Technology

Waymo is on the verge of becoming the world’s first commercial self-driving taxi service. According to Bloomberg, Google’s autonomous driving division Waymo will launch the world’s first autonomous taxi service early this December. Waymo will launch this service under a new brand name that is yet to be disclosed.

HRE Wheels presents the first-ever titanium 3D-printed rims. Named HRE3D+, the rims are the result of a joint project with GE AddWorks and were made to showcase the possibilities available when additive manufacturing is employed to create state-of-the-art car wheels.

Gone are the days of alloy wheels. Even magnesium wheels seem antiquated now that HRE and GE have come forth with a prototype 3D-printed rim made out of titanium. The process of making these wheels is complicated, but the results are astonishing. Basically, you can’t get such a design using a traditional CNC machine.

All of us have dreamt of riding one of these hovering vehicles. We have seen them in movies, video games, and always wondered whether it will ever become a reality. Well, the future is actually here. A Russian company, Hoversurf, has announced that its Hoverbike S3 is ready for production and preorders are open. It is priced at a modest $150,000.

One of the coolest advantages of electric powertrains over internal combustion engines is that power and torque are available instantly. And this is one of the reasons why the Tesla Model S is the quickest production car with a 0-to-60 benchmark of only 2.5 seconds. Now, Tesla wants to put the Model 3’s instant torque to good use on the race track through a new driving mode. It’s called Track Mode and turns the compact sedan into a drift machine.

Uber wants to resume testing of its autonomous vehicle systems 8 months after a Volvo SUV part of the Uber test program struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. Now, Uber wants to kick off testing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and hopes to regain public trust.

Back in March, a Volvo XC90 SUV equipped with Uber’s self-driving systems hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street at night in Tempe, Arizona. Although the person was hit away from a crosswalk, Arizona officials quickly suspended Uber’s permits that allowed it to test the new technology on public roads in the aftermath of the incident.

Now, Uber has released a detailed safety report to showcase the lengths it will go to to ensure that future testing of the autonomous technology will be carried out safely. The company stated that it carefully analyzed what went wrong and that it has improved the onboard systems and now wants to resume testing in Pennsylvania.

In an expected turn of events, the largest American car producer GM announced the development and production of eBikes. Electric bikes, designed by GM engineers in Canada, are intended for city use, sport small diameter wheels and still do not have a name. Before GM puts them in production and on sale next year, the company announced a crowdsourcing campaign and challenge where all interested parties can submit their name idea. GM isn’t a douche, so it offered $10,000 for the winner of the contest with the runners-up getting $1,000 in awards. You can access the challenge here as you have up until 26th November, 10 AM Eastern, to submit your naming ideas for the new eBike.

Some cars’ warning tones for leaving a door ajar, the headlights on, or low fuel can be downright annoying and sometimes startling. I know the low fuel warning in my mid-2000’s Ford gives me chills when I’m not expecting to hear it, and it’s a problem shared with newer Fords whose chimes can be quite annoying. But for its premium Lincoln brand, the Blue Oval has chosen to record actual musicians playing actual instruments and the result is a much better and more soothing one.

Ever wondered what will happen to the autonomous cars when the weather conditions are bad? What if it’s raining and your self-driving car gets cold feet err., cold tires? Ford has given it a thought and invested in a company called ClimaCell. ClimaCell specializes in "microweather" technology capable of tracking location-specific, short-term weather patterns; and it has caught Ford’s attention. The Blue Oval recently participated in a Series B funding round that raised $45 million for ClimaCell.

The car industry never sleeps (except in August) and every year it provides us with numerous solutions to new problems, and with innovations that make us want new cars even more. This is a rundown of 10 awesome vehicle and technology innovations for 2018.

Tesla’s back in the news and, lo and behold, it’s again because they have to pay a few million dollars back. This time, the money will go to aggravated customers who bought the $5,000-worth Autopilot 2.0 suite only to find out that they have to wait months before it actually becomes available.

As part of the $5,400,000 settlement, which will see Tesla pay back customers anywhere between $25 and $280 depending on when they purchased the car. Basically, Tesla announced they will release the Autopilot 2.0 group of functions in December of 2016 in two separate packages: the ’Enhanced Autopilot’ package which was priced at $5,000 and the ’Fully Self-Driving’ package which cost $2,000 less. Sadly for customers, Tesla couldn’t keep up to its side of the bargain so lawsuits were filed aplenty.

A lot of innovations in real life have come from movies, like the flip phone that was derived from the first mobile communicator in Star Trek, for instance. The next big thing, that surprisingly took long too come, is an iron-man inspired suit. Richard Browning, the creator of this suit that allows you to take flight, and is powered by jet engines, said he would launch a new racing series over water next year featuring men and women from different sporting backgrounds.

Bar-style rear light clusters are definitely not a new automotive design trend and, while they are cool, the vehicles they were featured on in the past really weren’t - just think of the not very pretty second-gen Ford Scorpio sedan, and you can understand why the trend didn’t take off until now.

In recent years, though, manufacturers have really adopted the trend of having a horizontal light bar running across the back of a car connecting the two rear light clusters, and now the coolest such light bars are on some higher end luxury cars. The proliferation of LED technology was definitely key to this dramatic popularity upswing, as now most taillight bars are animated in some way, and they can usually put on some sort of light show.

On top of just looking really striking and often quite pretty, this kind of setup has safety benefits as well - it makes the car even more visible from behind, so there is less chance of a rear-end collision.

More and more cars are bound to feature them in years to come, and it could become a staple design choice for more luxurious and expensive cars, although there are plenty of more affordable mainstream options that have light bars. As things stand, this is a list of the twenty cars with the biggest and boldest light bars available now - they all look so cool that it was hard to narrow it down to just ten.