Here’s a little known fact: Henry Ford used natural material like hemp and stray to reinforce plastic components in his cars. Now, Ford is at it again with a small quarter trim bin found in the third row of the Ford Flex made out of wheat straw bio-filled polypropylene. Wheat straw!

Sure, it’s just one small part in one vehicle, but according to the numbers, the impact on the environment sounds at least significant.

Treehugger,

This modest step, says Ford, will cut the need for some 20,000 pounds of petroleum and prevent 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

This so-called wheat straw is the byproduct of wheat harvesting and isn’t exactly useful. Chances are that if this trial works out on this one part, Ford, and the rest of the industry, will look into ways to further incorporate green materials into their vehicles. I, for one, look forward to the day that my steering wheel is made from corn and I can spreed a little butter and salt on it to enjoy a nice snack while driving down I-75.

Holy cats, Ford is going downmarket. Way down. Way, way down. Daniel Grossman, VP of Ford Motor Company, just announced to ONN the $650 car, which will be the least expensive, and cheapest, car available in any market. That’s right. A car I can afford to buy on my salary. My wife will be so excited. Watch the video announcement after the jump.

This beast isn’t exactly unprecedented (they need vehicles like this to get around at resorts, for filming, etc) but it is reportedly the fastest one out there. And once you get over the weird look it has (triangle-wheels) it’s actually pretty attractive.

Incidentally, there need to be more snow-racing games. Driving down a freaking mountain, there’s something you don’t get to do in real life. No more “Need For Speed” on regular streets. I want to drive down the Matterhorn, people!

[via Neatorama]

“Instead of focusing solely on determining routes to a specified waypoint, our system utilizes analysis of driver behavior in order to identify the set of goals the driver would like to achieve.” That is innovative, and as the video above indicates, AIDA can work to help you efficiently navigate your home city. It still looks suspiciously destination-oriented, and I wonder how much our continued reliance on navigation products is going to make us miss out of serendipitous discoveries, like the mom-and-pop movie theater nearby is showing your favorite B movie, or a big multi-family yard sale is taking place this Saturday. The more we rely on technology to get us where we’re going, the less likely we are to see what’s going on nearby.

AIDA is a product of the MIT SENSElab, the MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab. The full press release is available.

How much you enjoy Forza Motorsport 3 entirely depends on the time you have to invest in it. If you’re able to put in the man-hours you’ll find a racing sim that’s a deep as you want it to be, and just as rewarding. If you’re only able to play a few minutes here and there, well, it’s not really the same thing.

The game presents itself as a driving simulator, but one that won’t punish you for not knowing the difference between a carburetor and a CD changer. And, incidentally, you’ll be changing the game disc as soon as you turn it on, for the game’s developer’s, Turn 10, couldn’t fit it all on just one; an optional content install prompts as soon as the game loads. You’ll need approximately 2GB of free space on your hard drive to get the entire FM3 experience.

From there a cheery British announcer guides you through the game—it’s as if you’re playing Top Gear. The standard modes are there, but it’s career mode that shows the game in its best light. You’re granted a low-level car—something that you yourself may well own in real life—then race from event to event, earning credits and plaudits from other car manufacturers along the way. The credits are used to buy upgrades, while after the occasional successful race you’ll get a message along the lines of: “Fiat thinks you’re a good driver, so they’re giving you this brand new car for free!”

Lather, rinse, repeat. You’ll go from Class Z clunker to Class A holy-cow-this-is-fast as you plug along in career mode, which will take some time. Better skip out on Heroes this week if you want to make the most of this game.

The game looks good, yes, but I’m hesitant to call it the best-looking racing game I’ve ever played: that title belongs to Racer Driver: Grid. (Note: I never bought Dirt 2 because rally racing doesn’t appeal to me.) I don’t know, things just look too shiny to me. The best way I can describe it is, remember the first few FIFA games for the PS3/360, and how “shiny” the player models looked? I get the same feeling here.

