Mac Motorcycles out of the UK makes these gorgeous bikes powered by an affectionately known “Thumper” one cylinder that fires every second turn. I’m curious to hear what that sounds like, but there doesn’t seem to be much information around unfortunately.
In any event, wow.
I was driving to my hometown for the Easter long weekend and was passed by this; the Hyundai Veloster. It’s striking.
The lines are nice, like the lovechild of a Juke and an Evoque built on a Mini chassis. The three door thing is different and honestly, makes a lot of sense. Who needs symmetry?
The front is a wee bit gaping for my tastes. I liked the Audi look and I’m actually sad that they’ve been moving away from it recently, but the front on this hot hatch is just a bit… remora. Though I do love those side dams that move into the lines of the headlights.
Overall, I’m excited for this kind of car because I think it’s exactly what our society is looking for and previously found in more massive SUVs. These are smaller, sportier and better on fuel. Living in the land of pickup trucks with lone drivers and empty beds, it’s a welcome sign of things to come.
Photos via
If you cruise car news sites you’ll probably have heard that they’re reviving the Datsun brand. The news is bittersweet for me because I’m a huge fan of the past work and all the faux-nostalgia that comes with it but I’d hate to see it driven into the ground with generic new stuff. I really don’t mind Kia, but that’s sort of what comes to mind when I imagine what the new Datsun will end up like.
Secondly, and perhaps most forebodingly, the new logo above there is atrocious and is exactly the move to banal, boring predictable rubbish.
Some word association. There’s a song which is fitting for two reasons: a) it features the word Datsun right in the title, but b) because it actually was a song I played a lot in my old Japanese car a few summers ago, when the sun fell hot onto the seats and we sat by the river enjoying the breeze. There’s something in the word that’s just dusty and well used and loved and black leather seats cracked from years of some young couple adventuring and going on road trips down endless roads. There’s that gold that you see on the old Firebirds and sometimes crossed over into the land of JDM – this , really, is the colour scheme of beautiful old cars. From Countach to Esprit there’s just something classic about that. It harkens to the dark alleys just behind the neon lights, when streets lit up with auburn glow and gangs had dance offs instead of shooting one another because everything was classy like that. There’s a bit of space where my “memory” composed of the stories I’ve heard and movies seen bleed together, as if people were playing Micheal Jackson’s Beat It in such a car though they are ten years apart. The guy’s vest at 0:54 is that diamond stitch leather, which is what a 260Z’s seats should be made of (as should the Countach’s). The people who lived through the era will laugh at my such loose associations, but I even lump the early Daft Punk soundtrack into there, reminded by the intro to the Electroma – that Ferrari 412 could easily be replaced by the Fairlady styling.
But in the end, it’s a faded thing. Those gold stripes aren’t shiny and the black has softened with time. It’s grown beautiful because of it’s age. The leather smells of dust and warmth and the interior is that most comfortable form of stifling. The kind where you can’t breathe but smile because it’s summer. Your leather jacket squeaks a bit when you get in, sitting low in the buckets. It’s not a plastic FOB but a simple metal key in the ignition, springing with anticipation. The music player winds to life and those classic synth lines from the 70′s / 80′s resound as you set off into the horizon fire.
Will the new cars encompass these things? Nah. And maybe that’s alright. Some kid waxing poetic about isn’t going to change anything and nor do I expect it to. I’m sad to see the direction set off in this way, and it’s a brand that has those memories in a lot of people’s mind to play off of, but in the end the goal and duty of the brand was to provide decent cars that were affordable and if they can inject that into this market I fully support them. In the end, that is a far nobler cause than any mere aesthetic.
So, best of luck out there, however you end up doing it. Even if the old style is dead, may the old goals remain. Make something good and in such a way that everyone can afford it.
Sure the ad is dated and cheesy by our standards. How anyone survived the inevitable whiplash of such brazen driving is beyond me, but that’s not the point. The point is lovely and happens between 45 and 54 seconds. Check out that line up.
It’s three vehicles, but really only one with a couple of additional roof options. The manufacturing is the same for all of them. It’s brilliant.
Of course, this is nothing new or different – everyone has some product manufactured in this way, it’s smart – but I look around at our sheer amount of options today and it’s not surprising that people are paralyzed by them.
If nothing else, be inspired and refreshed by the utter simplicity of the product lineup. I am.
I want so much to like it. The matte black and swooping flatness. The subtle red trim and the huge front disk. The way that mid plate flows into the rear arm. These are things I’ll always love.
So it pains me, in a way, to say that I really don’t. The creator, who stands proud like a father (which is admirable in any designer – I do greatly appreciate that) was inspired by a charging buffalo, and I do see that. The stocky front and heavy forward balance do portray this very well, but from where that excited tautness comes is also it’s weakness: it’s aesthetically (and physically) unbalanced. It just looks wrong.
