Posts Tagged ‘cars’
New Cars Make Me Feel Old
In which an admitted gadget nerd feels as confused as grandma when dealing with the modern automobile
But recently I've had some illuminating moments of empathy. And they've all come behind the wheel.
I haven't owned a car since I was in college (a 1989 Toyota Corolla--White Fang, rest in peace), but being on good terms with Popular Science's automotive editor comes with the occasional perk: I sometimes find myself with a new car to help test with a run to the grocery store or a quick road trip weekend. My promiscuity with many cars, rather than the reliably monogamous relationship most people have with one or two, has allowed me to frequently recreate the moment of first sitting down in an unfamiliar cockpit. Which means: I am frequently very confused inside an automobile. This confusion can take many forms.
Discomfort: After licking my lips at a torquey Mercedes E-350 BlueTec diesel (my first time behind the wheel of a Benz), I climbed inside to find that someone with a frame considerably smaller than my 6'2" had driven this beauty previously. No big deal, I thought, as I crept out of the parking garage into Midtown Manhattan traffic, hunched over the wheel. I've adjusted many a seat. But as I fumbled with the powered controls in what I thought was the universal-standard position—below the seat on the left side—I found all manner of lower lumbar support options, but nothing to slide the seat back. I remained hilariously hunched for the next 30 minutes, before realizing on the Manhattan bridge that Mercedes likes to put their main seat controls next to the door handle.
Mild Panic: As I pulled into a moderately skeezy parking spot in Queens in the same Mercedes later that weekend, I unexpectedly found myself unable to lock the door. I pressed the button on the electronic proximity-sensing key fob and heard the doors' latches lock. But upon pulling the handle to test, the door opened. This charade repeated several times, enough to start thinking that maybe I wouldn't be able to leave this car unattended. It wasn't until I gave my companion the key and had her step away from the vehicle that I realized the door was opening because the proximity sensor knew I was holding the key.
Frustration: Like many nicely furnished new cars, a Volkswagen Touareg I recently drove was equipped with another kind of proximity sensor—one that detects objects near your bumpers while the car is traveling at low speeds, beeping and lowering the sound system's volume if it thinks you're due for a fender bender. A nice feature. Nice, that is, until you find yourself in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Whitestone Bridge leaving the Bronx. There, we found our music volume fading out (and, curiously, not returning to its previous level) every few minutes, as the sensors detected the bumpers of our fellow frustrated gridlock victims. Even in standstill traffic, my passenger and I could not coax the touchscreen control panel to turn off this feature.
Helplessness: In a Mitsubishi Outlander driving in a decent rain shower, I fell victim to another smart feature that adjusts the speed of your windshield wipers in relation to how fast the car is moving. Like many drivers, I am particular about the frequency of my wipers—and yet my settings wouldn't stick. Until I found and switched myself out of Automatic mode on the wiper stem, I was beginning to entertain the idea that I had lost my mind.
Absurdity: Back in the Touareg, my driving companion plugs his iPhone into the audio system via docking cable in the glove box. immediately plays. It turns out, the system auto-plays by default the first song on the first playlist when it detects a connected iPod or iPhone. Needless to say, we became extremely well acquainted with the jangly opening bars of "Good Thing" that weekend.
Before this starts sounding too much like something from the desk of Andy Rooney, let me state plainly that smarter cars are a welcome development in the automotive world. The gadgetification of our cars has happened extremely fast, and it shows . But my confusion should not be taken as a general cause for worry—I’m sure all of the features that puzzled me initially can be tweaked to suit my needs and tastes, after a bit of stationary fiddling and manual-reading.
And for every confounding new feature, there are those that effortlessly improve the driving experience. The rear-facing backup camera, which I find in just about every new car I drive, makes parallel parking in a modern vehicle one of driving's most satisfying moments. And blind spot indicator lights in the side view mirrors, like those on a Mazda 6 I drove, are extremely useful when switching lanes in city traffic.
The greater point, then, is that I'm not used to feeling lost inside a new system. Each of the conditions above is unique in the type of resulting road rage, but they all have a common factor: confusion. It's almost refreshing for someone like me to be reminded of this feeling—one experienced by millions of people as they more frequently encounter technology in their lives in new, unfamiliar places.
But it also poses a challenge to the auto industry: make the increasingly sophisticated technology inside our cars easier to use. Features like blind spot indicators make driving safer, but I'd argue that tapping through a touchscreen to find out why the stereo keeps beeping might cancel out such a gain. Are we safer, then, on aggregate? I would think so, but from my outsider's perspective on new cars, there are times when it feels like we're not.
