News: Dublin gets free wifi

I know we're a car website, but hey, we love our technology too and with the 3G signal around the nation being as flakey as a box of Cadbury's, here's some welcome news for those of us trying to access our emails when out and about.


The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Naoise Ó Muirí today launched Dublin Free WiFi at Barnardo’s Square, Dublin 2 (beside City Hall Dame Street). This new service will offer both Dubliners and visitors to the city access to free WiFi, 24/7, at key locations around the city. The rollout of free public WiFi contributes to the Digital infrastructure in the city.

Uniquely the WiFi hotspots will be identified by wall mosaics which will feature “digidub” characters, modern and historical. Fourteen different characters will be rolled out , with a Viking (above), a street cleaner, a tourist, a rockabilly girl and pyjama girl being visible on 31st January. Dubliners will be invited to suggest additional characters (come on; surely the cast of The Snapper are shoe-ins?)

“Our future economic success, our ability to attract talent and investment and our competitive branding internationally means we have to use and apply digital technologies now.  I am delighted to be here today to launch Dublin Free WiFi. This project is one of the milestones that will deliver on our Digital Dublin Initiative. By June of this year Dublin will have a Digital Masterplan.  The aim of the plan is to develop Dublin as a world centre of digital excellence” said the Lord Mayor of Dublin.                                                

In launching Dublin Free WiFi the Lord Mayor has thrown down a challenge. “I am asking Dubliners to identify and suggest different uses which can be made of the availability of free wifi in terms of developing services, encouraging people connecting, and making the city more attractive.”

To mark the launch the public is invited to take part in Dublin Free WiFi Day from 11am to 5pm, at Barnardo’s Square.

Free WiFi is an initiative of Dublin City Council. It is provided, at no cost to the Council , by  GOWEX, a Spanish company that has provided similar services globally. The service is free and provides a download speed of 512Kbps and an upload speed of 128Kbps. Users also have the option to purchase a higher download speed of up to 6 Mbps if required. Once registered the user will have access to all Dublin city hotspots and other GOWEX networks in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Paris,  and Buenos Aires. To celebrate the launch of this initiative, Dublin Free WiFi will be upgraded from 512Kbps to 1Mbps for 2 months from today.

“We are very proud to be working in Dublin alongside the City Council to offer free WiFi to all Dubliners and to all visitors. We think that Dublin is the European technological capital and having free WiFi in its streets will be a new attractive aspect for the City” said Jenaro García, CEO at GOWEX. Thanks to this WiFi service, Dublin City Council is laying the foundations for the deployment of a Wireless Smart City, providing infrastructure for the future delivery of smart municipal services.

From Thursday the service will be available at the Civic Offices Amphitheatre, Wood Quay, St Patrick’s Park and Barnardo’s Square. The service will be rolled out over the coming weeks to other key city centre locations including Smithfield Square, Grafton Street, Henry Street, O’Connell Street and Temple Bar Square.

You can view the full set of “digidub” characters and find out where you can go digital at www.dublingowexfreewifi.ie

News: Lexus shows off new safety tech at CES

It may not be the prettiest Lexus you've ever seen, but this LS-based contraption is almost certainly the safest Lexus, possibly the safest car, of all time.

It's called the Safety Research Vehicle and Lexus is showing it off at the vast (and vastly important) Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The car has been built to demonstrate ongoing efforts around autonomous vehicle safety technologies and explain Toyota's approach to reducing global traffic fatalities and injuries. The vehicle, based on a Lexus LS, advances the industry toward a new era of integrated safety management technologies.
The vehicle systems are capable of tasks such as scanning movement of objects around it, identifying a green light from a red light and measuring the trajectory of the vehicle on the road by using a 360-degree LIDAR laser on the roof of the vehicle which detects objects around the car up to about 70 meters; three high definition colour cameras to detect objects about 150 meters away, including traffic light detection using the front camera and approaching vehicles using the side cameras.
Radars on the front and sides of the vehicle measure the location and speed of objects to create a
comprehensive field of vision at intersections. There's also a distance measurement indicator located on a rear wheel measures travel distance and speed of the vehicle and an inertial measurements unit on the roof measures acceleration and angle changes to determine vehicle behaviour.

GPS antennas on the roof estimate angle and orientation even before the vehicle is in motion and the research vehicle is a testing platform aimed at the development of systems capable of enhancing the driver’s perception of their environment, assisting in the decision-making process and improving overall driving skills.

“In our pursuit of developing more advanced automated technologies, we believe the driver must be fully engaged,” said Mark Templin, Toyota group vice president and general manger of the Lexus Division. “For Toyota and Lexus, an autonomous vehicle does not translate to a driverless vehicle, but rather a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.”

Toyota has committed to new research toward an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), integrating the car with the driving environment. To accelerate development of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside infrastructure communications, Toyota began full-scale operations in November at new 8.6 acre ITS proving grounds, located within the Higashi-Fuji Technical Center in Toyota City, Japan. Modelled after urban roads, the driving environment replicates roads and traffic signals and simulates real-life traffic situations using other vehicles, pedestrians and control devices.

