After building luxury toys like high-speed electric boats and futuristic three-wheeled motorcycles, the Torrance design studio Motivo Engineering is getting into subsistence farming.
The company has developed a multi-purpose electric tractor to help poor farmers in India till the soil and, more importantly, provide them with reliable access to electricity.
Continue reading “Motivo Engineering Builds Electric Tractor to Power Indian Villages” »
Elon Musk is looking to build a test track for the Hyperloop, a futuristic high-speed transportation project that Musk outlined in a white paper 18 months ago.
Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015
He’s also trying to get students involved.
Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE http://t.co/HV9BLCoMb8
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015
The SAE International is a student design competition for Formula 1-style race cars. It also began in Texas.
UCLA grad students have been studying the feasibility of the Hyperloop since last fall. But Musk is not directly involved with that project.
This Hot Wheels dune buggy can launch off a ramp and 360 degree corkscrew flip.
A race car that can withstand eight g-forces on a double-barrel loop; a dune buggy that can hit a ramp and launch into a 360-degree corkscrew flip; a Darth Vadar roadster that breathes like the Star Wars supervillain and tops out at 150 mph.
These are some of the lifesize Hot Wheels vehicles that have come out of Action Vehicle Engineering, a stunt car garage in Chatsworth.
Continue reading “Stunt car-maker builds lifesize Hot Wheels” »
Los Angeles is Uber’s largest market. It’s also the testing ground for the taxi app’s latest offering: rides in ultra-luxurious cars like Teslas, Mercedes Benz S-Class and BMW 7-Series.
Continue reading “Uber launches luxury car service UberLUX in LA” »
The cult of Waze looms large in Los Angeles, where even veteran side-street-savvy motorists are turning to the now-Google-owned app to beat traffic as they traverse Southern Calfornia’s increasingly crowded highways and byways.
Continue reading “Where there’s a will, is there a way to thwart Waze?” »
A team of UCLA architecture students are spending the entire school year researching the Hyperloop, a futuristic transportation tube that promises to blast pods between San Francisco and Los Angeles at 760 mph.
The Hyperloop is the brain child of Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who released early design plans for the Hyperloop last year in reaction to the California High Speed Rail project, which Musk called too slow and too expensive.
Hyperloop pods float on a cushion of air and move through a low-pressure tube with the help of electric magnets and on-board fans.
Since Musk is so busy building sexy electric cars and low-cost spaceships, he hopes someone else will take up the task of providing California with cutting-edge bullet train technology.
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design school has taken up the challenge by creating a one-year research program, called SUPRASTUDIO, to work out the logistics of constructing a perfectly straight, elevated, vacuum tube between California’s largest urban areas.
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design students are studying the Hyperloop inside the former Hughes Aircraft hangars in Playa Vista.
The students are building a life-size prototype of a Hyperloop pod as well as a miniature vacuum tube system similar to the old mail delivery pods used in newsrooms and corporate buildings in the mid-20th century.
Program director Craig Hodgetts called the Hyperloop “insane” but insists that “the physics are sound.”
One of the biggest challenges will be consumer buy in, since travelling at supersonic speeds inside a vacuum tube might give some potential passengers pause — or lose their lunch. Most of the 25 students in the program are Chinese, with only two Americans enrolled.
All of them are Elon Musk fans, one student said.
The UCLA program is funded in part by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a crowd-funded project dedicated to making the Hyperloop concept a reality. The company, launched with help from the El Segundo-based JumpStartFund.com, was initially run by former director of mission operations for SpaceX, Dr. Marco Villa, and Patricia Galloway, former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.