Archive for October, 2009
The Danville Register and Bee reports that,
Students and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville developed a unique way to test tires.
Associate professor Saied Taheri and Virginia Tech students in the Intelligent Transportation Lab at the Institute developed a trailer that houses equipment to test tires on actual roads and road conditions.
After a year and a half of development, the team finished validating the test trailer in August. The researchers compared the results of tests on tires to manufacturers’ own laboratory tests. The data matched.
Most manufacturers and researchers test tires on a flat-track “indoor treadmill.” The rolling test trailer is only one of three such systems that tests outside in the real environment.
The trailer helps the Intelligent Transportation Lab test for stability of vehicles or measure what conditions would cause a vehicle with specific tires to roll over. With that information, researchers could develop controls to better stabilize a vehicle.
Dhaka, Oct 30 (IANS) India is considering granting passage to trucks from Nepal going to Bangladesh, media reports said.
London, Oct 30 (IANS) August Coppola, actor Nicolas Cage's father and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola's brother, has died of a heart attack.
Nissan has announced a US national tour of their new pure EV, Leaf, beginning with a first American public showing on November 13th in Los Angeles. Though not yet officially announced, the first public sighting of Leaf at a major…
Even with a hefty pricetag of 375,000 Euros, the Lexus LFA will not yield Toyota hardly any profit. After six years in development, Toyota poured millions into its development but the price tag and expected production and sales figures wouldn’t make it Lexus’ cash cow.
The LFA is powered by a 4.8L V10 that dishes out 552 bhp. That much power allows the car to hit 62 mph from standstill in 3.7 seconds and go all the way to 202 mph.
The LFA hit a roadblock about a year ago when Nissan came out with the GT-R. Toyota engineers went back to the drawing board to make sure that the GT-R would not shame Lexus in the bid of building the next proper Asian supercar after the Honda NSX ended its run.
While there will be expected demand for the car, 375,000 Euros is already the price of two Aston Martin DBSes. And quite frankly, even though I’m a Toyota fan, I’m pretty sure I’d spring for a couple of DBSes instead if I had the money.
So it appears Porsche is also planning another car aside from the seven models slotted in for production over the next four years. (Autocar, you sneaky chaps, you.)
Porsche apparently will also be rolling out an entry-level sports car known internally as the 356. Word has it that it will be sharing bits and pieces from the Audi R4 bin.
The car will be mid-engined but don’t think that entry-level means cheap. The car will be hovering around the £33,000 mark in today’s valuations and who knows how much inflation would kick it up by the time it gets launched 2-3 years from now.
I just hope that Volkswagen has weighed the business decisions regarding Porsche’s development plans.
If I were Volkswagen, I’d slash Porsche’s fleet to just one model – the 911 – and just have Porsche produce different varians of the car. Otherwise all the other models are just there to cannibalize other VW cars.