With price reductions on both sides of the Atlantic, and a battery replacement promise, Nissan is clearly keen to lure you over to the EV side of the fence. The latest ploy comes in the form of a battery leasing scheme in the UK market. Dubbing them “Flex” models, cars bought with a leased battery will start at £15,990 (about $24,000) thanks to a British government grant scheme that knocks £5,000 ($7,700) off the price. It’ll then cost £70 ($108) and upwards a month to rent the battery depending on the contract and mileage. The new British-built version also comes with a swathe of improvements (over 100 claims Nissan), with top-billing going to the extended range — from 109 to 124 miles. With charging times also said to be close to 50 percent of those of the original Leaf, the car certainly seems to be moving with the times. Those who prefer to buy the car and battery together as one, can still do so, at the expense of the £5,000 grant. Still undecided? Remember even more improvements could be on the way.
Renault has unveiled a new concept car called the Twin’Z. The car reminds me more than a little of the Fiat 500 from some angles. However, the Renault concept car has lots of glow-in-the-dark touches and an interesting set of backdoors. The concept car is a work by Renault with British designer Ross Lovegrove.
Renault says that the Twin’Z is a fun, modern, artistic take on a city car that draws inspiration from the Renault 5 and Renault Twingo. The Twin’Z is an all electric city car featuring rear-wheel drive and a rear-mounted electric motor. The car is very small at 3.62 m in length and features 18-inch wheels.
The all-electric rear-wheel drive architecture allowed Renault to push the wheels to the extreme corners of the vehicle for a solid footprint and large platform. Pushing the wheels to the corners the vehicle also allow outstanding cabin space inside the car. One of the most interesting features of the concept car are the doors.
The front doors open forward like traditional doors, but the rear doors are rear hinged allowing the complete interior to be opened up. The vehicle uses LED lighting all around and on the inside. The vehicle is 1705 mm wide and 1506 mm high. The wheelbase is 2495 mm and the vehicle weighs 980 kg. The top speed is 81 mph and the vehicle has a driving range of 100 miles on a charge. The rear-mounted electric motor produces 68 hp. To reduce weight and increase the driving range, the car uses carbon fiber bodywork.
Honda is celebrating the history of its cars over the last 50 years by asking people to vote on their favorite model out of the 208 that have come out over this period of time.
It is a popularity contest for its cars.
Voting can be done from the “Kuruma Zukan (car picture reference book)” after checking the cars’ specs and photos. Those voting for their favorite model will be able to get a rare original wallpaper of that car.
Honda is accepting votes by 11:59PM on July 31.
The picture album is here. It is in Japanese only, but you will be able to look at the pictures, organized by decade and year.
Terrafugia’s Transition flying car (or driveable plane) has stayed out of the spotlight since we caught a glimpse of it last year, but AOL Autos recently checked-in with the daring manufacturer to gauge its progress. Sure, the prototype has already scored a VIN from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and an N-number from the Federal Aviation Administration, but it turns out the land /air hybrid is still awaiting complete certification by the NHTSA. Production dates won’t be announced until the craft has been rubber-stamped by Uncle Sam, and that isn’t expected to occur within the next 12 months. For now, suppliers are being lined up, and it’s very likely that another prototype will be fashioned before it hits the assembly line. You might not be able to sit inside your very own Transition soon, but you will be able to see the first model on display at Cape Cod’s Heritage Museum this summer.
If you’re into 3D printable stuff, or into remote-control cars, then the OpenRC Project is for you. A gentleman in Sweden named Daniel Norée is sharing his progress on a 3D-printed Truggy, as well as sharing the recipe with the OpenRC Project group that he created. A truggy is an off-road vehicle, in case you weren’t sure.
The cost of 3D printers is dropping both for at-home use and enterprise, so it’s a very real possibility that consumers all over the world could soon have these devices in their living rooms. Crazier things have happened. We’ve seen 3D-printed iPhone docks, violins, pottery and even a robotic hand for a child.
If you can print out your very own customized remote-control car with one, count me in. While not all of the parts are printable, such as the wheels, for really die-hard remote control car fans, those are parts that they probably have sitting around in the garage already.
