Author archive
The Cardboard Lexus
Remember when you were a little kid and a cardboard box could provide hours of fun and games? I have vivid memories of my son pretending a cardboard box was a car, especially after his uncles decorated the box with BMW logos (is it a coincidence that he now dreams of owning a BMW X3?).
Lexus has managed to come up with a grown-up version of the cardboard box car, with a little help from LaserCut Works and Scales And Models in the UK. I’m not sure if you’d call the result a sculpture, a model car or the first glimpse of the next big thing in environmentally friendly motoring. In a nutshell, what they’ve made is a cardboard version of one of their very popular IS range . Yes, cardboard. Just about very single bit of the body. What’s more, you can really drive it.
Apparently, the idea was inspired by one of the more unusual tests given to the engineers who work on the Lexus assembly lines: they have to be able to fold an origami cat using their non-dominant hand (this is the left hand for those of us who are right-handed). The origami skill test alone is intriguing enough, as well as being so very typically Japanese. Some of the design features of many Lexus vehicles (Lexi? Lexuses?) look like traditional origami sculptures, so the next best thing for a good publicity stunt failing an actual origami Lexus was to come up with the cardboard version. I guess they couldn’t find sheets of paper big enough.
The cardboard Lexus looks just like the real thing apart from the colour and the visible lines where the different segments of cardboard end. However, if the light’s not brilliant or if you just see it trundling past down the road, you might easily mistake it for the real thing. It’s got the distinctive Lexus spindle grille. It’s got the twin headlights and the air intakes. It’s got the logo. It’s got doors that open and shut, and it’s got a full interior – it’s more or less made a 1:1 scale model car using very, very sturdy cardboard around an aluminium and steel frame.
How they did this is the LaserCut precision laser tooling folk took a standard Lexus IS 300 h sedan and got all its specs from the CAD drawing used by the actual Lexus production works. The car – interior and exterior – was then reduced to a series of slices, each as thick as the sheets of cardboard used by the creative team. A precision laser cutting machine cut each slice out and each piece was numbered so that the cardboard Lexus could be put together properly. The cardboard version was assembled entirely by hand after the cutting process. Here’s a video showing you how it was done:
The finishing touch was to add an electric motor into the engine bay so this cardboard Lexus can really drive. Whether or not it’s the same electric motor as you’ll find in the real Lexus 300h (which is a hybrid vehicle), we don’t know. However, the motor really turns the cardboard wheels, which respond to the cardboard steering wheel.
The result is a little short on the bells and whistles you’d find in the real thing, and the cardboard version certainly doesn’t go anywhere near as fast. However, it does go from A to B.
This model was done just for fun. However, given the current high use of plastics and the like in vehicles, the drive to make things lighter and the push for using sustainable resources, have Lexus stumbled onto something? Add in the requirements for impact-absorbing crumple zones and steering columns that collapse in the case of a collision so the driver doesn’t get impaled and a lot of possibilities open up. In future, will parts of vehicle bodies (not the ones that have to be structurally sturdy and protective, of course) be made from renewable and recyclable cardboard?
They’d better do something about the waterproofing or any future cardboard cars will suffer the same fate as my son’s long-ago cardboard box BMW: getting wet and soggy, then disintegrating.
Your Car Will Soon Be Able To Watch You Pick Your Nose
Already, several cars have the technology to realise that you’re drifting and your attention is lagging and, given the time of day according to all the electronics systems and how long you’ve been driving for, that you are likely to be getting sleepy at the wheel. That’s clever enough as it is and is a huge leap forward when it comes to road safety and crash prevention. However, there’s an Australian company that is taking things one step further and can actually see by your face that you’re getting tired.
Us humans have this “Gosh, you look tired,” thing down pat. We can see the bags under the eyes, the dark circles, the lowered lids and the general bleary look. Sometimes, we’ll ask another person this “Are you OK? You look so tired,” when that person isn’t tired at all. I used to think, “That poor child doesn’t get enough sleep – there’s always dark circles under her eyes” about one girl I saw a lot until I learned that the dark circles were genetic and not to do with poor sleep. Nevertheless, we all know how to do it by instinct, at least if we’re not total psychopaths or sociopaths.
The company Seeing Machines is based in our very own Canberra and is working on facial recognition software that picks up when people are looking tired, distracted or drowsy. The system uses a combination of a collection of discreet cameras trained on the driver – but which aren’t intrusive and in-your-face – plus a cunning computer algorithm that looks at your eyes and works out where you’re looking and for how long. It also looks at your head movements, your facial movements and your facial expressions, and uses these to detect when you’re getting tired.
