Richard Jenkins is sitting on a dry lake in western Australia, waiting patiently for the gust that will carry him across the salt and into history at the helm of a land yacht named Greenbird.

The British engineer has spent 10 years chasing his dream of setting the land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle, a goal he's convinced is at last within his reach. Greenbird is capable of at least 120 mph, a figure that would comfortably eclipse the current record of 116.7 mph. "After 10 years I now have the right vehicle, in the right part of the world with the right team in support," he says. "We now just need the weather to cooperate."

Heavy rain has sidelined his team since it arrived at Lake Lefroy on Friday, but the sky is clearing, the salt is drying and the wind is picking up. Greenbird is ready, and the record could fall any day now.

Continue reading "Riding the Wind Into the Record Book" »

Bloggers have been known to do strange things to get wireless internet access: move to Philadelphia, loiter outside the public library and even gain 20 pounds eating one cookie after another at the local Panera. Starting Monday, when Chrysler releases its UConnect in-car WiFi option, we could add "buy a Dodge Avenger" to the list, but we probably won't. In-car WiFi will in all likelihood remain an expensive curiosity until infrastructure upgrades allow true long-range mobile broadband access.

Information Week says the long-promised and much-hyped in-car WiFi system will be available next week at Chrysler dealerships (stop in -- they'll be very glad to see you). Expect to shell out big money for it, though: $500 for the router, $50 to install it, $35 to activate the service, $29 a month to use it and $5 a month for rust-proofing and clear coat. You'll have to own your Chrysler now that its stopped leasing cars, and you'll pay almost $2,700 to read Autopia behind the wheel of your new 300.

Who'd pay that kind of money to surf the Web in traffic? And is Chrysler's system the future of in-car WiFi?

Continue reading "Chrysler's In-Car WiFi Won't Change Where You Surf ... Yet" »

Love it or hate it, the Toyota Prius is a boring car and the last thing you'd expect to see snagging trophies at a car show. But three Swedes with wild imaginations and a truckload of cash have turned a car with the personality of a goldfish into the world's wildest hybrid.

Claes Gustafson and the crew at Classe's Garage completely reworked one of Toyota's eco-wonders and gave it more video screens than the Super Bowl, more speakers than a political convention and a paint job that makes Amy Winehouse look understated.

It took eight weeks and $184,275, and by the time the car rolled out of the shop the only thing they hadn't modified was the chrome trim on the grille.

Continue reading "Storming Sweden in the World's Wildest Prius" »

The Spanair flight that crashed on takeoff at Madrid's airport was bound for the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the western coast of Africa popular with vacationers. It was there that In 1977 two fully loaded 747s collided on a runway, killing 583 people. The crash was the confluence of many different factors, including pilot error and exhaustion, overwhelmed air traffic controllers, work rules, weather, and miscommunication.

On the morning of March 27, 1977, a bomb planted by separatists exploded at the Canary's Las Palmas airport. The airport was closed, forcing planes to divert to Los Rodeos on the island of Tenerife. KLM flight 4805, a 747 inbound from Amsterdam, landed at Tenerife at 1:30 pm. A half hour later a Pan Am 747 touched down there. The two planes, along with scores of others, had nothing to do but sit and wait.

Continue reading "Spanair Crash Brings Reminders of Another Tragic Aviation Disaster" »

Air safety experts say preliminary reports suggest the left-side engine on Spanair Flight 5022 caught fire or exploded as the airliner approached maximum take-off speed, causing the plane to skid off the runway in a crash that killed 153 people.

Witnesses say the Pratt & Whitney engine caught fire as the plane made its second attempt to take off from Barajas airport, causing the MD 82 to veer off course. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which is joining the investigation, said the plane "broke apart" on impact after skidding off the runway in a plume of thick smoke.

Arthur Alan Wolk, a lawyer who specializes in aviation safety, told us he suspects engine failure caused the crash and the plane's speed contributed to the death toll.  "Often times passengers end up walking off the plane after an engine failure," Wolk says.

Continue reading "Engine Fire Emerges As Possible Cause of Spanair Crash" »

Ask Neil Saiki why he designed an all-electric motocross motorcycle and he'll tell you EVs are the future, dirt riders must be more environmentally responsible and the sport faces a shaky future because dirt bikes are so loud they'll make your ears ring. That's all true, but push him a little and he'll confess the truth.

