Better Place, an outfit that is aiming to make eclectic vehicles ubiquitous and practical, has just shown a prototype of what amounts to the EV version of a filling station. Since fully recharging batteries can be an hours long process, Better Place has decided that a better idea is simply to swap out the drained batteries with full ones, and they’re doing it with robots.
Next week I will be heading to the Turtle Wax headquarters in Chicago for a bloggers summit, which will include a tour of the facilities, and a behind-the-scenes look at how they develop and test their car care products.
The tour will end with a Q&A session, and here’s where you come in. Do you have any questions or comments you’d like me to voice when meeting the Turtle Wax team? Any questions about their products or about car care in general?
If so, please head over to the contact form and submit them, and I’ll be happy to ask your questions and post them here when I return from the tour.
Making your car an extension of your personality and a reflection of your style is the point of car tuning. Many different ways exist to tune your car. However, what if you are tuning a daily driver? Can you have a well-tuned vehicle that looks great and still use it for your daily commute? The short answer is “yes.” However, you will have to go about the process somewhat differently than those who are tuning a car that is not driven every day.
Tuning a car is a tradeoff. Vehicles come from the factory with a midrange setup, designed for the average consumer and the average commute. This setup gives the vehicle moderate power, while still attempting to provide fuel economy and ride comfort. Tuning is a process of sacrifice; each item that you change will result in a different ride and a different comfort level. Here are a few of the areas that are most frequently changed by tuners, as well as what they do to your ride: Continue Reading…
Amazon just created this cool new parts finder which makes it easy to find all the parts and accessories they carry for your car.
As you can see, just enter your Year, Make, and Model of your car, hit “Go” and it will bring you to the Amazon Automotive page showing you all of the parts compatible with your car. You’d be surprised at how many parts they come up with - Amazon now has over 3.5 million parts in their automotive section.
Give it a try, let me know what you think.
Car tuning is a huge industry. There are several popular styles of tuning, such as Dub and German style. However, race tuning is different from almost all of these. Tuning your vehicle for a race, whether on the track or on the street, will involve several things that most tuning styles do not provide. While most tuning styles do add some elements of performance, there are additional aspects that negate many of the benefits gained. What must you do to tune your car for racing? Here are a few pointers to get you started: Continue Reading…
Seems that the golden state has decided to alter the definition of what is a motorcycle. What counts as a motorcycle in California? If it’s got two or three wheels, it’ll be a motorcycle. Period.
Simple, no? There used to be a weight limit on three-wheeled vehicles in Cal, anything above a certain weight, and it counted as something other than a motorcycle, and would be taxed, licensed and permitted accordingly (e.g. if it was a really heavy trike, you couldn’t run it in the HOV lane). Now that restriction has been removed, meaning it could turn into a free for all for trikes. The real upside of this is how it will affect alternative vehicle designers and manufacturers in California. Now rather than trying to make a featherweight, er, car like the Aptera or Venture One, an entrepreneur could design and build something a little more robust. Also feeding into the alt-vehicle scene is that California will also no longer differentiate between motorcycles that run on alternative fuels. However it’s powered, gasoline, electricity, or hydrogen, whatever, if it’s got two or three wheels, it’ll be a motorcycle.
There is, as always, a dark side … one question that the law does not seem to resolve is whether the operators of three wheelers will now have to have a motorcycle license. Up to now three wheelers have not been classified as motorcycles and could be driven by anyone with a regular driver’s license. Does this new law mean that in the future, an Aptera or Venture One owner will have to take their car-sized, er, “bike” down to the DMV and try to maneuver it around some cones?
That could be fun to watch.