This review should not be scathing, because I love everything about the project: the brick walls and wood floors of their office are perfect, the interviews and quotes seem like a man truly inspired and driven – these are awesome, awesome things. I just wish that front end were different.
Photos via
Mesmerizing, isn’t it?
I’m very pro-driverless cars. Seriously. I love driving, don’t get me wrong, and there will always be racetracks because of exactly that. But for the everyday? Bring them on.
“But Brennan, doesn’t that seem dangerous? Trusting computers?” and to that I reply a simple image:
I see this at least once – often more – every time I’m out driving. Really? And we’re supposed to be worried about computers making mistakes? Ha.
So.
You sit back in your car, the seats face each other like a restaurant booth so you can easily and comfortably converse with each other. The world outside the windows whizzes by at a speed that you were very uncomfortable with at first but grew to love as it delivered you to your destination in a third the time. You arrive. You open the doors and disembark, closing them behind you. Since this is the future they’d probably have a subtle cool hydraulic hiss of pistons. You step away from the car to wherever you were going and the car pulls away silently from the curb, melting seamlessly and perfectly into the stream of traffic to pick up your spouse from work.
The intersections don’t have red lights and traffic signs in general are taken down – everything flows at once and is centrally controlled. “But Brennan!” you interrupt again “Isn’t that one step closer to a totalitarian government controlling your location?” and that, I admit, is a very good point. On the other hand, have you ever tried to go against a red light on an old country road when it’s obviously empty and hasn’t changed in ten minutes? It’s terrifying. Psychologically the red light is an overwhelming power. Would that be true for a resistance fighter’s car chase through the dystopian city? Probably not. Still, what’s the likelihood of that, anyway?
The benefits are immense and I for one welcome our driverless overlords.
Intersection video via
It’s a shame the program ended the way it did – a few in museums and the rest destroyed. There was actually a turbine tank in the works from Chrysler and like the car counterpart wasn’t accepted mostly because it was new and different. To be fair, though, while they didn’t sell any turbine cars, they did sell a few turbine M1 tanks.
I don’t think I’ll get into the industrial design of the car itself: it’s pretty era-typical in it’s decadence. It features a circular turbine heat sink motif, but really wasn’t that different from what was on the road at the time.
So. Why a turbine, anyway? Well, Jay Leno and a 60′s educational film has you covered:
(I can’t embed with time markers, so you’ll have to manually skip to 10:14)
It should be noted at this point that Americans seem to say ‘Turbine’ like ‘Turban’ which I hadn’t heard before. We say Turbine acknowledging the ‘e’ at the end: tur-bine.
Basically, there are far less moving parts which means it runs longer without maintenance and has a much longer engine life. It doesn’t require antifreeze and can start without problems in the cold, providing instant heat for passengers. It gets much better fuel economy (the mechanism itself is much more efficient) and you can run it on basically any fuel. Exhaust gases burn much cleaner. No vibrations and negligible oil consumption; won’t stall from over burden. The engine itself is smaller and lighter than comparable internal combustion varieties.
Pretty great, from the sounds of it.
So what went wrong?
It was a combination of things, according to Bob Sheaves, Chrysler Corp. wasn’t doing so well in 1979 and in the bailout had to shut down the Defense contracts, which included the Turbine M1 project. It was public knowledge that the technology was there but has since faded into obscurity. The company had the tool and dies for Turbine car production but given the shaky economic times it was deemed too risky.
I always thought it had to do with the lag – turbines work really well at set RPM and don’t like to vary all that much, making for a delay between when you put your foot down and when you get response from the engine. This, as I’ve learned, wasn’t really an issue by the end of the program. In 1980 they had a seventh generation engine which had a lag of under one second (only a bit longer than piston versions) which was down from the notorious seven seconds seen in the first generations. If you’ve driven anything turbocharged you’ll know that spooling feeling, that delay. This was a stigma that stuck with the cars in the public’s mind.
Since it requires a higher RPM to stay efficient there were concerns with excessive fuel consumption while idling, even with it’s better efficiency. This is interesting, considering it will deliver torque at zero RPM – just starting the engine easily has enough power to push the car. Couldn’t they have just turned off the engine at every available chance?
Exhaust heat was exactly that: hot. Not only dangerous as a public concern but also that the engineering incorporated expensive alloys. I am curious, though, given how much material technology has improved in the past fifty years, if that would still be as much a problem.
The first generations were loud but if you kept watching the Jay Leno video above the noise (albeit more vacuum cleaner sounding than normal) seems reasonable inside the cabin. Again, I wonder how much that could be improved just by using modern materials and technologies.
Cost. Yup. The all defining factor. There might be less parts but each part has to be that much more exotic. Despite the awesome low maintenance of the engines, if something goes it really goes – and that’s costly. Back once more: modern materials? I’m curious and the internet doesn’t seem to have much on the subject.
You can read more here, which is where a lot of the above information comes from (cross referenced, of course).