Not that we’re graphics whores ’round these parts, but I’d be remiss to not mention how the game looks.

To make another comparison to Race Driver: Grid, I do feel that the menus in the game, and just the way the game is presented, is less interesting than Codemasters’ hit. In Grid, menus fly by and spin in circles, you can see people walking about your garage while selecting a new paint scheme, your earned credits fill up in dramatic fashion, slowing down as you approach an upgrade point… It just seems more “next-gen,” more “hmm, now this is different” than FM3, which is very much “well, this isn’t anything special.”

So is the game good? Yes, of course; I dare you not to enjoy it. You will, however, have a much better time if you can sit there for several hours rather than treating it as a quick “hey let me kill 10 minutes” fix.

That’s it.

Installation will set you back $500, and will be installed in your new GMC, Chevy, Buick, or Cadillac, setting you back about $29 for 1 GB of service. Go over 1 GB of transfers, and you’re cut off, unless you pay for the 5 GB version. Range is limited to about 150 feet from your vehicle, which would be fine for camping, but you wouldn’t want to use it for torrenting or anything. Or you could just get a Mifi.

[via Autoblog]

Volkswagen is taking great strides in making the roads safer and remove the dangerous fun from driving by developing fully autonomous vehicles. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, director of the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) about the future of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) at Stanford University and how the technology developed there is being integrated into Volkswagen Group vehicles. You may be able to buy a real-life K.I.T.T before you know it. It probably won’t be a Pontiac though.

You may recall that Volkswagen was the first team to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 by having a fully autonomous Volkswagen Touareg SUV (his name was Stanley, btw) drive 132 miles through the Mojave Desert. Then for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a VW Passat Wagon took second place behind Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon University in a 60 mile urban course. But those two challenges are nothing compared to what’s on tap for next year: Pikes Peak in an autonomous Audi TT-S.

CrunchGear: How about we start with an overview of the project.

The VAIL is an initiative that we started here from our electronics research lab in Palo Alto to initialize automotive center at Stanford. We got the smartest people from all over the world in one place. We already had experience with the DARPA Grand Challenge race success. We won the desert race with the autonomous driving cars together with the Stanford racing team. Then we repeated the success in the Urban Challenge in 2007.

So we thought how can we bring each competence together, create a platform for a convenient automotive industry and Silicon Valley partners to look into the future and find some solutions for the mobility, safety and environmentally-friendly problems, which we have to face together.

The Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory funded a building, which will be dedicated and opened tomorrow (10/24/2009). We’ll fund the research projects with $750,000 per year for the next five years.

CrunchGear: How is Stanford involved in the project?

We expect first that we collaborate with the Stanford genius together on the solutions that we create for the future. We divided the VAIL topics into three major themes

One is how do we want to drive autonomously in the urban environment. We have so many problems that we have to solve like direction recognition, lane warning, lane detection, but all these obstacles have to be observed by camera systems in the urban environment, which is one of the biggest challenges.

What we would like to create for all of these three topics, and I’ll come back to the 2nd and 3rd, is initiatives. The vision for urban driving is to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles autonomously and that involves traffic jams and obstacles. What can we do to provide to our drivers with? They want to text while driving and we have to make that safe.

We already established systems in our current models like blind spot detections, adaptive cruse control but what’s the future for that? Can we already allow them to press the auto button to start texting? So that’s the vision. Drive along the highway and allow the driver to do something other than driving.

The second vision is up to the limits together with the driving dynamics department at Stanford. If you come to a critical situation, you generally have to take the control over from the driver.

Let me explain it to you this way: If you brake your car without control, you will definitely hit the obstetrical in front of you. Can you imagine that we can try to find the emergency parts for the driver and turn the car into a different path to avoid any impact any with the obstacle? It would be a smart system that acts within the limit’s range of the car that would find an emergency solution. The driver would never be able to do this because there is too much information within the milliseconds.

The idea for up to the limits is to look at the best drivers to give us super examples how to react in critical situations. So we looked at a German rally driver that drives up Pike’s Peak. It’s a really critic race, but it’s a challenge for us to try to understand what makes this rally driver so special and get this knowledge into the car.

