Hasta La Gadget!

Driving in the middle of the night can already pose enough of a challenge to navigate through as a number of people aren’t even supposed to be driving due to the limited visibility. Driving while a car as large as a yacht behind you with its high beams on can make it even more challenging, but a new car feature will be introduced at next week’s Geneva Motor Show that could make the use of high beams less of a distraction for drivers in front of your vehicle.

Volvo will be introducing its Active High Beam Control which installs a mechanical system in a vehicle’s headlamps that has the ability to block your light from distracting oncoming traffic or cars in front of you.

The way the Active High Beam Control works is through a camera which is already installed in Volvo’s rear-view mirror for its detection and auto-braking system. The camera can detect other vehicles and calculate the area that should be shaded within a 1.5-degree margin. Once the system tags a vehicle that should be shaded, tiny metallic cylinders cover the light to shade the appropriate area.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Urbee 2 To Cross Country On Just 10 Gallons Of Ethanol, iPad Works With Self-Driving Car,

Instant torque feels delicious on the highway, but it could be an even bigger asset in an offroader. Land Rover has been experimenting with electric versions of its Defender 110 for a while now, and claims its latest prototypes benefit from a reduction in wheel spin due to the single-speed motor, making them more adept at climbing and less likely to churn up the environment. The prototypes don’t necessarily stand out in terms of raw specs: they’re 25 percent heavier than turbodiesel models, with lower horsepower and torque ratings, and with a range of just 50 miles. They try to make up for it in other ways, however, with the ability to deliver up to eight hours of slow, grueling off-road time, where range is secondary to staying upright, and by exploiting Land Rover’s Hill Descent Control feature for faster recharging through regenerative braking. There’s no plan to bring an EV Defender to market any time soon, or to run the Dakar gauntlet like some rivals have, but the prototypes are due to make appearance at the Geneva Motor Show before being tested for painful-sounding “specialist applications” later in the year.

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Via: Autoblog, Forbes

There’s been talk for weeks of Boeing developing a fix for the 787 Dreamliner’s battery fire troubles. If the aircraft maker has its way, that should soon translate to action. The company’s commercial airplane chief, Raymond Conner, tells reporters that the company has a “permanent” fix that would place three layers of protection around the batteries and, theoretically, head off fires and their causes. It sounds like just the ticket — the challenge will be getting everyone else to feel the same way. American investigators believe the batteries are at fault, but their Japanese counterparts haven’t yet ruled out external factors. With this kind of ongoing debate, we’re not about to book a 787 to Tokyo for spring break.

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Source: New York Times

A police officer on a high powered motorcycle is a deadly combination, even more so when the police officer is the T-1000 in disguise. Well, a motorcycle is a whole lot more useful during peak traffic hours, as one can weave through traffic while boasting of quick acceleration to capture those who are on the run. Five-O has introduced another benefit – which would be stealth, thanks to the efforts of Zero Motorcycles.

John Lloyd, Vice President of global sales, said, “After seeing the success the 2012 model had in the field, we decided to expand our 2013 police and security offerings. To have the support of so many different law enforcement agencies and security organizations is an incredible honor.” The most recent law-enforcement models will receive crash bars, the relevant number of lights, a Whelen siren, and of course, a shotgun rack. There will be other options such as hard cases, a detachable windscreen, and a quick-charge kit. Since these are electric motorcycles, they’re quiet, allowing the long arm of the law to be a whole lot more sneaky.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Pedego Trail Tracker Electric Fatbike, 2014 Chevrolet Impala Gets Valet Mode,

If you’re one Elon Musk, you’re probably ready for just about anything to take the place of the only story dominating the Tesla tagline for the past few weeks. Of course, a $90 million net loss isn’t the ideal story to overtake the Model S kerfuffle, but hey — at least the company’s aiming to pull in a profit next quarter. In a bid to keep investors focused on the positive, the automaker’s Q4 2012 shareholder letter notes that Tesla is officially predicting its first quarterly profit in Q1 2013, sliding up from “late 2013.”

For the quarter that just wrapped, the firm saw revenues of $306 million (a 500 percent increase sequentially from the $50.1 million seen in Q3 2012), and it ended the year with $221 million in total cash after having made the first quarterly principal payment of $12.7 million to repay the loan to the U.S. Department of Energy. Tesla also plans to deliver some 20,000 Model S vehicles in 2013, with around 4,500 of those happening in Q1. Europeans and Asians can expect their deliveries in “summer” / “late this year” (respectively), with the first Model X deliveries to occur in early 2014. Musk also told investors that it plans to “spend significantly less on capital expenditures” in 2013 compared to 2012, helping to (hopefully) generate “slightly positive net income on a non-GAAP basis” in Q1 2013.

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Source: Tesla