In an automobile, the fearless experimentation that allows a younger person to be more comfortable with technology is reduced—there’s only so much exploratory fiddling you can do at 60 mph. With the playing field so leveled, automakers must work even harder for simpler interfaces that require little to no familiarity or advanced knowledge to operate.
Because behind the wheels of our cars, for safety’s sake, we should all feel like master technophiles.
Dashboard-Mounted Smartphones Network Together to Watch for Red Light Patterns, Help Drivers Commute Efficiently
The idea stems from an already popular smartphone setup in which drivers perch their smartphones in dashboard brackets and use them as navigation devices. The MIT team built their SignalGuru app to take advantage of the camera on the other side of the phone by collecting stoplight data as cars drive around and feeding it back to a central system that then builds a larger picture of a city’s traffic flow.
The system could presumably be built out to incorporate all kinds of other useful data, the researchers say, like the locations of city buses, gas prices (via gas station signage), or where parking spaces are available. But the main idea is to build a realtime network of traffic signal timing. The app can then use GPS location to tell where a driver is, how quickly he or she is approaching a stoplight, and where that stoplight is in its green-yellow-red cycle.
From there, it does some simple math, telling the driver what speed to run to ensure he or she doesn’t have to make a complete stop at the upcoming light. That generally involves slowing down, but it doesn’t cost the driver any time overall, and the savings are in the gas tank. In tests, SignalGuru helped drivers shave 20 percent off their fuel consumption by cutting down on stopping and accelerating.
In those same tests SignalGuru was able to establish accuracy down to two-thirds of a second for signal changes. That could theoretically improve even more with more data--that is, with more people using the system. That’s both the key and the catch: SignalGuru is one of those things that only works with lots of data. So it might be difficult to get enough people participating in the system, but once it hit a certain tipping point it could become a very effective system that requires no additional roadway infrastructure to be installed.
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DOT Mapping Out a Plan to Protect Cars From Cyber-Attacks
This isn’t so much a call for proposals a la Darpa as much as a genuine call for ideas--that is, there’s no contract to be awarded as a result of this request for information. But the DOT still wants your input, should you have any to offer. Via the :
The USDOT is collecting relevant information to characterize needs and establish a strategic research roadmap to meet the rising challenges of ensuring the safety of automotive safety-critical systems due to increasing complexity of motor vehicle systems using advanced electronic controls to improve drivability, safety, efficiency, and operational reliability; escalating use of information technology in motor vehicles to enhance basic and secondary vehicle functions and to enable infotainment applications; and wireless connectivity to in-vehicle systems, between vehicles and external information networks, and among vehicles.
Essentially, it sounds like the DOT is smart enough to know that America’s roadways will evolve, either within the scope of its own vision or beyond it. And it wants to be prepared. Call it an official acknowledgement that change is afoot on America’s highways and byways.
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Terrafugia’s ‘Roadable Aircraft’ Receives Regulatory Clearance Again, This Time for the Road
With the help of a few key exemptions
The exemptions are aimed specifically at this kind of dual-use vehicle, which can drive legally on American roadways but also take off and fly under the FAA’s Light Sport Aircraft category. One allows the Transition to trade in standard automotive safety glass for lightweight polycarbonate windows. The other allows it to run on tires usually not allowed on multi-purpose vehicles.
These kinds of compromises are necessary for a vehicle like the Transition, as rules governing aircraft and highway vehicles are often incompatible when applied to the same vehicle. Such regulatory hurdles and other production headaches have delayed the Transition a few times already. Last year Terrafugia said we’d see the vehicle delivered by 2011. That’s now been pushed back another year, but clearing this major regulatory obstacle (the FAA already the Transition last year) should help the Transition down the homestretch.
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China Opens the World’s Longest Bridge Over Water, Toppling American Record-Holder
The new bridge spans Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of China’s Shandong Peninsula in northeastern China. At 26.4 miles long, it beats Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — the previous world-record holder — by at least 2 miles, according to the .
Chinese workers toiled at marathon pace to build the bridge in four years, starting at each side and meeting in the middle. The structure has 5,200 pillars and cost at least $2.3 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.
The Guinness officials say the bridge is earthquake- and typhoon-proof, and designed to withstand the impact of a 300,000-ton vessel. It links the port city of Qingdao to the island of Huangdao, cutting drive time from 40 to 20 minutes, according to the state-run .
The reports that Americans are apparently not giving up the world’s longest title without a fight, however. The newspaper talked to Carlton Dufrechou, general manager of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, who pointed out that the Jiaozhou bridge has a bend in it, and that the over-water length is only 16 miles, compared to 24 for his bridge.