Seeing Machines is in the process of developing their fatigue monitoring systems in partnership with various mining and other industry partners, including Takata, who specialise in research and development of automotive safety systems. Some of the other products that Takata has been involved with are seatbelts and airbags – things we take for granted these days. However, think about what seatbelts looked like back in, say, the 1980s, where an inertia reel seat belt was pretty flash. Airbags weren’t even heard of then. However, inertia reels are pretty standard these days and are a lot better than they used to be. Take pretensioning systems, for example. Then you’ve got airbags: every new car, even stripped down back-to-basics models have at least one set of airbags; most models have heaps. Takata is a Japanese manufacturer that is responsible for making these airbags and seatbelts, which the motor mechanics then install in the cars. This means that when you buy a new vehicle, the seat belts and the airbags will have been outsourced to the specialists (Takata) rather than being made by, say Toyota or Mitsubishi in-house.
Some of Takata’s products are more high-tech, which is why Seeing Machines is partnering with this manufacturer for their driver fatigue monitoring systems. Things that Takata is already making or is in the process of researching include collision sensors (as seen in pre-collision systems, blind spot warning systems and the like), lane departure warning systems and seat occupant detection systems.
Part of me thinks that Seeing Machines’ technology is brilliant. We’ve all had those times when we’ve had to drive late at night or very early in the morning and the risk of nodding off is real. So having a system that sees when your eyelids are drooping and your head is beginning to slump forward slightly, then jerk back as you snap back awake, then slump forward again is a good safety feature. The Transport Accident Commission says that in Victoria alone, there are 50 deaths per year caused by someone dozing off at the wheel. Given that a car going along at 100 km/h will travel just over 100 m if the driver falls asleep for only four seconds of microsleep, this isn’t surprising.
However, there is another part of me that doesn’t like being looked at and monitored by a computer and a camera, even if this is for my own good. Seeing Machines’ systems developed for truck fleets also monitor if a driver is taking his/her eyes off the road to check out their phone – and reports this back to the fleet’s HQ. Sure, a truckie shouldn’t be Facebooking on the phone while out on the road, but is this machine going to tell on you every time you stare out the window at a gorgeous bit of rural scenery for more than a couple of seconds? If the driver is a woman wearing makeup (or a guy – who are we to judge?) and her eyes water, making her mascara run, does the computer decide that she’s got dark circles under her eyes and is therefore tired? Does the reporting system send the camera footage back to HQ so whoever’s responsible for checking over the reports gets to see when the drivers are picking their noses or singing along with the radio? It’s good for safety, but it is a little bit Big Brother.
What’s more, there’s a larrikin part of me that would want to pull stupid faces at the cameras.
What do others think about facial recognition and fatigue sensing systems like these? Great idea or too invasive? Tell us what you think.
More information is available at the following websites:
Nissan’s New Bio-Ethanol Fuel Cell Technology
It’s the usual problem with new sustainable fuels*. On the one hand, the inventors have come up with a great new technology that’s renewable but still produces lots of lovely energy that we can use to get our cars whizzing around the road. What’s more, it would be a piece of cake to install this in the typical production car (well, in some cases, anyway!). On the other hand, using this technique requires a fair bit of infrastructure to be in place. You need to have bowsers that pump out the biodiesel or the ethanol, you need charging points for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles (and you thought finding a charging point for your smartphone was bad enough), and you need hydrogen refuelling stations for fuel cells. It’s a real Catch-22 situation: the powers would be would install more of the infrastructure if there was more demand for these sustainable energy sources created by people like you and me buying vehicles than need the charging stations, etc. However, I, for one, am not going to buy a vehicle, no matter how eco-friendly it is, if I can’t give it the juice it needs to get moving because the infrastructure is lacking.
Things are slowly changing in the electric car and plug-in hybrid department. We’ve already got an electrical grid that works pretty well most of the time and at least a chunk of the power is generated from renewables. Charging stations are popping up all over the show, which makes buying a hybrid or electric vehicle more attractive. We’ve also got a fairly good history of using ethanol blends in our fuel thanks to our sugarcane industry, so it won’t take that much to increase the amount of ethanol or biodiesel we use.
The renewable clean technology that’s been a bit slower to get off the ground has been hydrogen fuel cell technology. This is super-clean burning, producing only water vapour as “exhaust” but powering our cars on hydrogen has some drawbacks. Putting in the fuel cell into production cars at the factory is easy. Fitting in a hydrogen tank is a bit harder, as these things have to be large and as tough as gnarly old ironbark tree or tougher. Then you’ve got the infrastructure problems, as hydrogen sources can’t be pumped from your regular bowser, as it’s a gas, not a liquid.
