Cars, Planes and Boats
ICON Aircraft
Apr 1st
Visit the website here: Icon Plane
Since the FAA’s dramatic regulation changes in 2004 created the new Light Sport Aircraft category, ICON Aircraft’s sole purpose has been to bring the freedom, fun, and adventure of flying to all who have dreamed of flight. With these ground-breaking FAA rules solidified, ICON believes that consumer-focused sport aircraft can do for recreational flying what personal watercraft did for boating.
ICON’s sport aircraft are not only designed to deliver an amazing and safe flying experience, but also to inspire us the way great sports cars do. After years of development with some of the world’s best aerospace engineers and industrial designers, ICON Aircraft has released the first of its line of sport planes, the ICON A5. The A5 is a bold yet elegant design that communicates beauty, performance, safety, and most importantly… fun.
ICON was founded in 2005 by Kirk Hawkins. Hawkins, a graduate from the Stanford Business School, is an accomplished engineer, former U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, and long-time motorsport enthusiast. With its world-class team of engineers, designers, advisors, and investors, ICON is located in Southern California – home of the world’s largest concentration of both aerospace and automobile design resources. ICON’s engineering and development team came from Burt Rutan’s famed Scaled Composites, which created such record setting projects as Voyager, Global Flyer, the X-Prize winning SpaceShipOne, and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.
My new dream car
Oct 30th
The Tesla Roadster may be fast, and the VW E-Up might be economical, but those go-karts don’t have anything on the Audi e-tron.
The concept vehicle unveiled at the International Auto Motor Show in Frankfurt looks a lot like Audi’s R8 coupe, but with one screaming change: four electric motors and a massive battery pack capable of mustering as much as 10 times as much torque as a Ford F-350 pickup with a V-8 engine.
For those of you with calculators, that’s over 3,300 foot-pounds of all-wheel drive rocket power. The car has an equivalent of 313hp and will hit zero to 60 mph in about 4.8 seconds, too, but the most important number on this machine is the range: 154 miles.
For a relatively big coupe, that’s considerably more than most electric car makers could hope to claim. Whether Audi will actually be able to deliver on the promised range remains another story.
Is VW’s Electric E-Up The Beetle of the 21st Century?
Sep 15th
As the hew decade comes in so does the question on what the next big car technology, you would think Hybrid right? Well VW and Mercedes still thinks electric fuel cell cars are where it’s at.
The electric car really is due at a showroom near you, we can confirm, because VW, maker’s of the “people’s car” will have one in 2013. VW’s even dubbing the E-Up the “Beetle of the 21st Century”. Can this lofty claim be true?
Volkswagen just unveiled the car at the IAA auto show. It’s a new version of a concept car the German auto-maker’s been teasing for a while now–the Up–but in this case the car’s been given an eco-friendly 100% electric drive overhaul. It’s stats are pretty impressive: An electric motor that delivers peak power of 60 kW (or 40 kW at continuous speed) and delivers 210 Nm of torque right from zero revs. That doesn’t sound like much, when compared to the Prius’ electric motor’s 350 Nm, but it’s enough to give the car a 0 to 100 km/h speed of around 11 seconds, and a 0 to 50 km/h speed (the range most of interest to city drivers) of just 3.5 seconds. It also tops out at 135 km/h (nearly 84 mph), so it’s more than capable of roaring down the autobahn or freeway, no matter that VW is dubbing it a “city specialist.”
Of course electric cars are defined as much by their battery tech as their engines, and the E-Up has an 18 kwh lithium-ion unit that, at 240 kg, makes up nearly a quarter of the entire car’s weight. This unit gives the car a 130-kilometer (80-mile) range, which would limit how far you’d drive it on the freeway…but a one-hour top-up charge will fill ‘er up to 80%. So when rest-stops come equipped with electric charging points it’ll enable much longer range trips. Plugged into a household 230V power socket it’ll fill up completely in 5 hours, which means you can use cheap-rate electricity, resulting in a claimed cost of €2 per 100 km (around $3 for 80 miles).
What to say about the car design? Well, it’s weird–but the Up always has been, and electric cars (I’m thinking about you, Mr. Aptera) seem to be trending towards the kooky, anyway. Its seating arrangement is dubbed “3+1″ which means the driver’s seat’s normal, the front passenger seat’s actually set a little forward, and there’s room for two to sit in the rear seat behind this one–the seat behind the driver’s works, but is really only for storage space.
But can the E-Up live up to VW’s lofty claim of being the Beetle for a new century? The original “volks-wagen” requirement was to have a car that could transport two adults and three children at 100km/h and do so affordably. Its design ended up being pretty unusual, famously so in fact. In that light the E-Up really could be the 21st Century Beetle–and check out the adorable design detail whereby the VW logo on the hood swivels to reveal the charger socket. That’s cult design-potential right there. We also won’t have long to find out if the E-Up is as affordable to buy as it is to run–VW is really going to start pushing these things off the production line in 2013.
Mercedes Turns Out Fuel-Cell B-Class Car, Ready for Public Consumption
Sep 8th
While some of the limelight has swung away from fuel cells, Mercedes is still chasing the technology and has just announced a new milestone: It’s F-Cell is the first series-produced vehicle that’s hydrogen powered.
This is the first time Mercedes has moved beyond a concept car into a “proof of concept” car with the tech, and it’s integrated the new fuel and drive-train into a B-Class car. The combination of an in-production chassis and the newly-polished engine means that the car is actually being produced in sample quantities late in 2009, and a short-run production will result in 200 cars in early 2010, which will be sold to customers in the U.S. and Europe. While that’s not mass-production by any means, it’s unquestionably a significant step in getting road-going fuel-cell cars into the public’s hands.
Unfortunately, most of the world still lacks any hydrogen fueling infrastructure, so unless you live along Norway’s hydrogen highway or in Iceland (aka “Energy Island”) you probably won’t have much use for this vehicle. Which is a shame, here’s why: Including the F-Cell engine into the B-Class results in a car that has the same interior space and trunk capacity as a traditional gasoline-powered version, and hasn’t compromised Mercedes’ famous high build-quality. This has been done by squeezing many of the components into a sandwich layer in the floor of the car, which places them out of the way and increases the safety aspects of the design–Mercedes has undertaken 30 extra crash tests on top of the normal certification ones, and optimized the safety of the new design as a result.
And how does it perform? Pretty impressive–it does deliver much of the promise of hydrogen-powered electric cars. It’s got a Li-ion battery to boost power and store energy from regenerative braking, a 100kW electric motor with 290Nm torque that can push the car up to 105mph. It does all this with zero CO2 output and, in the strange back-to-front fuel equivalence calculations, it manages 3.3 liters diesel-equivalent per 100km. It’s got a max range of 240 miles, and can even cope with wintry weather–its can cold-start at -25ºC.
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