Here in the City of Glass, we’re used to massive buildings hewn from reflective services — a forest of crystalline spires like some 1960s sci-fi version of the future, albeit with fewer flying cars and more Starbucks.
You sort of get used to the way the dappled light sometimes glances between the skyscrapers, casting oddly geometric patterns on the pavement. People don’t even bother looking up anymore.
They might, however, if the buildings started focusing the sun’s energy into death rays and shooting it at their cars, as happened in the U.K. recently.
A curved, 37-storey structure in downtown London is doing something its architects didn’t expect, gathering up sunshine like a parabola and then lasering it down to parked cars below like a magnifying glass frying ants.
For the owner of one Jaguar XJ saloon, the heat proved quite expensive indeed, melting a sideview mirror and plastic pillar cover, as well as liquefying the Jaguar emblem. Good gracious me.
Happily, as the building is owned by a somewhat conscientious development company and not, for instance, Dr. Evil, the damages to the Jag have been covered. The affected parking spaces have also been closed, and James Bond has been advised to not work on his tan in the area.
Toyota launch appliance
For many, many years, the Toyota motoring company has been breaking sales records and simultaneously suffocating any whisper of driving enthusiasm from their lineup. Their cars are safe and reliable, and any employee who mentions the words “Supra” or “MR2” is immediately locked in a room and forced to listen to Kenny G until he or she calms down.
And yet, in the past little while, Toyota seems to have gone completely berserk. We’ve had the loony-tunes LFA from their Lexus luxury division, and now we get this, a 414 h.p. Yaris subcompact called the Hybrid-R Concept. Yes, it’s a hybrid.
Into the tiny, buglike Yaris shell, Toyota’s engineers have managed to stuff a wild array of equipment: three 60 h.p. electric motors, a supercapacitor to store the electricity needed to power them and a 1.6-litre turbocharged engine making 300-odd horsepower.
Basically, the turbo engine drives the front wheels while two of the electric engines are in charge of powering the rear wheels. As the electric motors can shunt their power around, the little Hybrid-R has the ability to divert power to either side out back, allowing it to carve through the corners with torque vectoring. The third electric engine is used as a generator for the supercapacitor under braking and can also fire a little more power out back if the front wheels get overwhelmed.
While it’s merely a concept, one of the interesting takeaways from the Hybrid-R is that it’s, well, interesting. Might we see some sort of turbocharging making its way into a sportier version of the Yaris or Corolla? That’s an exciting thought — oh hang on. Better break out the Kenny.
McLaren P1 approaches seven-minute barrier at Nürburgring
While it may not have the most exciting name in the world, the P1 supercar certainly looks the part. Actually, that’s not true: it looks a bit like someone put a smiley-faced Mazda2 in Willy Wonka’s taffy puller.
It is fast though, and unofficial timekeepers have been watching the car during shakedown runs at Germany’s long, torturous Nürburgring. Currently, they figure the car’s laptime at somewhere around seven minutes, four seconds.
So how does the McLaren stack up against the competition? That’s quicker than a Lexus LFA, quicker than a 911 GT2 RS (the ultimate expression of rear-engined Porschehood), and much quicker than a Nissan GT-R. If confirmed, the P1 would hold the street-legal track record by a wide margin.
The reason the time remains unconfirmed is pride —McLaren hopes to tuck the P1 just under the seven minute time, a first for a road-legal car. What happens when a street car cracks seven? I’m not sure, but Marty McFly is somehow involved.
U.S. consider seatbelt interlocks
How about this: instead of your car bonging away at you incessantly if you don’t put your seatbelt on, it simply won’t start. That’s the petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is mulling over in the United States.
Remember the old door-mounted automatic seatbelts? It’s just like that, only even more annoying. Thus, the legislation is still a long way off, but here’s the silver lining.
If seatbelt interlocks were put in place, car manufacturers might well be able to stop cramming so much heavy safety related gear into their cars. With a passenger securely anchored, there’s no need for unbelted crash testing, and all the extras needed to get the required scores. Moreover, one third of all people killed on U.S. highways last year died because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt.
Not a horrible idea then, in terms of safety, but at what point do we stop trying to make cars safer and start simply trying to make their drivers safer instead?