However, just last week, Nissan announced a possible way to sidestep the infrastructure problem. They’re in the process of researching and developing a new sort of fuel cell: one that uses hydrogen derived from bio-ethanol within the fuel cell itself to generate electricity to power a car. This is known as a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell or what Nissan has called its “e-Bio Fuel Cell”. This technology looks set to be released in countries where they already have a good source of ethanol handy as a byproduct of sugar or corn-growing industries. In other words, countries like Australia!
The process works more or less like this: first, the ethanol or ethanol and water mix gets pumped from a regular bowser into a regular fuel tank. The ethanol goes through the reformer part of the system to become H2 (chemically, ethanol is CH3CH2OH, so there’s lots of handy hydrogen). At the same time, air comes in through the intakes, and the hydrogen and oxygen head for the fuel cell stack. This generates electrical energy, which gets stored in the battery, which, in turn, powers the electric motor.
The aim is to have a vehicle that’s a nice, quiet electric car with no or very low emissions and diddly-squat of a carbon footprint (although the official Nissan press release didn’t say what happens to the excess carbon and oxygen left over after converting the ethanol). With this sort of fuel cell, it’s likely that Nissan will have a 100% electric vehicle that has better range than what’s currently possible with the typical EV, such as Nissan’s very own LEAF . On top of this, there’s no need for new infrastructure to supply the fuel and it won’t take ages to fill up, unlike the situation with plug-in hybrids and EVs today, which take a fair bit of time to charge, so you have to plan your plug-in time to fit your schedule.
It sounds like a real win-win situation: a low-emissions vehicle that uses sustainable fuel, is quiet, has decent range and is fairly quick to fuel up. It’s not sure at this stage when Nissan will be putting these fuel cells into its vehicles, but it shouldn’t be too far away, so watch this space!
* This was written before I spotted my fellow Private Fleet blogger’s post on the sustainable fuel issue. Great minds think alike!
Glow In The Dark Highways
Have you ever been driving along a road at night and suddenly had that moment of disorientation as you realise that something has happened to the road markings? It’s pretty disconcerting and if you have been a little drowsy, that tends to snap you awake… well, it snaps me into full alert, anyway. It’s particularly alarming on rural roads, where there isn’t much other light from streetlights and the like around to guide you.
The safe and sane thing to do here is to slow down a tad and to look around you more carefully. Usually, you’ll be able to spot the white lines and yellow lines showing you where you ought to be and where the road is going. The posts marking the sides of the roads can be a different story. Although they’re vital for road safety, things always happen to them. Cows use them as scratching posts and snap them. People who tackle corners far too quickly clip them and take them out (there’s only so much all the active safety features in any car can do and the laws of angular momentum still apply). Idiots think that it’s fun to pull them out and do goodness knows what with them. Bushes and grass grow over them and obscure them.
If only the markings telling you where the road begins and ends were a bit more visible.
Well, they can be. In the Netherlands, where they really pull out the stops and concentrate on designing safer roads, an urban and transport design company called Heijmans has come up with the Smart Highway. This looks like just a normal road during the daytime but at night, the lines glow. They don’t just reflect light, like normal road markings do; they actually give out light. It’s similar to the concept of glow-in-the-dark paint. During the daytime when there’s lots of light, the paint charges up. When it’s dark, it starts glowing. When you think about how many other things we use every day come in glow-in-the-dark (including nail polish, condoms and basketballs), it’s kind of surprising that glow-in-the-dark road markings haven’t been tried earlier.
The other bonus with having glowing lines is that it reduces the need for having quite as much other lighting provided by the roading companies and town councils. With the glow-in-the-dark technology, you get all the advantages of having lights at the side of the road but without the hassle of setting up electrical systems for this. This means that you get all the advantages of good lighting but without the energy demands.
A pilot Smart Highway is in place in the Netherlands – the N329 in Oss, found about roughly in the middle of the country not too far from the border with Germany.
More information is available at the Heijmans website.
The other thing about the Glowing Lines smart highway is that it has had some design input from an artist. This means that it isn’t bland and boring like a lot of road safety features. It’s designed to be pretty as well as practical. The artist behind the concept has also worked on a cycleway (in the Netherlands again) that uses the same glow-in-the-dark technology but has based the arrangement of the lights on a Van Gogh painting so you can bike through “Starry Night” come to life.
The question I have to ask is why on earth other road design companies don’t have artists on their team. Just imagine what our roads and road signs could look like if they weren’t just boring and utilitarian. Car designers have cottoned on – just compare the bland boxes of the 1980s with, say, the Toyota Corolla of today with its interesting angles and lines. So why don’t road designers give it a go?
Level 2, 9 Help Street