Unveiled last February, the hyper-realistic, pliable figure known as Graham designed by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini (in collaboration with a forensics expert and a trauma surgeon) whose anatomical frame is modified to withstand low-impact car collisions has been nominated for London’s Design Museum annual award competition. Commissioned by Australia’s traffic safety board, the grotesque is sort of a reverse crash-test dummy, imaging how we might have evolved to survive automobile accidents if that were our only threat to contend with, and installs safety features in the passenger as a way to lobby the industry to make safer vehicles.
Tuesday, 29 August 2017
anthropomorphic test device
Tuesday, 15 August 2017
idling
A preliminary but rather brilliant year-long trial in Denmark is demonstrating that parked electric vehicles can help to regulate the power grid. Recharging batteries overnight and during work hours can place stresses on utilities infrastructure and is already changing peak hours and demands but by keeping cars otherwise engaged and active players in their refuelling, the grid could selective reduce, increase or take back energy from the batteries (plus presumably store excess capacity) on this extended grid. As if this was not incentive enough in itself, the exchange—which is something I’m sure we’ll being taking for granted in the near future, can also earn some money for the vehicles owners paid out by the grid’s operators.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ฐ, ๐ก, ๐, environment
Sunday, 13 August 2017
la terre est habitรฉe
As a little kid, I remember distinctly seeing this short animated that posited extra-terrestrials observing Earth might be forgiven for assuming that automobiles were the dominant life forms of the planet with human beings just some parasitic infestation (though parasites, despite their reputation aren’t lower life forms) and being quite alarmed at the idea that we might be overlooked while the scouting-party compile an ethnographic account based on what they can extrapolate about car culture and society and make informed guesses on cars’ grooming, feeding, mating and funerary rites. Our appreciation to Fancy Notions for showcasing this feature and letting us experience it again. What on Earth! (ou La Terre est habitรฉe!) is a creation of the Canadian Film Board by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal and was first released in 1966 to critical acclaim. I wonder what visiting aliens might make of Earthlings if they came today to throngs of screen-gazers, communicative and engaged by not necessary in outward appearance or with those in closest physical proximity. Maybe such customs would be too inscrutable for outsiders to interpret.
Monday, 7 August 2017
la strada

Believing that large cities could be transformed into vertical utopias with good administration, his designs relied heavily on the use of towering skyscrapers—grattanuvole, already familiar to the aspiring architect.

Saturday, 5 August 2017
vroom!
Thursday, 27 July 2017
motorama or ร la kart
Messy Nessy Chic brings us the profile of George Barris, the late, legendary designer of custom cars who was responsible for nearly all the iconic vehicles featured on film and television throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Though perhaps the contribution of his workshop that’s most easily conjured up would be the original Batmobile, Barris also brought us My Mother the Car (a much maligned sitcom that was premised on the idea that an attorney purchases a used Porter touring car that his mother has been reincarnated as), the dragsters from Mannix, the Dukes of Hazzard and the Banana Splits as well as the signature cars of the Munsters and the Clampetts and another sentient automobile in Knight Rider’s KITT plus his nemesis. Barris’ studio also recreated many novelty vehicles for special exhibitions and designed custom cars for celebrities, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elton John and Elvis Presley.
Monday, 17 July 2017
sea of time
Though not quite the phantas- magorical conveyance of the Beatles that had its animated debut on this day back in 1968 at the London Pavilion, a former dance hall in Piccadilly Circus that was the venue for many film premieres, the Golden Submarine is a race car that is celebrating its centennial this year—we learn via Messy Nessy Chic. The stream-lined, steam-punk dragster was built for the Illinois circuit back in 1917 by Barney Oldfield and Harry Miller with rigorous safety components added to the aerodynamic foil (actually put through the paces in a wind-tunnel) and enclosed, protective cockpit.
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐ถ, ๐, holidays and observances
Thursday, 15 June 2017
ford at the fair
There are a lot of interesting angles to pursue in this latest ploy for attention from Tedium but what really resonated with us was the mention of the partnership between industrialist Henry Ford and botanist and inventor George Washington Carver to create a “soybean” car—or rather an automobile with a hemp-based body. Like the factors that led to the production of the plastic Trabant in East Germany, war time austerity and steel and fuel rationing prompted this collaborative effort in 1941.
Designed to also operate on hemp oil, there is some unsettled contentions about the success and abandonment of this bioplastics vehicle. Only one prototype was built and displayed to the public at the Dearborn assembly-line and later at the Michigan State Fair and was subsequently destroyed—along with the exact combination of crops used—and newspaper accounts vary as to the reception. Despite significant investment, safety demonstrations, patent-filings and acres and acres of soy and marijuana, the end of World War II and surplus steel seemed to mothball the idea for the more ecologically-friendly mode of transportation but the initial decision to walk back the first model the remains a bit of mystery. Tales abound how the petroleum industry conspires to quash innovation that would not be in their self-interest, and perhaps the soy car was one of the earliest casualties and one wonders what trajectory things might have taken otherwise.
