Items tagged with Automobiles
Sometimes the weather calls for cruising down the road with the top rolled down, Thelma and Louise style (minus the ending). Mercedes-AMG has again added that option to its growing line of GT sports cars, the latest of which is the topless GT S Roadster. It's the third GT Roadster model in the company's stable, to go along with four two-dour coupes, three four-door coupes, and a pair of customer race cars. That's right, there are now a dozen AMG GT sports cars, and like the two other GT Roadster models, the GT S Roadster boasts a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 engine. This gives it 469 horsepower in the...
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The days are numbered for opportunistic thieves who swipe packages from people's doorsteps when they are away at work or otherwise not at home. In an expansion to its Amazon Key service, Amazon is now giving Prime members the option of having their items delivered to their car, so instead of leaving a box of goodies out in the open, the delivery person will instead shove it in the trunk of a compatible vehicle. Amazon is not charging anything extra for this service, it's yet another perk for Prime subscribers. There are caveats, however, one of which is that it's only available in 37 cities and...
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It has been exactly five decades since Ford introduced its original Mustang Cobra Jet, which made its debut only four years after the first Mustang arrived. In celebration of the Cobra Jet's 50th anniversary, Ford went and built another model for 2018 that is the "most powerful and quickest version from the factory yet." And by that, Ford means it roar down a quarter-mile in the mid-eight-second range while topping 150 miles per hour. "From the very first Mustang Cobra Jets dominating the 1968 NHRA Winternationals to our modern-day Cobra Jet racers, the Ford Performance Parts team continues to...
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Neel Jani and Porsche are both sitting on cloud nine after Jani set a new track record at Spa-Francorchamps while driving Porche's 919 Hybrid. In what has proven to be faster than a Formula One race car, the Porsche 919 Hybrid zoomed around the Belgian Grand Prix track in 1 minute 41.770 seconds, besting the 1 minute 42.553 seconds it took Lewis Hamilton in a Formula One last year. With the pedal to the metal in the modified Evo, Jani achieved a top speed of 359 kilometers per hour, or a hair over 223 miles per hour, while averaging 245.61 km/h (~152.61 mph). "This was an absolute fantastic lap—an...
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Uber and the autonomous driving sector at large are under close scrutiny after one of the ride sharing service's self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian on Sunday. However, the police chief of Tempe, Arizona, the place where the fatal accident occurred, says a preliminary investigation into the matter reveals that Uber is "likely" not at fault for what happened, and that it would have been difficult to avoid the outcome whether a human driver was in charge or a series of sensors and cameras. To be clear, there was a human driver behind the wheel, though the self-driving Volvo SUV was in...
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The future of high-speed racing might very well be performed using electric vehicles. Performance-oriented electric hypercars are getting stupid fast, to go along with their sometimes aggressive styling, as we bear witness to once again from Rimac. The company's newest concept vehicle, the C Two, hit the pavement and went from 0 to 60 miles per hour in just 1.85 seconds, believe it or not. Hitting 60 mph in under 2 seconds is nothing short of incredible. It also makes the C Two one of the fastest cars in the world, electric or otherwise. The C Two is plenty powerful too, obviously, with nearly...
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The era of electric vehicles may one day arrive in earnest, especially with some automakers pushing out performance oriented sports cars that run on batteries. Porsche is one of them. The company is prepping its Mission E for launch, and like Tesla's Model S, it is an intriguing vehicle. Stefan Weckbach, the guy in charge of Porsche's EV efforts, spoke in an interview about the Mission E and what's in store. One thing Weckbach said is that Porsche is not likely to devote resources to developing technologies that simulate the throaty sounds of muscle cars that run on gasoline. "Porsche is unlikely...
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To the uninitiated, riding shotgun in a self-driving car might seem like a scary proposition. Part of the reason is because we are simply not used to seeing a vehicle navigate itself without a human driver behind the wheel, so the image of a potentially deadly hunk of metal motoring down a busy street is inherently concerning. Waymo seems to recognize this, so it has gone and launched a 360-degree virtual reality experience that puts users in the rear seat of a self-driving car. Much of the 3-minute video is spent explaining how Waymo's various sensors survey the landscape to identify all the moving...
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Just two months ago, Waymo announced plans to test a self-driving car service in Phoenix, Arizona, in which commuters could summon a free ride from one of around 600 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans. Now the company is putting the pedal to the metal with "thousands more" of the same hybrid vehicle, each one motoring around without a flesh and blood (read: human) driver behind the wheel. Fiat Chrysler in Canada is producing the self-driving vehicles for Waymo, which is planning to deploy the hybrids in cities where it is currently testing autonomous driving technology. When asked by Wired exactly...
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Apple has filed a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that provides some insight into how the company plans to tackle navigation. The patent explains how Apple intends to make autonomous driving more efficient by reducing the need to constantly remake detailed maps. It also serves of further confirmation of Apple's plan to compete in the autonomous vehicle category—this is Apple's first patent in the self-driving car field. In the patent, Apple explains that today's autonomous vehicles use a combination of static information, such as detail maps of...
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Tesla is indeed developing custom AI semiconductors that will help with autonomous driving chores, company CEO and founder Elon Musk has finally confirmed. It is not entirely clear if Tesla is working with AMD on specialized hardware for its electric vehicles, though Musk did offer up that Jim Keller, a microprocessor engineer who previously worked for AMD and Apple, is working on the hardware for Tesla. Keller joined Tesla in 2016. He is the automaker's President of Autopilot Hardware and Software Engineering, and presumably is the one who is in charge of the company's effort to build to a custom...
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Electric vehicles and hybrid automobiles are all about being friendlier to the environment and saving on gas money, though the latest models are anything but boring or conservative. Automakers have been pushing out increasingly faster, better performing EV and hybrids, and many of them even have a certain sex appeal. To that end, BMW's new i8 Roadster and i8 Coupe are a couple of environmentally friendly (relatively) beauties. These are plug-in hybrids, one with a fixed roof (i8 Coupe) and the other an open-top version (i8 Roadster), the latter of which is a new addition to what BMW claims has...
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Waymo, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, continues to accelerate its self-driving car efforts by racking up millions of miles on public roads. The official tally now stands at 4 million miles, of which 1 million of those were accumulated in the past six months alone. In the early going, it took a full 18 months for Waymo to log its first million miles. All of this experience adds up and is crucial to making autonomous vehicles safe for everyday use. Image Source: Waymo "With these 4 million miles of experience, we’ve been able to focus on varied and complex driving scenarios....
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Chevrolet is kicking off the week by crowning a new king, one that is now "stronger than ever," in the 2019 Corvette ZR1. Armed with an exclusive LT5 supercharged engine, Chevrolet blissfully proclaims its newest model Corvette takes the brand's legacy to a new level with the highest power, greatest track performance, and most advanced technology in its production history, and that is saying a lot. "I’ve never driven a Corvette like this before, and nobody else has either, because there’s never been one like this before," said Mark Reuss, executive vice president, Global Product Development, Purchasing...
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