Here’s a video that Norée uploaded today that shows some of the schematics behind the parts, and the actual 3D-printing process using one of those fancy MakerBot Replicators:
The project has come a long way in the past few months; here’s a video of an earlier model breaking down:
Hydrogen fuel cell cars have any number of hurdles to overcome, whether it’s widespread adoption or the basic matter of locating a place to fill up. If a Virginia Tech discovery pans out, getting the fuel itself won’t be one of those challenges. The new combination of a polyphosphate with a special blend of enzymes lets researchers extract meaningful quantities of hydrogen from any biological element that includes xylose — in other words, the sugar that’s present in every plant to at least some degree. The process is potentially more eco-friendly than most, as well. While you’d expect it to be renewable given the main ingredients, it also reduces the need for metals and cuts back sharply on the volume of necessary greenhouse gases. Most importantly, the findings could reach the commercial world as soon as three years from now. If they do, they could lower the price of hydrogen fuel by making it more accessible, all the while avoiding much of the guilt trip that comes with using polluting technology to generate clean energy.
The automotive industry is a tough one for a new automaker to break into. It’s even tougher for a new automaker to break in the automotive industry with a completely electric vehicle. Most consumers are still staying far away from electric-only cars in large part due to range anxiety, so major manufacturers are focused on plug-in hybrids for now. Upstart automaker Detroit Electric has officially unveiled its new all-electric car, and it’s a sports car.
The car is called the SP:01 and it reminds me a lot of a combination of the Lotus Elise and the Tesla Roadster. The Detroit Electric vehicle is a two-seat limited edition electric sports car with a 200 hp electric motor mounted in the middle of the vehicle. Detroit Electric says that the car is the world’s fastest production electric vehicle with a top speed of 155 mph.
The vehicle can hit 62 mph in 3.7 seconds. The body is made from carbon fiber and the total weight is 2359 pounds. The lithium polymer battery pack has 37 kWh power, promising 180 miles driving range per charge. The car can also interface with smartphones giving drivers control over the climate control system and more.
All of this performance, technology and style comes at a price though, as the SP:01 will sell for a base price of $135,000 (USD).
Optimus Prime, Hot Rod, and Ultra Magnus. These are all robot cars from the Transformers franchise rooted in early 1980s Japan. Somewhat disappointingly, here in realityland it looks like Japan’s real robot cars will have names like Nissan, Toyota, Fuji Heavy Industries, Honda, Mazda, and Hitachi.
Assume gravelly cowboy voice: “Hitachibots, transform and roll out!” Yeeaaah… umm, nope.
Okay, sadly Japan’s big automakers aren’t yet churning out sentient, anthropomorphized, purely good or purely evil all-male robot warriors. But they are very hip to developing and deploying practical versions of so-called robot cars in cooperation with domestic government agencies (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism – MLIT), one another, and given their global reach, international partners as well. Domestically, the current aim is to deploy highly autonomous, self-driving cars on freeways within 9-10 years. If the system proves successful, a global brand like Nissan or Toyota would surely find additional markets in other, much larger national freeway systems (ex: the massive national networks of China and the United States).
Concepts and proposals for robotic automobiles have been around for almost 80 years, and functional experimentation has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Actually, when breaking it down by individual features, 0ne can see that cars have been gradually roboticizing for a long time, e.g., power steering, power windows, power mirrors, anti-lock brakes, etc., etc.
So naturally, big J-Auto’s development of self-driving, partially autonomous, and arguably robotic feature sets isn’t novel. The 2003 Toyota Prius (Japan only), for example, was the first car available with a sonar-based Intelligent Parking Assist System (IPAS) wherein the driver operates the brake and the car calculates optimal steering angles for automated parallel parking (this option didn’t make it to the U.S. until 2009). Robotic features aren’t limited to driving, as here with the 2006 Mazda Miata’s Transformer-like power sunroof:
So what else is there with the Japan/robot car special connection situation? Well, geography, as it is so often want to do, must also insert itself into this macro-cultural equation. Insofar as: Japan’s approximately 130 million residents are shoehorned onto a mere 30% of the country’s land area – and not by choice, the other 70% is either too unstable, rugged, or topographically crazy to be inhabited. So, if one imagines all those people in contiguous urbanization on an island nation about the size of the U.S. state of Ohio, or just a bit larger than Portugal, one can appreciate the extreme population density and everyday challenge of very close-quarter driving and parking.