We built a next generation autonomous car that’s able to drive like a rally drive and drift into the curves. It drives even in extreme situations. We think we can actually drive up hill to Pike’s Peak next year. That’s the second project.

The third one is with multitasking. We actually sponsored a project seen in the NYT on what people are really able to multitask or are they not really able to focus on one task and fulfill that. It’s really an interesting study. But for us it’s really interesting because we would like understand what the perfect interface between humans and machines. Do you believe in your car? Do you believe that if you press the autopilot button that the car would actually do what you would expect. Or do you have blue screens like we experience everyday – I don’t want to blame Windows – but with our operating systems. We have to prepare the highest reliability for systems. But what do you expect in these relationships between the car and the driver in the future.

These three founding purposes are the main intentions at VAIL.

CrunchGear: What type of testing has the Pike’s Peak vehicle seen so far?

We actually tested that at Salt Flats to have the open area available to be able drive up to the limits without any risks. It sounds crazy but we needed the smartest people actually at Stanford to prepare to the algorithms because you have to control systems again in the in-stable mode and the few years ago we thought it was impossible. But we did test already and we created a movie to show that’s possible and we think we can go one step farther and do this crazy race.

Again I told you that it’s rally style driving. It’s really incredible; up to the limits.

CrunchGear: One of the reason they use Pikes’s Peak is because of the environmental conditions. How does the altitude affect the vehicle?

We have the best system actually to use for that in the Audi TT-S and it’s working perfect. We tried it already at Pike’s Peak in slow mode to figure out what type of problems we might have in that environment.

CrunchGear: What else has changed in the Audi TT-S

If you saw our Junior VW Passat Wagon urban environment, we had many roadblocks to avoid and accidents with any person in that car. We don’t need the rack on the roof anymore. We don’t need big sizes for that at all. It looks almost like a stock car. You would only see three antennas on top of the roof. That’s all. We fit the computer in the trunk. We really want to show off that we’re coming closer to an actual product. It’s not too far away.

You can watch the video and find out, or just scroll past the picture of the lovely Kari Byron. The car part is about 40 minutes in.

Yes. Apparently, covering your car in clay and dimpling it like a golf ball will result in a significant increase in gas mileage. Who would of thunk it? The real trick it to make sure the dimples are scaled up to the proper size. I could get into the science, but it’s easier to let Jamie and Adam tell you all about it.

The system has a built-in GPS chip that “compares your automobile’s bearings with an internal database of 6,000 red light and speed camera locations in the U.S. and Canada.” What’s more, the display shows your current position on a street map and “alerts you to the presence of red light cameras with visual and audible cues.”

Though this device walks like a GPS system and talks like a GPS system, it does not function as a GPS system. That is, there’s no turn-by-turn directions or points of interest or anything like that. On behalf of everyone reading this, why not just add in those features and call it a day? It might help justify the $200 price tag.

Up-to-date data can be transferred to the device via USB. The first year of updates is free, while subsequent years will set you back $20 apiece.

The Red Light Camera Detector [Hammacher Schlemmer]

You can also show off by popping the trunk and hitting the panic button, too. The module can be added to existing compatible Viper systems for $300 or there’s an all-in-one system for $500 – both are currently available at Best Buy.

Since the starter module has some sort of cellular connection built-in, Viper will be charging $30 per year for remote iPhone starting features. The first year is free, though, and the system is also compatible with the iPod touch over Wi-Fi.

If all this stuff sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall a similar prototype Android version called “KEI” (see coverage here) that an MIT student developed back in May of 2008.

Here’s a video demonstrating how the Viper system works.

Viper – Remote Start System with SmartStart [Best Buy via CNET]

I won’t give you all the details, but the article points out that the system’s sound is clean and detailed no matter what the volume is set at. This is thanks to a dedicated system of amps and processors, along with acoustical enhancements to the vehicle. The system’s single 8-inch sub does not pound per se though. Chances are that the people that can buy the $45k Lincoln new aren’t looking to bump. They just want to make sure El Rushbo comes in nice and clear.

