New technology from Google will allow restaurants, shopping malls and garages to offer free taxi rides to their customers. A patent awarded to the internet giant reveals how the company plans to use advertising revenue to fund free local travel – possibly using its own fleet of self-driving taxis . How will the free Google taxi work? In the way…
A new petrol engine from Nissan is so small it could be carried on board a passenger plane as hand luggage and yet weighs only 40 kg. At 1.5 litres, the capacity of the DIG-T R is no larger than the engine in a Nissan Micra, but whereas the little city car produces around 65hp, the new power plant produces…
An ambitious plan by Boris Johnson to spend £100m on transforming a handful of outer-London boroughs into ‘mini Hollands’ could result in an influx of Dutch-style bikes. Most of the budget will be spent on major improvements to infrastructure including the scrapping of gyratories and the re-connection of neighborhoods fractured by main roads, but the safer conditions for cyclists that result will make possible…
A French boat building company has unveiled the Foldavan – a lightweight bicycle caravan that collapses for easy storage and towing. Wooden Widget already produces a range of collapsible boats and sailing dinghies that can be towed behind a bicycle and the Foldavan shares many of the same design principles. Built from wood, carbon fibre and reinforced PVC cloth, the teardrop-shaped Foldavan has three…
As cars become progressively faster and larger, help for pedestrians might be at hand in the form of Prosthesis – a 5-metre tall, battery-powered walking machine from Canada. A team of engineers in Vancouver is building Prosthesis, a gargantuan human-controlled robot designed to walk and run. As car drivers are now surrounded by air bags, crumple zones and computer aids,…
23/01/14