Another big deal for robotic cars here is the very long-term continuous habitation of the habitable areas. See, when one gets off the modern, 1st world-standard, highly developed roadways, in most cases one will quickly find oneself winding through very narrow streets with little if any standardized configuration. Human beings have been living along the same trails-that-became-roads-that-became-streets for many hundreds, if not thousands of years – long before there was much regard for large-scale municipal planning or an even vague anticipation of the motor vehicle. The analog compensation here is that nearly every non-arterial, non-grid-like intersection in Japan has an array of fish-eye mirrors at each corner, and drivers either use them or risk having no idea what’s coming. A networked robotic car, however, would be able to “see” around the corners, which would be nice when navigating this Tokyo neighborhood:
And then there’s the demographics. We mentioned assistive robots’ role in Japan’s aging society a few weeks back; this country has a big-deal labor shortage coming up in a generation and a half or so. In addition to the role robotics will very likely play in augmenting a dwindling human services labor force, a day spent in any Japanese city futilely looking for taxi or bus driver under 45 will clearly reveal another pending labor shortage. Who’s going to fill those jobs in 25 years? Yep.
Japan is approaching a perfect-storm state of necessity for practical robots, and if proven effective, reliable, and safe, increasingly robotic automobiles are likely to get an early foothold here. Besides, piloting a car in Japan is objectively difficult, licensing and compulsory driving schools are quite expensive, and despite its world-class public transportation system, Japan does experience considerable roadway congestion (networked, self-driving cars are anticipated to greatly reduce traffic jams and the effects of human error). Add in safety benefits, a potentially positive environmental impact, and POW: if it can, big J-Auto will put J-robots on the road ASAP.
Japan’s current repertoire doesn’t include anything ready for public consumption, but there are some very advanced and promising projects underway. Nissan’s modified Leaf, introduced last October as the NSC-2015, as in the year 2015, is an ambitious and innovative offering – complete with smartphone connectivity:
Toyota is also keeping pace with the Lexus-branded Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle that debuted at CES in January:
Bringing things down to the personal, Hitachi recently unveiled their latest version of the Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System – Ropits. This autonomous, obstacle-avoiding, user-friendly personal transport is intended to one day assist the elderly or disabled:
Japan’s MLIT was scheduled to produce an update to their ongoing robo-car feasibility studies by the end of last month. While not yet public, it’s safe to assume that their assessments and directives probably won’t result in big J-Auto’s production of a transforming robot car that will protect you, your family, and the galaxy from those other, eeeevil robots – but within a few decades, it’ll probably be reasonable to expect one’s very own private chauffeur to be… well, basically just software.
For now and the near future, think of robotic cars as you might think of powered robotic exoskeletons, i.e., they’ll help you do what you need to do with greater strength, precision, and efficiency, but they aren’t going to walk out to the driveway and help you up the stairs all by themselves.
The robots are coming, but for now and a while to come, humans are still going to have to push a few buttons. _________
Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
Anyone who wanted a Tesla Roadster but showed up too late to the party (or too early) is about to get a second chance as soon as this year, if not quite in the way they expected. The Detroit Electric badge has been restored once more for the SP:01, a high-speed EV that shares Tesla’s early use of a Lotus design — albeit an Exige coupe this time, not an Elise. Its 201HP equivalent motor can also approximate the Roadster Sport’s brisk 0-60MPH time of 3.7 seconds. That’s roughly where the major similarities stop, however. The SP:01 should have a shorter range (around 180 miles on a European cycle) and will take a longer 4.3 hours to charge up from a 240V source, but it will cater to enthusiasts with a lighter carbon fiber body, a higher 155MPH top speed and even the choice of a manual transmission. Detroit Electric goes so far as to include a clutch, although stick shifters won’t have to use it when starting or stopping. Just be ready to pony up in short order if you like the SP:01’s notion of electric revivalism: only 999 examples of the $135,000 car will roll off the line after production starts in August.
It sounds very strange to say Porsche and hybrid in the same sentence, but the company has been working on hybrid cars for a long tim. In fact, they’ve been offering a hybrid version of its four-door Panamera since last year, and also has the hybrid 918 Spyder supercar. Now, Porsche has announced that is getting ready to launch its first ever plug-in hybrid automobile with a new addition to its Panamera line.
The new Panamera S E-Hybrid should be significantly more fuel-efficient than the old hybrid version of the car and perform better as well. The E-Hybrid has 416 total horsepower and its new electric motor produces 95 hp on its own. The previous hybrid had a measly 47 hp electric motor.
The E-Hybrid also gets a significantly larger lithium-ion battery pack featuring 9.4 kWh of electricity compared to only 1.7 kWh of electricity in the outgoing hybrid. The car will also be able to drive for 20 miles on electricity alone – which isn’t stellar, but good for short hauls. When the gasoline engine is fired up the E-hybrid can reach 60 mph in 5.2 seconds and has a top speed of over 160 mph. As you might expect, the Panamera S E-Hybrid is an expensive car, with prices starting at $99,000 (USD).
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