I suspect there are a lot of really cool technologies that were invented long ago and because of the materials and methodology were impossible / impractical to make so then became forgotten. If I had the money, believe me, I’d make an entire research department that just revisits old tech like this. Alas.
It’s crazy to read about the first Apollo missions. How they managed to do anything with such limited computing power is astounding to me. I’m a new generation, I guess. I can’t long divide on paper because I haven’t needed to since grade five or whenever it was that we learned it.
There’s a lot going on here so I’ll try to break it down best I can.
The video itself is a mess. The establishing shots are too long since they aren’t building suspense. The Disney-esque particle ribbons seem sort of 90′s and busy. The Tron city at the end should have been a modern skyline to show the real world implication (to contrast and offset the entire fantasy of the previous) as if taking the concept and driving it into the real world. That’s where you connect with the real people who want to buy the car. I did like the over simplified and friendly explanation of the hydrogen fuel cell process. I think education on all these technologies need a good explanation to the general public to gain acceptance and dispel untrue stigmas.
The front of the car is brilliant. I love the smug smile of that front curve, like a resolute but happy bulldog’s jowls. It’s a guardian, strong and proud. I like that they’ve purposefully removed exhaust pipes in the back because even if there’s just water coming out it really is an ugly relic of the past and associates with pollution itself. That’s smart psychology in design. The overall form factor is awkward at best. The wheel base is too short for the visual weight of the arch and creates an uneasy balance to the whole thing. This is the same reason I don’t like Mitsubishi’s latest Sportback Lancer, it’s just distributed poorly.
I’ve commented on the Prius before and I think this is a good evolution – taking what used to be an ugly status symbol for those eco pretentious to flaunt and moving it into the decent looking mainstream. ‘You don’t have to settle for ugly in order to help the planet’, it says. Is it sporty and gorgeous? Well… no. But it’s better than before.
With that said, and like all car technology you’re just moving the problem around. How do we get the hydrogen? Well, you need energy from somewhere to break it apart from water. This might be from wind or solar, which would make it clean (but slow) or from burning fossil fuels (sound familiar?). To be fair, it is natural gas, which isn’t as bad as gasoline, and bigger centers can be made more efficient than a mass of individual smaller engines. Hydrogen is harder to deal with since it requires high pressure tanks in order to get any sort of distance from them – tanks which are prone to issues with extreme heat and any cold under freezing and are harder to interface with at the pump (gasoline just flows, adding pressure becomes a challenge). Crashing becomes a much bigger concern but while we can make very robust tanks to minimize that, it adds weight and size. I am curious if they’re burning it with an internal combustion engine or converting it for electric use; they never mentioned.
The chairs I’m torn on. With that colour scheme they look like people wearing vests. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or if I’m just anthropomorphizing things but I think I’d be alarmed sitting on a “person”, even subconsciously. On the other hand, it creates a very friendly, familiar appearance to things. We relate to human shapes, they make us comfortable. And, perhaps that’s the plan.
I am excited though. I think even if it’s not a perfect solution it at least shows that companies are willing to explore other areas and try new things. I appreciate that. It’s these sorts of projects that wean people off of internal combustion and get used to alternatives and as a societal shift that can have great importance with the adoption of new technology.
I’m not sure if they’re just recording really nicely or if that exhaust note is actually angles singing.
The design seems to be getting slightly more meh, though, which is sad. They seem to be getting fatter and longer over time, which sort of takes away that lithe agility they once had. I liked the big grill and the aggressive eyes, but that philosophy has been taken a tad too far – the lean muscle is getting beefy.
As such a big fan, this is both entirely exciting and entirely frustrating. Audi, please come back. We love you.
Um. What?
If this were a radio show, all you’d hear right now is silence as I struggle to figure out where my jaw went.
Dodge? You look… good. This is… unusual.
I don’t know what happened to the water they put in their tame industrial designer’s cages but goodness, it’s working. Dodge has had the potential for a few years now but never really took the bold step forward that would have produced this sort of thing then – because, really, they could have. I’m not sure if it was inspired by the recent Ford Fiesta design / Americanization but the front does share some of that chin up gaping grille geometry. I don’t mind it – very Mazda – but I’m glad they have that bumper in the middle breaking up the two actual intakes. It’s painted black to hide, but I think having it entirely grille pattern would look goofy. I also really like how the lights come together, creating that uninterrupted hood bottom edge. On the back the lights are also continuous à la Charger (which was inspired be the flagship Challenger) so it’s good to see they’re taking a design language and running with it. The traditional Dodge cross is still there but more subtle which is fine, I think it’s iconic enough that the truck lines can still use it brazenly without needing the cars to be showy about it as well.
So, if this is the future, I’m excited. They’ll probably still break down every 5 meters, but at least they’ll look really good on the side of the road, and the big rear lights are handy for flagging down help. (I kid. They’re getting better, slowly, at least)