Recently, the EPA and COBB Tuning have settled after the latter was sued for providing emissions control defeating equipment. As per the EPA’s settlement details document, COBB Tuning have since 2015 provided customers with the means to disable certain emission controls in cars, in addition to selling aftermarket exhaust pipes with insufficient catalytic systems. As […]
You normally don’t think a lot would go into the construction of a chair. However, when that chair is attached to a commercial jet plane, there’s a lot of technology that goes into making sure they are safe. According to a recent BBC article, testing involves crash dummies and robot arms. Admittedly, these are first-class […]
Although battery fires in electric cars and two-wheeled vehicles are not a common phenomenon, they are notoriously hard to put out, requiring special training and equipment by firefighters. Although the full scope of the issue is part of a contentious debate, [Aarian Marshall] over at Wired recently wrote an article about how the electric car industry […]
One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constant vigilance to a relatively boring task with high stakes, which is not something humans are particularly well adapted for. Modern GPS equipment can […]
Sliding in an extra slice of cruise ship to lengthen it. (Credit: Silversea cruises) The number of people going on cruises keeps rising year over year, with the number passengers carried increasing from just over 3.7 million in 1990 to well over 28 million in 2023. This has meant an increasing demand for more and […]
[Michelle Hampson] reports in IEEE Spectrum that Chinese researchers may improve self-driving cars by mimicking how the human eye works. In some autonomous cars, two cameras use polarizing filters to help understand details about what the car sees. However, these filters can penalize the car’s vision in low light conditions. Humans, however, have excellent vision […]
What’s a dog to do if they want to do some accessible skateboarding? [Simone Giertz]’s three-legged pup, [Scraps], got the chance to try a LEGO Technic board for her thrills. This electric LEGO skateboard features six motors and paw pedals to let [Scraps] steer while [Giertz] remotely controls the speed of the board. While it’s […]
You know, it feels as though it’s getting more and more difficult to compete for Father of the Year around here. And [Jon Petter Skagmo] just laid down a new gauntlet — the incredibly overly-engineered kids car. While the original plan was to build the entire car from scratch, [Jon] eventually opted to use an […]
In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your car was a rolling computer complex? The electronic speedometer has been around for well over a century and, when […]