Designed for the BMW Motorrad Innovation Contest, the Halbo turns saving the planet into an extreme sport.
Conceived by designer Pierre Yohanes Lubis, the electric bike is much more planet friendly than say a petro-based vehicle. But, if the concept were to become popular it’s just unsafe enough to thin the herd.
Segway inventor Dean Kamen is developing a hybrid electric scooter that can run on almost anything that burns.
According to the patent, the bike has a small two-piston Stirling engine right under the seat. Though with an engine of that size, it really isn’t going to provide much juice - not much more than 5bhp.
A Stirling engine is based on tech which predates internal combustion engines by almost 100 years. It’s kinda like a steam engine in the sense that it uses external combustion. They use pistons for the crankshaft, but unlike the alternatives they have no valves for no gas ever enters or leaves the cylinders.
LA County Sheriffs stuck driving Crown Vics are about to be left feeling tragically un-hip. Their Board of Sups just approved a deal with BMW to lease 17 fully electric MINI Coopers.
Approved on Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will lease the MINI Es for only $10 a month. With a market lease rate of $850, automaker BMW offered up the bargain price in exchange for deputy’s feedback.
On Wednesday, June 10, astronaut Maurizo Cheli set a world record while piloting the fully electric SkySpark. During an eight-minute flight at the World Air Games 2009 in Turin, Italy, he hit a top speed of 155 mph (250 km/h).
That’s a record speed for a 100-percent electrically powered aircraft.
Eighth-grader David S. Dixon–along with his dad David G. Dixon–has built a street-legal quadricycle powered by a solar-charged electric motor. The bike not only carries his dog and three friends, but it has also has an iPod dock and GPS. Ya, it’s that cool!
Coined as the Solar Human Hybrid (SOHH), the vehicle was launched as part of David Jr.’s middle school project for the Novato Charter School.
Robert Riley’s XR3 kit car is an amazing three-wheeled plug-in diesel hybrid. The trike gets a jaw dropping 225mpg on combined diesel-electric power and 125mpg when using only the 23hp diesel engine.
And hey, it kinda looks like that Back to the Future car!
Introduced back in June of 2008, the two-passenger car was designed so it can be assembled using readily available parts. Fully constructed, the car weighs in at 1480 pounds and has top speed of 80mph. And while you can only get 40 miles out of its li-ion battery pack, it can be plugged into any standard wall socket.
Today’s the
TTXGP - the Time Trials Xtreme Grand Prix. And don’t let that misspelled word fool ya. It’s going to be one heck of a ride! In fact, it’s going be the
world’s first zero-carbon, clean emission Grand Prix.
With twenty-three different electric bikes and sixteen riders, seven different countries will compete in this inaugural race. The event take place in the Isle of Man with teams from the UK, Italy, USA, India, Germany and Austria.
An e-Grand Prix? Um…I wanna go!
And if you’re bummed that you can’t make it, don’t worry. Organizers plan to showcase their contestants here in the States too. It will be at this year’s American Motorcyclist Association Vintage Motorcycle Days festival at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in Lexington, Ohio.
Here are 15 hot bikes racing today.
Apple fanboys might still be drooling from yesterday’s iPhone 3Gs announcement, but I bet they never saw this coming: an electric superbike with an iPhone for all its instrumentation!
Heck, I was happy to finally get MMS support!
The MotoCzysz E1pc is one of the many entries in the TTXGP race this Friday. How the iPhone is integrated into the bike is still a mystery but features like its native GPS will surely be used. And whether it wins or loses, it definitely gets points for creamy white geeky goodness.
Chris Aultman is the helicopter pilot and Aviation Director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He served for six years in the United States Marine Corps prior to joining the Sea Shepherd team. During that period Chris spent 13 months at sea and became a veteran of the Gulf War.
Aultman’s first experience with the destruction of the world’s oceans was seeing the disastrous effects of the millions of barrels of oil dumped into the Persian Gulf during that war. This and many other experiences caused Chris to start to see the world for what it really was, and nothing was ever the same again.
At the Eco-Aviation Conference in Washington, Air New Zealand’s Chief Pilot Captain David Morgan announced the company’s findings on a test flight from last December. Powered by a combination of biofuel and jet fuel, the test resulted in a fuel savings of 1.2%. It also cut CO2 emissions by over 60%!
While a 1.2% fuel savings doesn’t seem like much, that is over 1 ton of fuel!
The test was conducted using a commercial 747-400 fitted with Rolls Royce engines. Rolls Royce had certified the fuel — a 50:50 blend of standard Jet A1 fuel and synthetic paraffinic kerosene derived from jatropha oil.