Thursday, 11 May 2017
retronautics institute
First introduced at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, the darling little Microlino electro-auto by Swiss designer Wim Ouboter evokes the bubble chassis of the BWM Isetta of the 1950s. Priced at twelve thousand euros, the company is slated to reach its production goal of five thousand by the year’s end.
Saturday, 8 April 2017
rock-a-bye
Wednesday, 22 March 2017
vee-dub
Car guy Jesse Bowers shares a gallery of impressions from the Bob Baker Volkswagen Customer Appreciation Show, that happens every spring in Carlsbad California and is a forum for collectors and dedicated caretakers of vintage VW buses. There are only the older models to be found in the States as an import duty has been levied against Transporters for years, customs classifying the van as a truck. Let’s hope we’re on the right side of any coming trade-war.
Monday, 6 March 2017
your mileage may vary
Via the forever fabulous Everlasting Blรถrt comes this delightful promotional film from the American Petroleum Institute that illustrates the virtues of fuel-efficiency and ethical resource management through the conformist practises of the Martians in thrall to the great and powerful Ogg who pay the primitive Earthlings a visit, who despite their superior technology, don’t have infrastructure and public institutions worked out too well. This animated short by character designer Tom Oreb is from 1956 and for the time really highlights our ability to harness energy and develop new industries but it also demonstrates that we’ve all but stopped progressing, insofar as we’re still reliant on oil.
Monday, 26 December 2016
wattway
Over Christmas week a Norman village of about thirty-five hundred residents unveiled a one kilometre-long stretch of road that is cobbled with solar-voltaic panels.
Though the region is not famously sunny, the power generated is projected to kept the village’s street lamps burning with a surplus for other utilities. And despite the first of its kind experimental thoroughfare (Wattway it is called and is the innovation of a veteran firm specialising in asphalt) costing five million euro to pave, a trial of the next two years that will look at durability and energy returns may mean this small village in the Orne will be truly trail-blazing in the near future. Perhaps electric vehicles can be made self-charging.
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
old-timer
Thursday, 17 November 2016
4x4
no bueno: a look at the evolution of the logo of a Tex-Mex-ish fast food chain via Super Punch
pleasure capsule: the pimped out Panthermobile, from the creator of KITT and the Bat Mobile, is finally street-legal—via Nag on the Lake
omoshirogara: the private propaganda kimonos en vogue from 1900 to 1945
ur-fascism: an examination of the key features of totalitarianism
Thursday, 6 October 2016
grand cru(ise)
Intoxicatingly, French motorists are being cautioned along the motorways of some wine-producing communities during this year’s harvesting time to drive with care due to the risk of spillage onto the lanes from lorries transporting grapes from the vineyards to processing centres. The warning signs are temporary and will be taken down after the season is over.
Viniculture in much of western Europe was bookended with a pair of Roman festivals called the Vinalia—one in Spring and dedicated to Venus to break open the casts of the previous year’s vintage and prayer for a good growing season, and the second held in the early Autumn, dedicated to Jupiter (who controls the weather) as a pre-harvest celebration and selecting of the finest grapes that would be reserved for sacramental wine. I believe that this year was the first time authorities were prompted to install traffic signs but surely there must have been some overflow since ancient times.
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฅ, ๐, holidays and observances
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
autobots, roll!
An Ankara-based research and development firm has created a range of prototype and fully operational Transformer vehicles. These BMW cars can be driven just like any car but also can take a robotic form and is fully articulated. Maybe these warriors are not quite ready for a pitched-battle but the team behind these custom Decepticons are working fervently to add more features.
Friday, 29 July 2016
foot traffic
Quite used to our Ampelmรคnnchen, I haven’t encountered a wordy pedestrian crossing signal for years but I did rather enjoy pondering the poor punctuation of the lack of an apostrophe in don’t—which I’d never noticed.
Granted, apostrophes can be confusing and prone to abuse and especially glaring and galling and when superfluous but I suppose in its omission—not so much, but it is wholly unrelated to the recent assault that British civil engineers launched on diction on the roadways in hopes of staving off confusion for navigation devices. It turns out—and there’s some interesting diversions and detours along the way—no one really knows why that tradition was carried on, but one’s best guess is that it was for symmetry and easier to make the NT a ligature with the earliest sign illuminated by neon tubes and skip the apostrophe.
Friday, 8 July 2016
electric mirages
The fatal accident involving a tractor-trailer and driverless carriage, the brilliant BLDGBlog reports, was certainly a tragedy, but also prizes out insights into the increasingly inscrutable realm of machine perception.
Just as the component influences of complex algorithms quickly grow beyond human comprehension and artificial intelligences behave in ways that their programmers could not predict, it’s rare that we bother trying to understand how a machine sees and judges accordingly. When things run like clockwork, I suppose we are not that considered about what’s under the hood and how it works. Diagnostics revealed that the robot car could not distinguish between the chassis of the truck and the sky, forwarding further thought on the design of infrastructure and of space in general (the home, highway, office and warehouse) to make it more (or less) machine-accessible. What do you think? Is real-estate to be landscaped for use by computers, much like most of the traffic of the internet, or are those unreasonable accommodations?