Last week, President Obama announced plans to earmark a whopping $4 billion for autonomous vehicle research . These funds will be dispersed to pilot programs all over the country during the next decade—but where and how the money is spent will determine just how big a step forward Obama’s plan really is. Read more…
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7 Autonomous Vehicle Ideas That Need to Happen Now
How can law enforcement agencies track down some of the world’s most (in)famous pirates? The same way that we find out how our school frenemies are doing: stalking them on social media. TorrentFreak has investigated the recent convictions of three of the UK’s biggest file-sharers to learn how exactly they were caught. It turns out that copyright enforcement officials are doing the same sort of armchair-sleuthing that we all do, only that they’ve got a hotline straight to the police. For instance, 22-year-old Reece Baker was more commonly known by his online alias, Baker92. According to the report, his fatal mistake was to include a shout-out to his “baby momzie Ria” in an NFO (info) file. Officials at the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft guessed that Baker92 was a surname/year of birth combination. They then searched Equifax’s credit-rating database to find anyone born in 1992 with that surname and, potentially, a child with a woman named Ria. Similarly, 24-year-old Sahil Rafiq posted torrents under a wide variety of usernames, including memory100, hail_alpha and sohail20. Unfortunately, the sohail20 identity was also used on the customer support website for an online retailer. Rafiq had posted a question concerning his laptop, but signed the piece “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” With his real name, authorities took very little time in finding his Facebook profile and, from there, were able to alert the police. Facebook was also the petard by which 40-year-old Graeme ‘Reidy’ Reid was hoisted, since he used the same anonymous e-mail account on his profile as he did his piracy. FACT bods simply searched for his Hushmail address and his Facebook page popped up — where he’d obligingly listed his occupation as “encoder.” We’ve not checked, but presumably bank robbers are going to start making similarly honest alternations to their social media pages in the near future. As much as FACT would like you to think twice about sharing illegally-obtained material around the web, there’s another moral here. After all, if enforcement officers were able to find these people with a few well-chosen Google searches, then perhaps the secret is to not be so forthcoming with your personal information. Source: TorrentFreak , FACT
Zothecula writes: Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce than regular steel, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It’s now being tested by three of the world’s five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they’ve been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests. Grain of salt: the positive claims here are mostly coming from the company responsible for the process. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Steel Treatment Paves the Way For Radically Lighter, Stronger, Cheaper Cars
By Cat DiStasio Fuel efficiency is one rating that can really set a car apart from the pack. Although you can’t yet walk into just any dealership and drive away in a vehicle that gets more than 100 miles a gallon, there are some sweet rides out there that demonstrate just how incredibly efficient a car can be. To get a better idea of what the uber-efficient car of tomorrow looks like, we’ve compiled some of the most efficient vehicles on the planet, all of which exceed that 100-mpg marker. In fact, most of the cars featured here leave that rating in the dust, and several break into the quadruple digits .Slideshow-342967
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6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon
Mazda The RX-Vision. Mazda calls this design language KODO. 11 more images in gallery We make no apologies for our love of the concept car at Ars Technica, and this year’s Tokyo auto show has just delivered another fix. Home turf for companies like Mazda, Toyota, and Yamaha means they usually push the boat (or in this case the car) out with something special, and 2015 is no exception. First up is Mazda’s RX-Vision, which announces to the world that the company has not given up on the rotary engine. The RX-Vision is a front-engined, rear-wheel drive sports car that has RX-7 fans salivating at the prospect of a replacement for the iconic car. Although Mazda says it has no plan to put the car into production, we wouldn’t be surprised if a groundswell of popular opinion eventually changed its mind. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lexus, Mazda, and Yamaha wow Tokyo with stunning concept cars
Teslas might be ‘practical’ and ‘fast’ and other useful things, but they’re also a little nouveau riche. If you want real electric-car class, you’ve got to hark back to 1905, and this very expensive vintage golf cart. Read more…
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110-Year-Old Electric Car Sells for $95,000
After getting caught cheating on emissions testing by means of software, Volkswagen could face up to $18 billion in fines, reports USA Today. That number is based on the company being assessed the maximum penalty of $37, 500 per affected vehicle. That’s not the only bad news for Volkswagen, which has halted sales of its 4-cylinder diesel cars; the linked article reports that the violations “could also invite charges of false marketing by regulators, a vehicle recall and payment to car owners, either voluntarily or through lawsuits. Volkswagen advertised the cars under the ‘Clean Diesel’ moniker. The state of California is also investigating the emissions violations.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Volkswagen Could Face $18 Billion Fine Over Emission-Cheating Software
Uber, which is notorious for more or less ignoring its drivers’ needs already , is apparently looking to one-day cut out the middleman entirely. According to a report from TechCrunch, the on-demand car service is building a robotics research lab to ” kickstart autonomous taxi fleet development .” Because at least robots won’t get all uppity about sketchy loans and unfair wages . Read more…
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Report: Uber Is Building a Robotics Factory for Self-Driving Cars
We’ve known for a long time that federal authorities have a lot of license plate readers at their disposal, some of which they surely use for nefarious purposes. However, new details have emerged that show exactly how nefarious those purposes are. Does secretly spying on millions of Americans and seizing property sound nefarious enough to care? Read more…
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Feds Are Spying on Millions of Cars With License Plate Readers
An anonymous reader writes Engadget takes a look at Ford’s new Research and Innovation Center located in Palo Alto. The company hopes to use the new facility to speed the development of projects such as autonomous cars and better natural voice recognition. From the article: “This isn’t Ford’s first dance with the Valley — it actually started its courtship several years ago when it opened its inaugural Silicon Valley office in 2012. The new center, however, is a much bigger effort, with someone new at the helm. That person is Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple engineer with significant experience in consumer electronics, semiconductors, aerospace and automotive tech. Ford also hopes to build a team of 125 professionals under Maciuca, which would make the company one of the largest dedicated automotive research teams in the Valley.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Inside Ford’s New Silicon Valley Lab