"I love to ride. That's the real reason I did it," he told us with a laugh. "I wanted to make a product that's crazy fast and fun to ride."

The Zero X from Zero Motorcycles is an EV you can actually buy right now for $7,450, and it's a real motorcycle. It weighs a bantamweight 140 pounds with the lithium-ion battery, and with a 23-horsepower motor it'll hit 57 mph and leave a fat streak of rubber on the pavement getting there.

Saiki says the street version coming next year will be even quicker.

Continue reading "Two Wheels, Zero Emissions and Loads of Fun" »

We warned you months ago that in-flight WiFi was coming, and now it's here. This morning American Airlines launched airborne broadband service on 15 nonstop transcontinental flights, allowing passengers to send e-mail, chat by IM and browse the Internet at 36,000 feet. For $12.95, you can spend six hours surfing the web instead of watching a lame romantic comedy.

American and AirCell, the company responsible for the technology behind the system called GoGo, hailed it as a Great Day In History, with AirCell chief executive Blemenstein proclaiming, "today the days of being cut off from the rest of the world while in the air become history."

Sounds to us like a nice way of saying the last refuge from your boss has been breached.

Continue reading "American Ushers in WiFi-Friendly Skies" »

Pity the poor F-150, loyal workhorse of farmers, union laborers, and that half-in-the-bag handyman who rode your tail all the way home from work. As if it wasn't a grave enough indignation to lose best-seller status to the vegetarian Honda Civic, a car that never did a day's worth of manual labor in it's garage-kept high-falutin' city life, Motor Trend reports the F-150 has been ungraciously stripped of several million option configurations. Now, there only a measly ten million customized combinations of drivetrain, body, and electronic bells and whistles.

The move to cut option packages, Automotive News says, began when Ford CEO Alan Mulally had difficulty figuring out the option packages on an E-series van he was buying for his mother's senior center. While "CEO tries to buy own company's product, gets flummoxed at the dealership, vows to change things" makes a good story, we bet that the changes have something to do with the added cost of all those options.

Since all those electronic doo-dads require entirely different wiring harnesses, the F-150 assembly line looked like it was designed more by Xzibit than Henry Ford. Additionally, it was so easy for customers to have a truck custom built that dealer inventory sat stagnant. "Dealers would sit with items on the lot for six to 12 months if you ordered it the wrong way," dealer task force member Rich Savino told Automotive News. In addition to Ford's trucks, Ford promises that most car lines will have fewer than a thousand combinations, with the Focus only getting 150 flavors.

Continue reading "A Ford Tough Year for the F-150" »

A British company is working on an artificial intelligence system that examines clouds to find areas in the sky where rising air creates the lift that allows gliders to sustain flight and powered aircraft to prolong their journeys.

The on-board system being developed by Roke Manor Research uses video feeds to collect information about clouds, ground surface conditions and other elements, then crunches the data to develop flight paths that steer gliders toward rising air.

Continue reading "Artificial Intelligence Gives Gliders a Lift" »

After nearly a decade of planning, officials at Washington's Dulles International Airport unveiled the AeroTrain automated people mover (APM) system, making one more airport feel like Disney World without the singing archetypal ethnic children. Starting in 2009, the AeroTrain will serve the dual purpose of replacing the anachronistic "mobile lounges" that currently transport passengers to their planes and, according to Eric Weiss of the Washington Post, entice federal transit officials to expedite the extension of the Metrorail to Dulles.

While the mobile lounges are certainly space-age retro (even after the removal of the onboard bars) and occasionally efficient, they don't have the right of way when crossing taxiways and therefore end up delaying passengers. Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) engineer Frank Holly told D.C.'s NBC4 that the longest AeroTrain trip would be less than a minute and a half, with waiting times for trains slightly longer than that amount of time. When the AeroTrain is officially put into service next year, travelers could go from the main terminal to any gate in less than three minutes, albeit without any Mobile Lounge Operators.

Continue reading "Take the A(ero)Train at Dulles" »

If you live on an isolated island and want to see the world, you're going to need to fly to get there. No one knows this better than Australians, who are considered some of the most well-traveled people on the planet. But there's one Australian who says her fellow citizens must squash their travel bug for the sake of the environment. 

