeon; it remains to be seen whether new channels and programs will be added in the future.
Those interested in availing the new feature for their Chryslers will be given a free 12-month subscription with a monthly subscription – Chrysler is pegging the number to be around $9 per month, depending on how negotiations with FLO TV progresses - kicking in after the one year free period expires.
The in-car live television feature for Chrysler vehicles is just the latest technological advancement in the pursuit of bombarding cars with as much entertainment as possible. GM’s in-car Internet service was the first salvo and, thanks to the in-car live TV feature, Chrysler has given GM a pretty resounding response.
Yesterday, we talked about a group of scientists from Stanford’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory that have been working on an robotic Audi TTS and their ambitious attempt at running the fully automated vehicle at the Pikes Peak climb.
It turns out that the Audi TTS isn’t the only car these geniuses have been working on. In addition to the Audi TTS, the scientists also have a standard-looking VW Passat in tow, and while it looks unspectacular, to say the least, the Passat also comes with the some highly-advanced computer gear in the trunk that allows the car to park itself without any manual assistance.
Amazing as it sounds, the technology does have a few catches of its own. For the technology to show off its true worth, the car needs to have a layout of the area where it’s parking and, in addition to that, the computers inside the Passat have no means of detecting outside forces that may obstruct the car from parking on its own.
Nevertheless, a car that parks by itself is still something none of us have in our garages and it’s worth noting that in the event the technology goes mainstream in the future, you should know that the whole genius of an idea was made to fruition by these guys over a Stanford.
Anytime you’re stopping on a red light and you see an Audi TTS beside you with no driver in sight, then consider yourself one of the lucky few to have seen the robotic Audi TTS that was developed by a group of scientists from Stanford University.
We all know that Stanford has had a long history of producing robotic cars but their latest pet project is far and away the most ambitious undertaking they’ve ever done. To be clear, the robotic Audi TTS is far more than just your run-off-the-mill robot vehicle – if you can even get away saying something like that. The folks from Stanford who created the technological marvel have plans on entering their autonomous ride to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, a rigorous twenty-kilometer race for a car-driven driver, let alone a driverless vehicle. Ambitious as the challenge may be, the robotic Audi TTS clearly has something going for it, not the least of which is posting an ‘unofficial’ speed record for an autonomous car after posting speeds in excess of 130 mph.
We all keep talking about the future of vehicles, but advancements regarding automated driving have never reached this stage so you can bet your bottom dollar that this will not be the last time we hear from those folks from Stanford.
In today’s fast-paced world, internet connectivity has become a necessity everywhere we go so it comes as no surprise that car manufacturers are all going gaga over the prospect of having dealer-installed routers on their vehicles. The first brand to do this was Chrysler when it put Autonet routers on its vehicles about a year ago. Chrysler was then followed by Volkswagen, which had the service installed on the Routan a few months ago.
The latest to hop on the bandwagon is General Motors. After signing a deal with Autonet, the Detroit-based manufacturer will now be offering the service for a number of car lines under its umbrella, including GMC, Chevrolet, Buick, and Cadillac. The Wi-Fi hotspot created by the service extends within 150 feet of your car and without an encryption key to keep your connection private, all those that fall within that radius would be able to access free internet connectivity.
According to Sterling Pratz, the CEO of Autonet Mobile, “Ninety percent of customers prefer surfing the Internet over just watching movies. “Customers want the biggest brands the Internet has to offer in their car, such as Facebook, YouTube and FlyCast Internet radio.”
The in-car Internet service for GM is bound to attract a lot of customers, especially those that cant seem to stay away from being connected to the Internet for longer than five minutes. The service comes with an installation price of $500 and a monthly charge of $29 a month for a service capacity of 1 GB.<
Specialized hard drive maker Flash Rods has created an external hard drive disk in the form of, wait for it, a 1:18 scale model of an Audi R8.
What better way to show to the world how much of a car enthusiast you are with these two car-inspired computer hardwares. The Audi R8 hard drive, which will be available beginning on the 1st of November, comes in three disk spaces, including a 250GB, a 500GB, and a 640GB. A number of colors are also available so you can choose what color of the R8 best suits your taste and personality.
While we already know when the R8 hard drive will drop on store shelves, we still don’t know how much it costs. But if we can look as previous models as precedents – Flash Rods already has a Dodge Challenger and a Nissan GT-R hard drive – then the 250GB version should cost somewhere around the neighbourhood of $200.
General Motors is the only automotive manufacturer to offer OnStar, a service that provides a variety of subscription based communications like: in vehicle security, hands free calling, turn by turn navigation and remote diagnostics systems. However as one lucky California resident learned, the little blue button in his Chevrolet Tahoe can do so much more. Thanks to the advent of Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, only 16 minutes after Jose Ruiz and his cousin were accosted by a carjacker wielding a firearm, The satellite service was able to bring his 2009 Tahoe to a halt, bringing what could have been an exhausting and endangering car chase to a halt.
This occasion marks the first time that the OnStar SVS technology has been activated to help in a carjacking situation. SVS helps take high speed pursuits out of the equation, and reduces the chance that a stolen vehicle will be crashed during a chase. Once a subscriber has reported a stolen vehicle they can call and request the service. The advisor will then use advanced GPS technology to pinpoint the location of the vehicle and notify law enforcement. When police have the vehicle in sight, they can request the advisor send a signal that interacts with the vehicle’s engine, gradually slowing it down, aiding in a safe recovery. So the next time that any carjacker thinks about boosting a new car, they ought to think twice about stealing a GM vehicle.
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