The system is designed to help prevent accidents involving pedestrians and other vehicles using information continuously collected by the vehicle from other vehicles, infrastructure and pedestrians. Connecting people, vehicles, traffic environments and infrastructure with state-of-the-art electronic and telecommunications technologies will help move toward safer and more efficient traffic environments. The Toyota ITS Proving Grounds will assist the company work toward the early practical adoption of evermore reliable systems by repeatedly conducting testing that can be difficult to perform on public roads, with changing environments.

“The real value of research projects like this is reinforcing our focus on what a few years ago seemed an impossible dream and is now becoming more plausible,” Templin said. “We, at TMC and Lexus, consider the elimination of traffic fatalities and injuries the ultimate goal of a society that values mobility.”


 

News: Could cheaper electric car batteries be coming soon?

New research being carried out by the University of California and Bosch could lead to smaller, faster-charging batteries for electric cars within three years.

Professor Miroslav Krstic and postdoctoral fellow Scott Moura of the University of California, San Diego have been researching into the way Lithium atoms 'behave' (if that's quite the right word) in a battery. Astonishingly, it seems that we don't actually have any great knowledge of exactly how chemical components of modern batteries behave, and this new research is helping to break down that barrier.

The upshot is that we could shortly have batteries with much greater capacity, meaning that they could either make a car go for longer distances, or the same distance with a smaller battery. Even better, these new battery designs could cut lengthy charging times by as much as half, and be on sale within half a decade or so. They could even become significantly cheaper to manufacture as a result.

"If one could have a better knowledge or better estimation of what's going on inside, one could safely operate closer to the limits of performance, which means that the oversizing and overdesign would be less necessary”, Krstic told Automotive News. "That translates into savings in costs and in weight."

 

News: Ford working on carbon parts for Focus

Ford is planning to bring lightweight carbon parts to cars like the Focus, even though currently such parts would be prohibitively expensive.

Ford is showing off this, a current Focus fitted with an experimental carbon-fibre bonnet, which weighs about half as much as a conventional steel panel. Generally, carbon is about five times stronger than steel for an equivalent weight of about a third as much. Pretty impressive, pretty expensive.

But that could be all changing. Companies like McLaren and BMW are currently at the cutting edge of carbon research and are finding ways of making carbon components, and even entire carbon vehicles, for a much more affordable price. Indeed, if the labour-intensive nature of current carbon-fibre design and build systems can be reduced, then the actual raw material cost is lower than that of, say, aluminium.

“Reducing a vehicle’s weight can deliver major benefits for fuel consumption but a process for fast and affordable production of carbon fiber automotive parts in large numbers has never been available”, said Inga Wehmeyer, advanced materials and processes research engineer in Ford’s European Research Centre.
 
“By partnering with materials experts through the Hightech.NRW research project, Ford is working to develop a solution that supports cost efficient manufacturing of carbon fiber components.”

Anthony Sheriff, MD of McLaren Automotive, the road-car making arm of the legendary F1 team, has no doubts that carbon is the future even for mainstream cars:

"Basically everything that’s important to the driving experience, strength for crash safety, weight for speed and efficiency, rigidity for handling, are improved significantly with carbon fibre. That’s the case whether you’re talking about a mid-engined 200mph sports car or a city car.

"I think we already see a number of cars at lower price points that have have woken up to the point that with innovation you can drive the production costs lower. And you are going to see other sports cars, and very interestingly, hybrid and electric city cars using carbon fibre. Especially on electric cars, the weight saving has an enormous benefit because if you have a light electric car, you can have a smaller battery and therefore you save additional weight and additional cost.

"Before you find it in a Ford Focus? Well, it’s not 50 years but neither is it 5 years. I’d say its 10 year before we start to see significant use of carbon fibre in such cars."

That tallies with Ford's plans, which seek to reduce the weight of an average family car by as much as 340kg by the end of the decade.
 

News: Self-driving cars still have to overcome hurdles

Not literally of course. No-one's going to go and put actual real hurdles out for self-driving cars to jump over, that would be silly. No, we mean legal and safety hurdles.

There has been a lot of publicity around self-driving cars lately, what with the successful SARTRE road train project testing and Google's work in the US, which led to California and Nevada officially licencing such cars for use on the public roads. But those of us looking forward to a future of having an electronic chauffeur on board might have to wait a bit yet.

The Alliance Of Automobile Manufacturers, a lobby group which represents a large chunk of the US auto sales industry, has released a statement saying that it reckons there's a way to go for autonomous cars.

“If the state’s intention is to promote autonomous vehicles, all the concerns – like liability – need to be properly addressed in advance, or we can expect a bumpy road ahead.” No pun, presumably, intended. The Alliance is quick to point out that insurance and law enforcement systems aren't really yet up to the task of dealing with self-driving cars, and that web security giant McAfee has already been sounding warnings of the possibility of such cars having their software interfered with. Doesn't really bear thinking about, that one.

Concerns are also being raised over privacy and the fact that autonomous cars could potentially be reporting a person's location and travel details without their consent.

Sounds like good lawyer-fodder to us.