The 1986 Chevrolet Corvette Indy concept car design was great in theory, but it wasn’t until the operative Indy, which emerged after the show car made its rounds, that some of its technical ideas were put into practice. Even before he arrived at General Motors, Earl was a pioneer in the concept of taking a design from a two-dimensional drawing to a three-dimensional form by producing clay models of his creations. Earl accepted, moved to Detroit, and soon wielded unprecedented control over GM’s new product development. Harley Earl put more than 45,000 miles on the LeSabre show car, using it as his personal car and driving it to automotive events. Combine the adrenaline rush of the Grand Prix with the competitive intensity of a globe-trotting, high-stakes reality show and compelling personal stories and mysteries, and you’ve got “Drive.” This new Fox series follows a diverse group of people coerced into competing in a secret, illegal cross-country road race. However, studies do show that robbers leave faster (and thus take less stuff) when there’s an alarm system in place.
Generally, a red-light system has cameras at all four corners of an intersection, to photograph cars going in different directions and get pictures from different angles. What do you get when you cross a lazy driver, an industrial robot and a Dalek from “Doctor Who?” The latest addition to our phalanx of robot overlords, that’s what! But this robot is a one-trick pony, which keeps it from developing the intelligence required to annihilate every species in the universe, which is what the Daleks are born to do. The sensors also picked up on the cell phone carried by a Savari engineer who trusted the system – and Dr. Ibrahim – enough to volunteer as a pedestrian about to step in front of the van without looking. When the sensors in the spout detect that the tank is full (or the app on your phone tells the system to stop), the spout withdraws and lets you know you’re allowed to go now. I think they’ll have lots of time to adjust to the idea of a robot popping the fuel door open and filling up the tank.
People were probably more freaked out by the first automatic car washes than they will be by a robot arm filling their fuel tank in a snow storm. For the paranoid speed demons out there, this technology may seem a little scary. If that giant dump truck in the mining facility doesn’t have a rearview camera, that little truck behind it is in trouble. When the radar gun and the car are both standing still, the echo will have the same wave frequency as the original signal. There are actually a couple of companies in Europe working with robotic gas pumps, and their systems work pretty much the same way. It’s important to note that none of these systems are 100 percent effective; even with a top-of-the-line detection and jamming system, the police still might catch you speeding. They’re also furthering existing technologies such as self-parking and pre-safe systems. There are a number of technologies that detect when a car has moved past a particular point in the road, like this red-light camera.
A long exposure, which lets in a great deal of light, can make a picture taken on a moonlit night look like daytime. Even with a camera attached to a tripod, adding movement to a shot can affect the motion blur in cool ways. But even in a big car with advanced technology, the system was deemed too cumbersome, and Lexus no longer offered it after the 2012 model. The Fuelmatics system that was making the rounds of nerd news in early 2014 will start at $50,000 to $60,000 per pump, Corfitsen said, though he predicted the price would drop as more pumps are installed. Just mount a few (fairly inexpensive) wireless cameras in strategic locations, connect them to your home computer network, and voila — you have your very own surveillance system. Throw up a few Webcams around the outside of your house, and you could catch burglars in the act just by turning on your cell phone — even if you’re thousands of miles from home. For $4.99, it allows you to link your phone to Web cams in your house. Post has been created by GSA Content Gen er ator Demoversion.
