Hasta La Gadget!

The future of modern transportation awaits us. By 2012 we expect to have multiple proper, reasonable choices for fully electric vehicles, but check your calendar and you’ll see it’s still 2010, leaving us still waiting for cars like the Leaf and the Volt to make their proper appearances. Toyota would like to remind you that the Prius is still here, celebrating an amazing tenth year of availability in the US and teasing us with the upcoming plug-in model, offering a taste of EV with the practicality of a hybrid. We just spent three days with one and managed a quite impressive 91mpg average — no hypermiling required. Click on through for our detailed impressions of this five-door eco-warrior.

Continue reading Toyota Prius PHEV preview: three days in plug-in paradise

Toyota Prius PHEV preview: three days in plug-in paradise originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The French city of Toulouse is testing a system that displays available parking spots on drivers’ smartphones. The system can also tell when someone is illegally parked or hasn’t fed the parking meter.

“This technology comes from space travel,” says Patrick Givanovitch. “They were supposed to help find landing spots on Venus.” The French space agency CNES and Givanovitch’s Toulouse-based start-up company Lyberta helped develop the street-level sensors and refit both their hardware and software to map urban parking spaces. Over time, they plan to add data from global positioning systems as well.

“We know in real time where there is parking available in the city,” Givanovitch says. In addition to helping drivers find spaces and easing congestion, the hope is that city planners will be able to use the data to optimize traffic flows and parking arrangements throughout the city.

The sensors actually work by electromagnetism. They’re placed just below the street and connected in a network using ordinary coaxial cable. An occupied parking spot has a different magnetic profile than an empty one. If a garbage bin or service truck is parked in the space, they can sense that too.

Since they can detect the exact time a car parks and leaves in a space, the sensors can bust meter-cheaters as easily as overhead intersection cameras can detect cars running red lights. Just as the information that a spot is open can be relayed to a driver looking for a space, information that a car’s gone over its time limit can be relayed to the police.

Toulouse’s pilot program will eventually be expanded to cover the entire city; city planners in Paris and Los Angeles are also interested in implementing the technology.

Relief for Harried Drivers: The Parking Space that Finds You [Der Spiegel]

Image by Stefan Simons for Der Spiegel

See Also:

• Groups Build Parks From Parking Spaces
• May 13, 1935: Enter the Parking Meter
• San Francisco Parking Meters Adjust Prices Depending on Demand …
• Smart Parking Meters Hacked — Free Parking For All!
• Our Bike Racks, Ourselves: Crowdsourcing Two-Wheeled Parking …
• "Smart" Parking Meter Implementations, Globalism, and You
• Cell Phones, Internet Bring Parking Meters into the 21st Century …

Google Computer-Driven Prius from Ben Tseitlin on Vimeo.

“[W]e have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.” Hang on, what? It’s never a good sign when life imitates an early Stephen King novel… Those are the words of Sebastian Thrun, Google’s Distinguished Software Engineer, posted to the Official blog. The blogs of the rest of the world naturally responded with a collective, “wait–what?”

Google has, in fact, created a self-driving car–not only that, the company took it on a test drive down the coast of California, from its Mountain View campus to its office in Santa Monica. Then, naturally, they cruised the thing down Hollywood Boulevard. Word is that the car really wanted to check out the selection at Amoeba Records.

And this isn’t the first time Google has taken the car out into the wild. Past exertions have included Lombard Street (the world famous “crookedest street”), the Golden Gate, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the circumference of Lake Tahoe. The car has driven some 140,000 miles–with trained operators on-board, naturally.

The goal of the vehicle is “to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” according to the company. The cars (yes, cars plural) utilize video cameras, radar sensors, and lasers (that’s how you know it’s from the future) to spot other traffic. Built-in maps, meanwhile, help the vehicles navigate the road.

The car is in constant contact with Google’s data centers, which process all of the information gathered by the vehicles.

In all, Google seems confident of the potential of its crazy future car, “We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new ‘highway trains of tomorrow.’ ” Anyone else think that this is beginning to sound like an exhibit from the 1964 World’s Fair?

Ouch! It really stings to see the curvaceous spectacles that car designers can come up with, only to then find out the resulting electric speedsters are either far too expensive or nowhere near becoming a reality. Latest in this group of four-wheeled objects of desire is Jaguar’s C-X75, which roars from 0 to 60mph in 3.4 seconds, cranks out 780bhp courtesy of a quartet of electric motors and a pair of micro gas turbines, and reaches a screaming 205mph at its absolute zenith. You can go for 68 miles just on electric juice or 560 if you let the gasworks recharge the Li-ion battery pack on the go. So it’s gorgeous inside and out, it comes with swan doors, high-res LCD screens and an aluminum body, and it has less chance of being on sale than a dodo sandwich. Yep, it’s an electric supercar alright. See the C-X75 on video after the break.

Continue reading Jaguar C-X75 is the 780bhp electric supercar we’ve all been waiting for, likely to keep us waiting (video)

Jaguar C-X75 is the 780bhp electric supercar we’ve all been waiting for, likely to keep us waiting (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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