AUTOMOBILES

And while standard dash cams work well for run-of-the-mill vehicular lifecasting, their relatively low resolutions and short recording times make for a less than desirable compendium of your transportational adventures.

For $300, you can get yourself the Car Cam Voyager — an LCD-equipped video camera that’s capable of recording up to 48 hours of 720×480 video to a 32GB SD card. Installation consists of mounting the camera to one of the overhead visors and plugging it into your vehicle’s lighter.

It’ll capture clips in 15-minute increments and when the storage gets filled up, the camera will automatically delete the oldest clips to make room for the new ones. There’s even a built-in battery that’ll keep the camera recording for 15 minutes in the case of an accident.

And last but not least, there’s an RCA output cable which will allow you to hook the camera up to your TV when you get home so you can relive the excitement that is your daily commute. I’d also suggest popping out the SD card and uploading your videos to YouTube so that everybody else in the world can get in on the fun.

Car Cam Voyager w/LCD [Brick House Security]

It’d be a pretty traditional hybrid, as unexciting as that sounds, and it would have a full-sized 2L, 4-cylinder boxer engine as well as two power plants, 10 and 20kW, for electric propulsion. It will of course be all wheel drive.

It just looks awesome to me. A practical, roomy AWD Subaru, rocking gullwings? Man, if I don’t get one, at least I’ll see them all over the place because they’re so awesome. Assuming they ever get made, that is.

Hyundai? Pretty please bring OLED screens to the automotive world. It doesn’t have to be as futuristic as the dashboard in the Blue-Will concept car, but OLEDs are just so nice. Ford is already using LCD screens in its latest hybrids, but why not up the game a bit, and do something radical? Please?

[CarAdvice via OLED-Info]

Help me understand this. Toyota today announced some sort of anti-drunk driving “gadget” (more like a complete system, including a digital camera and a breathalyzer) that prevents a car from being turned on if it detects a certain amount of alcohol in your system. You know, to help reduce the number of drunk driving-related accidents, which in the U.S. caused nearly 12,000 deaths last year. That’s one death every 45 minutes.

And yet, all too predictably, there’s a certain segment of the population who claim the system will fail because it infringes upon people’s freedoms.

Here’s a sampling from Breitbart:

Sure way to lose American sales.
We like our freedom, not dictates.

…

I don’t drink & drive, but I’ll be damned if Toyota, or any other automaker is going to dictate to me.
There will be a good business on technicians who override these systems.

…

Time to properly install one of these devices…. about 4 hours

Time to bypass the device…. about 10 seconds

Another wasted technology bought and paid for by your American tax dollars going overseas

…

NAZIS

…

Yeah, lets just put the cop inside the car with you! Blow an illegal limit, the doors lock and the alarm will go off if you open them. Take this gadget and jam it up your Japanese arsh!

I literally laughed out loud at the “NAZIS” barb. Not even Godwin would have predicate that. (On a side note, can anyone point me in the direction of a book or paper that describes Nazi Germany’s policies with respect to drunk driving?)

Granted, this reaction is to be expected when Drudge is involved. (He linked to the Breitbart version of the article.) That site attracts a certain reader, let’s say. The kind that likens still-in-draft bills with the death of the American way of life—whatever that is—itself.

I mean, what does this gadget do, exactly? It detects if you’re drunk. If you’re drunk, however that’s defined in your local jurisdiction, you should not be driving a car, full stop. End of discussion.

And yet, people will bleat on about their “freedoms” being violated. Driving drunk is not some noble exercise of your freedom, but rather is an example of needless (and senseless, but there doesn’t seem to be too much sense there to begin with) recklessness. Do not confuse an ability to vote in elections and participate in a democratic republic with your ability to careen down a highway, killing a perfectly innocent person, or persons, in the process.

/soapbox