“Bunch of wannabes,” he said. Read the for his full take, in which he calls the Chinese news “propaganda.”
In any case, the bridge looks pretty neat, especially set to this haunting soundtrack. Check out some aerial views below.
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Future Shocks: Predictions From the World’s Foremost Film Prognosticator
How the designer of Blade Runner thinks the future will look
Lightweight Exoskeletons
Pointing to new electroactive polymers that contract powerfully and predictably when exposed to a charge, Mead foresees an era of lightweight human exoskeletons. Such strap-on limb supports could strengthen soldiers and help the elderly and the paralyzed. “These new materials are better than hydraulics or electric motors,” he explains, “because they have a directional axis to pull and push, much like muscles do. So they’re very efficient, and more like a sheath than a bulky cylinder. That’s going to change the world.”
Hands-Free Highways
“Cars have already become semi-sentient,” says Mead, citing the recent introduction of consumer-level “self-parking” systems. Soon cars will be able to communicate with one another, which could end slowdowns caused by erratic human judgment. “It’s all just geometry,” he says. “To have 1,000 drivers trundling down the freeway, making their own second-by-second decisions, is awful.” There is, he notes, also a potential downside: “Cars will be able to notify your insurance company immediately if you’ve hit something.” Even the smallest bump could drive up your rates.
Printable Replacement Organs
3-D printers, which lay down consecutive layers of urethane resin to create detailed objects, have become crucial prototyping tools for Detroit automobile designers and Hollywood special-effects houses alike. Mead says that soon these printers will be loaded with live human cells rather than sprayable resins. The micro-precise nozzles could turn out custom replacement body parts built using our own stem cells. “You’ll be able to make extremely intricate closed-volume solids at will,” he says. “No seams. That is amazing. And it reduces economies of scale to zero. You can make one item at a time, as demand requires.”
Swappable Car Bodies
Riffing off universal chassis systems such as GM’s drive-by-wire “skateboard” concept, Mead foresees a day when we’ll be attaching new car-body modules onto an underlying, independently powered frame as quickly and easily as we change shirts. “I first rendered this concept over 40 years ago,” he says (he began his career at Ford Motor Company’s Advanced Styling Studio). “Once it gets going, in about 10 years, it’s going to mark a huge change. In some ways, it’s like what happened in the 1910s and 1920s, before cars became fully mass-produced. You’d buy a Deusenberg chassis, then have a custom coach builder put the body on it.”
Covert Bank Warfare
Given the ever-increasing prevalence of cashless purchases, Mead says we are headed for a world of covert bank-account warfare directed by government bureaucrats. “You’re standing naked to the electronic-surveillance world with every financial transaction,” he says. Whether through radio-frequency ID chips, phone transactions, or mobile credit-card processing and Web transactions, financial information is becoming more easily intercepted, tracked, and correlated to personal information, such as national identity, bank-account information and employment history. “All somebody far above you in the hierarchy has to do is hit ‘delete.’ Instantaneously you’ve become a non-person, economically. That’s scary to me.”
MIT Demonstrates Smart Cars That Predict Each Others’ Moves to Avoid Collisions
To suss out the patterns in human driving, the team first had to break down the act of operating a moving vehicle into its most basic parts: accelerating and decelerating. Using onboard sensors, the computerized intelligent transportation system (ITS) first determines which state another vehicle is in. From there, there is a finite (but sill large) number of positions on the roadway the vehicle can be after any given duration, be it one second or ten.
It’s here that the human behavioral modeling comes into play. The computer assesses other factors (is it an intersection or an onramp?) and other data about where human drivers tend to accelerate or slow down. All this, filtered through an algorithm, gives the ITS a pretty good idea of where a vehicle might be immediately headed.
The ITS-equipped vehicle then quickly figures out the areas in which the two vehicles could theoretically collide (this is termed the “capture set”) decides what it thinks the other car is going to do, acting accordingly to avoid those “capture set” areas where the risk of collision is remarkably more pronounced.
To test the system, the MIT team built two miniature cars--one equipped with ITS, the other controlled by human drivers--and put them on circular, overlapping tracks. They then ran 100 trials, changing up the human driver to compensate for any particular driver’s style. The result: collision was avoided 97 times. Vehicles entered the “capture set” three times, and only one of these instances resulted in collision.
Not bad. Of course, all or this has to take place in an instant in the real world, and adding more cars and more variables (pedestrians and cyclists, for instance) compounds the challenges. But the work is important for reasons that go beyond the roadway. If we’re truly going to learn to live alongside our robots, we don’t just need to know what they are going to do next. To some degree, they need to be able to predict our next moves as well.
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