Adele Horin, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, says her countrymen (and women) are addicted to travel and that all the thermostat adjusting in the world won't mean anything if they continue hopping flights to visit family, attend conferences and explore the world. It's a assessment that's not likely to be well received.

Continue reading "Are Australian Travel Junkies Destroying the Planet?" »

City officials in Delhi are sparring with activists and transportation policy wonks over a ubiquitous site on the streets of India -- cycle rickshaws. The city banned the three-wheelers from many areas three years ago, and though the ban was recently overturned, everyone says the fight is far from over.

Bureaucrats can tick off a long list of reasons for banning rickshaws. They're annoying and dangerous. They impede traffic, clog roads, cause pile-ups and occasionally nail pedestrians. City officials say there are 300,000 to 400,000 rickshaws on the streets of Delhi -- triple what is allowed -- and because they're considered an "ethnic mode of transportation" they can't be cited for violating traffic laws, which they do all the time. Officials also play the organized crime card, saying the rickshaw business is run by a shadowy rickshaw mafia that preys on the poor.

Rickshaw mafia?

Continue reading "It's Car Vs. Rickshaw on the Mean Streets of Delhi" »

So you've driven to San Francisco in your 2008 Bullitt Edition Mustang. You have the Garmin plugged into the cigarette lighter, an iPod full of Lalo Schifrin and you're not leaving until you've blown out your shocks on that street where Steve McQueen caught air again and again. You know, the really hilly one? Wait, there's more than one really hilly street in San Francisco?

Since the SF Convention and Visitors Bureau is highly unlikely to provide a map of historical sites where you can burn out your tires and terrify pedestrians, the kind folks at Seero.com have a solution: a GPS overlay of the entire chase, mapping out every fender-smashing second. Seero calls it "geo-broadcasting," and the same technology can be used with live or pre-recorded videos. For example, in your Bullitt reenactment, you can send out a live geo-broadcast to let the folks back home see where you bottomed out your Mustang, the very streets you marked with a trail of oil and the exact spot you were taken into police custody.

Continue reading "Re-enact Bullitt With GPS Maps" »

Two pilots have flown a helicopter around the world in a record 13 days, breaking the previous record by four days during a trip that took them through 15 countries, 24 time zones and 30 states.

Scott Kasprowicz and Steve Sheik landed at LaGuardia Airport at 10:15 a.m. today, ending a whirlwind global journey that started with a record-setting jaunt across the Atlantic but nearly fell apart in Russia when lousy airports and an engine problem threatened to sideline them. But they kept at it, pushing themselves and their aircraft to the limits in pursuit of a dream.

"Both Steve and I love a challenge," Kasprowicz told us. "We figured flying around the world was pretty big."

Continue reading "Helicopter Pilots Break Round-the-World Speed Record" »

Getting audiophile sound out of your car often means a trip to a stereo shop, where some kid with no musical taste fills your ride with gear that strains your alternator, drains your wallet and invariably sound better in the showroom than behind the wheel.

Automakers have figured out there's a lot of money to be made offering truly high-end audiophile stereos and are starting to respond. Lacking the expertise to do it themselves, many are enlisting some of the biggest names in home audio to turn their vehicles in to rolling concert halls. Lexus started things off by tapping renowned audio geek Mark Levinson to design a system for the SC430. Audi offers an award-winning $6,300 Bang & Olufsen stereo with 13 speakers and a subwoofer in the A8 and S8. Jaguar recently invited British speaker specialists Bowers & Wilkins to give the XF sedan a top-shelf system. Many expect the industry mashups to continue as other premium automakers jump on the bandwagon.

"We are seeing a bit of a paradigm shift," says Martin Lindsay of Bowers & Wilkins. "Levinson was just the beginning. The luxury car market was under-served when it came to audio. You had good, better and best when it came to auto choices but car audio seemed to stop at better. There was nothing for those who wanted the best."

Bentley is the latest to join the party, inviting their countrymen at Naim to develop an audio system befitting automobiles with six-figure prices. The system they've come up with is the result of two years spent trying to get audiophile sound into one of the worst possible environments for it.

