The thoughts of a true technology versatilist
The Hong Kong made MyCar that I told you almost 3 years ago has won an award from the GreenFleet magazine, who has given it the “electric vehicle of the year award“. Well done!
I wish it is available in Hong Kong, we sure need something like this to improve the pollution level.
This is a joint venture between Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, InnoVech and the world famous designer Giugiaro of Italy have designed a “car”. Or to be exact a motorcycle with 4 wheels and a hard shell.
It is targeted at youngsters between the age of 14 – 18 and may be driven without the normal vehicle license. At the moment the target geographic launch will be Europe.
InnoVech is responsible for the manufacture of this vehicle and is considering building a new factory in Hong Kong to perform the final assembly and quality control of the vehicle.
A shorter list would be “What a Macintosh cannot do?”.
Driving a SUV will be another one off that list.
The “Team Banzai” will be competing in this year’s “2005 DARPA Grand Challenge” (“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”) on October 8, 2005 among 39 other teams for the USD2 Million grand prize.
The team’s vehicle is a Volkswagen Touareg named “Dora” outfitted with 3 Mac Mini’s, which control the full functions of the vehicle, including navigations, decision control and motor control systems.
Note that the “brains of Dora” are just three 1.25GHz G4 Mac Mini, Apple’s most economical desktop computer. Compare that to the Stanford University entry with the same model vehicle that is controlled by seven Pentium M computers. Given that the two teams are using the same model vehicle in the same challenge, it further shows the power of Macintosh computers (with its Mac OS X) over Intel based computers.
I wish the best of luck to Team Banzai in October.
Finally… after almost one and a half year, I finally got some pictures of my Audit TT Quattro that I currently drives in Hong Kong. Here is a sample:
You can see more photos at my Flickr set.