Link Banana

The National Weather Service think they may have found a driver going 130 miles per hour around Chicago. Using a weather doppler. Who knew? As Gizmodo explains, It works something like this:

Sometimes, when a warm layer of air rolls in up above the surface, the beam from the Doppler radar can be deflected towards the ground—picking up traffic and other objects much like a police radar gun. The weather service alluded to the fact that the “speeder” could have been nothing more than noise, but it still makes you wonder how long it will be before they figure out how to bust motorists from space.

An interesting look at the reality of the much heralded and fretted over Tata Nano:

Malhotra is having second thoughts. He’s done the math and realized that once taxes and insurance costs are added, the price of the entry-level Nano rises to just over $3,000. For an extra $500, he says, he could buy a decent used car with a more powerful engine and air conditioning, which the Nano won’t have.

(via Passport)

Philadelphia has an interesting plan to get people to slow down: paint optical illusions onto the road.

(via Gizmodo)

There are so many of them that we’re ignoring the road. So says John Staddon:

And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.

Despite my ambivalence about that thesis, I do enjoy his railing against stop signs: “The four-way stop deserves special recognition as a masterpiece of counterproductive public-safety efforts.”

(via Slate)

Nothing in this table about the cost of driving different vehicles should surprise you, but the presentation’s rather clever.

In a thorough summary of the basics of hybrid auto technology, The Economist’s Tech.view column sees a future that may favor less-efficient (but cheaper) mild hybrids over “stronger” ones like the Prius.

The complexity and cost of such drive-trains has made many in the industry think twice about strong hybrids. Mild hybrids like Honda’s may offer only modest fuel savings, but they are considerably cheaper to make. Selling for less than a Toyota Prius, the new mild-hybrid version of the Chevrolet Malibu has been a runaway success, despite having only 2mpg better fuel economy than a conventional Malibu.

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer:

Virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine.

From this week’s Earth Day-inspired New York Times Magazine, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt — they of Freakonomics fame — offer a cogent argument for pay-as-you-drive car insurance.

While economists may argue that gas is poorly priced, that imbalance can’t compare with how poorly insurance is priced. Imagine that Arthur and Zelda live in the same city and occupy the same insurance risk pool but that Arthur drives 30,000 miles a year while Zelda drives just 3,000. Under the current system, Zelda probably pays the same amount for insurance as Arthur.

While some insurance companies do offer a small discount for driving less — usually based on self-reporting, which has an obvious shortcoming — U.S. auto insurance is generally an all-you-can-eat affair. Which means that the 27,000 more miles than Zelda that Arthur drives don’t cost him a penny, even as each mile produces externalities for everyone. It also means that low-mileage drivers like Zelda subsidize high-mileage drivers like Arthur.

It’s a hard question, and Salon’s Pablo Päster doesn’t give a broad answer — though he offers how to figure it out for yourself. For a 1986 Mercedes-Benz W126:

Given that your car is already built, we can write off the energy used in making it. We can also write off the emissions that it has already created from burning gasoline. That means that over the next 116,000 miles, your car’s greenhouse gas emissions will essentially break even with the emissions from the production and use of a Prius. I’m guessing your 22-year-old car probably has over 200,000 miles on it. If you’re lucky, you can get another few years out of it. So if you can afford a new Prius, you are better off switching now. And think of the fewer hassles of owning a new car.

Tomorrow Ford is supposed to announce the sale of its high-end Jaguar and Land Rover brands to India’s Tata Motors — the company that recently announced a $2500 car. We truly live in a changing world.

Tata is likely to pay about $2bn (£1bn) in the deal, although analysts will be keen to see the exact price and terms.

The agreement will bring to an end a lengthy sale process which started last June when Ford announced its intention to sell the companies as a package.

No doubt encouraged by the success of their technology post of a few weeks ago, Neatorama has compiled logos from many major car companies. The thing I found notable: distinct presences of a swastika behind the Volkswagen’s logo from the war years.

Having felt it was a kick, I decided it may as well be a full-blown trend. The Economist’s got a very interesting piece about the recent developments with capacititors, and suggests that the technology may even one day replace batteries are our storage medium of choice.

EEStor also envisages employing its devices to build an “energy bank” to store off-peak power and release it when demand is high. One use of such a bank, the firm suggests, could be the rapid charging of electric cars—which would, of course, also be fitted with capacitors.

That would remove a big obstacle to the adoption of electric vehicles in general—that it takes so long to refuel them. If a driver could pull into an electrical filling station and top up his capacitors as rapidly as he can now replenish his petrol tank it would both increase the effective range of all-electric vehicles and decrease resistance to buying them in the first place.

It was closer than ever, but it appears that GM will keep the title for at least one more year.

GM, which was expected to lose its title of the world’s largest automaker for the first time in 76 years, sold 9,369,524 vehicles in 2007. Toyota sold about 9,366,000 units, a source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The most recent Tech.view column over at The Economist is both long and meandering. Though that makes it hard to draw a single conclusion from it, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits about America’s crazy policies for determining if a car or fuel is “green.” Take this, for example, which explains how CAFE standards are calculated (something I didn’t know), and how E85’s even worse than higher fuel prices:

Car companies in America get a fuel-economy credit for every flex-fuel vehicle they sell. The government rates the fuel economy of flex-fuel vehicles at about 165% the miles per gallon (mpg) they would get on straight petrol. In reality, vehicles running on E85 get 25-30% fewer mpg than their petrol equivalents.

As it costs only $200 to turn a conventional car or light truck into a flex-fuel vehicle, the industry can save itself billions in potential fines that would otherwise accrue for failing to meet the government’s CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) requirements. CAFE is the sales-weighted average mpg figure for all the cars or light trucks a manufacturer sells in any given model year.

I’ll just give you Slashdot’s summary:

“In a move that can only be described as ‘Copyright Insanity’, Ford Motor Company now claims that they hold the rights to any image of a Ford vehicle, even if it’s a picture you took of your own car. The Black Mustang Club wanted to put together a calendar featuring member’s cars and print it through CafePress, but an attorney from Ford nixed the project, stating that the calendar pics and ‘anything with one of (member’s) cars in it infringes on Ford’s trademarks which include the use of images of their vehicles.’