Continue reading "Getting Audiophile Sound in the Worst Place for It" »

Suggesting that a domestic industry is about to be eclipsed by foreign competitors is always risky, but that's just the brave card Dr. Leo Hanifin played when he told Detroit that the best automotive innovations will be stamped "Made in China" if we don't soon see a fresh crop of talented American engineers.

Some will scoff at the suggestion Hanifin, dean of the College of Engineering and Science at the University of Detroit, made during a seminar hosted by the Center for Automotive Research. After all, Chinese cars tend to be licensed copies of more established brands (China made 1980s-vintage Audi 100s until 2006), cheap unlicensed knockoffs of popular cars or truly odd vehicles like the "Book of Songs" EV (pictured) that one manufacturer brought to the Detroit auto show this year. Many of these doubting Thomases undoubtedly had parents who felt the same way when a little company called Toyota brought the Toyopet to America in 1957.

Hanifin says it's best to head these international engineering challenges off at the pass, especially when Michigan's seen a double-digit decline in engineering students. "More and better-educated engineers are needed if our nation and its auto industry are to thrive or even survive," he says.

Continue reading "With China Rising, Detroit Needs Engineers ASAP" »

All new cars will have some degree of hybridization by 2020, by which point battery technology will be ubiquitous and vehicles will communicate with one another and the road to make driving safer and easier.

That vision of the future is laid out in "Automotive 2020: Clarity Beyond the Chaos," (.pdf) by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The report, based on interviews with 125 auto industry executives in 15 countries, says the industry is on the cusp of revolutionary changes that will see environmental sustainability and technological innovation become top priorities as automakers respond to consumer demands for more efficient cars that don't sacrifice performance, comfort or reliability.

"In the next 10 years, we will experience more change than in the 50 years before," says an executive with a European automaker who, like all of those quoted in the report, was not named.

The revolution already has begun.

Continue reading "Every New Car Will Be a Hybrid by 2020" »

From the country that brought us pickled herring, particleboard furniture and the funniest Muppet comes the latest advance in eco-driving: compulsory driver's ed courses in hypermiling.

The eco-friendlier driving classes arise from a conundrum familiar to some Americans: Swedes want to be green, but they also love their turbocharged Saabs and full-size Volvos. While Swedish cars aren't especially large to those of us in the land of Town Cars and Escalades, they're gargantuan gas-guzzlers by European standards. That created a problem when members of the European Union agreed to significantly lower carbon emissions, so the wily and unpronounceable Naturvårdsverket (Sweden's EPA) decreed that all new drivers learn how to maximize fuel economy.

This isn't Sweden's first attempt at increasing fuel efficiency. Five weeks of vacation certainly saves commuters some gas, and we suspect the only reason Saabs occasionally die in the driveway is to encourage carpooling.

Continue reading "Don't Drive Like a Meatball: Sweden Teaches Hypermiling" »

U hav got 2 b kidding me! A survey of 1,000 drivers' texting habits by the legal eagles at FindLaw.com finds the incidence of texting while driving (maybe that should be driving while texting) increases as age decreases. No big surprise there, but what's stunning is 48 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds admit to speeding through traffic while letting friends know theyre runN L8.

What we find more interesting -- especially those of us who are occasionally guilty of the aforementioned bad habit -- is just how much legal trouble you can get into if you cause an accident while messaging behind the wheel.

"The potential legal implications of texting while driving go far beyond the possibility of a mere traffic violation," says FindLaw.com attorney Stephanie Rahlfs, presumably from the safety of her own desk. Since every text message is time-stamped and usually saved on the handset, police have no problem proving a driver was texting at the time of an accident.

And that can result in a suspended license and prob8n. OMG.

Continue reading "Half of aL yung drivRs txt Bhind d Wheel" »

For all the hype surrounding the Chevrolet Volt and General Motors' willingness to share every detail of its development no matter how minute, we still don't know what the car will look like. We've caught glimpses of early prototypes and everyone's seen that wind tunnel shot, but photos of a production model have been as elusive as Thomas Pynchon.

GM still isn't letting the cat out of the bag, but it's quietly released some sneak-peek shots over at the GMnext blog, where director of design Bob Boniface talks about the car's styling and the role aerodynamics play in making it so efficient.

"In the end," he writes, "we believe the vehicle is both aesthetically pleasing and extremely efficient."

Continue reading "GM Teases Us With Sneak Peeks of the Volt" »