Rydal-Meadowbrook Civic Association

Photo: SpaceX

UPDATE 9:35 p.m. EDT – Inspections of the number five engine found a check valve that allows a nitrogen purge of the engine prior to ignition had stuck open. This stuck valve was the root cause of the high pressure in engine five detected moments before launch. The valve will be replaced and the SpaceX team will make further evaluations of the data on Sunday. If further inspections look good, the next launch attempt will be at 3:44 a.m. EDT on Tuesday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — This morning’s scheduled launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scrubbed with less than a second remaining on the countdown clock due to unusually high pressure in one of the engines.

In the pre-dawn darkness at Cape Canaveral in Florida, everything was looking good for a 4:55 a.m. EDT liftoff with all eyes focused on SpaceX’s Launch Complex 40. About 15 minutes before launch, SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced via Twitter the software used for liftoff had “initiated master countdown script ‘Auto Sequence: Yoda.’”

Excitement was building as the countdown made its classic downward progression from 10 seconds and veteran NASA announcer George Diller made it all the way to “T-0 seconds.” With a flash of light emanating from the bottom of the rocket Diller continued with “liftoahhhhffff….” before his voice trailed off as it was clear the rocket was going nowhere. “We’ve had a cutoff, liftoff did not occur” Diller added.

The ignition sequence for the nine Merlin rocket engines had started, but the pressure in engine five was trending high. Once the limit was hit, launch software took over and aborted the liftoff. In a post abort press conference, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the problem looked like an actual issue with the engine and was not one of the sensor or software issues that had led to delays in the schedule earlier this year during simulations.

“We can not blame the software guys for this one” Shotwell noted.

The abort actually happened at T-0.5 seconds after all engines had “started nominally” and only engine five was trending high. The problematic engine is located in the center of the engine layout pictured above in the hangar before the launch attempt.

One of launch procedures SpaceX uses is to hold the rocket on the launch pad for a few seconds after ignition to make sure everything is working properly. Shotwell said today’s abort is a perfect example of why the procedure is used. She said it is analogous to an airline pilot lining up on the runway and holding the brakes as the power levers are pushed forward, “we were revving the engines, we were looking at the gauges, we decided not to fly.”

Aborts are nothing new to the rocket launching world. The decision not to launch is considered critical to the safety and capabilities of any launch vehicle. Shotwell emphasized the upstart space company did not suffer a setback other than a few days on the schedule. She says the cause of the problem is not known other than it was likely due to a lack of sufficient fuel in the combustion chamber.

“This is not a failure, we aborted, with purpose”  Shotwell told reporters. “It would be a failure if we had lifted off with an engine trending in this direction.”

Because of orbital mechanics and the path of the International Space Station, the next opportunity for a liftoff will be on Tuesday at 3:44 a.m. EDT. The SpaceX team must wait until ISS is in a proper orbital path to minimize the amount of propellant needed to chase down and get in phase with the station. The team wants to preserve as much fuel as possible for the complex maneuvering that will be needed for the demonstrations required by NASA.

This isn’t the first time engine five on a Falcon 9 has caused a problem. On the first launch of the Falcon 9 in June 2010, engine five experienced a higher pressure as well leading to an initial abort.

Shotwell said initial inspection of the engine this morning showed the necessary valves appeared to be working properly and technicians must now make a more detailed inspection of the engine before determining the root cause of the high pressure.

SpaceX makes its own rocket engines at its Hawthorne, California factory. The company is investigating the possibility of fixing the engine on the rocket, or if needed, swapping out engine five from the Falcon 9 rocket in the adjacent hangar that is slated for the next flight later this year.

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Late last night the 178-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket was moved out of its hangar at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral and positioned on the launch pad. Today the rocket and Dragon capsule sit in the Florida sun waiting for tomorrow's 4:55 a.m. ET launch. The launch pad is leased by SpaceX from the Air Force and is the location of the previous two Falcon 9 launches.

Like everything at SpaceX, keeping costs low is the theme on the launch pad just as it is at the factory. The company has reclaimed items from the scrap heap and opted for water instead of concrete to keep the noise down.

The pad itself has been in use for decades and was used to launch Titan rockets between 1965 and 2005. Now it is one of two launch sites used by SpaceX, the other being at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. The company plans to develop a third launch pad of its own in the near future.

Tomorrow's launch window is a "near instantaneous" opportunity to lift off and make it to the International Space Station. The narrow window is dictated by the orbital path of the ISS and the need to preserve as much propellant as possible for the demonstration mission, rather than chasing the station on orbit. If the launch window is missed, the next satisfactory opportunity would not happen until Tuesday. There are other chances to launch, but they would require too much propellant to rendezvous with the ISS.

SpaceX has yet to perform a flawless countdown to launch during any of its previous missions. At a Friday press conference, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell acknowledged the delays during previous countdowns, but put the odds of a launch tomorrow at "better than 50/50." The weather forecast is relatively good, with only a 30 percent chance of weather interfering with the launch.

Photo: Jason Paur/Wired

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Nürburgring, 1960. Photo: ╚ SεΣ ╤hi∩Gs DiƒFerεNT└y ╗/Flickr

Can’t afford a round-trip expedition to Germany to experience the 24 Hours of Nürburgring race this weekend? We’ve got you covered, with live video, GPS car tracking and audio streams from all the major teams and press outlets on the ground at the Green Hell.

As always, Radio LeMans provides the best color commentary when racing gets underway at 4 p.m. local time (10 a.m. EDT, 7 a.m. PDT). Get breaking news through their Twitter account and plug this URL into your favorite streaming audio app for live coverage.

Audi, Nissan and Subaru are all streaming live video over the weekend from both the paddock and their respective cars. We’ve embedded Nissan and Subaru’s streams below, and Audi’s can be accessed through Audi.tv. ADAC – the organizing body behind the race – also has its own stream available here.

GPSauge has the most trick setup, providing live GPS signals from all the cars, complete with speed, location and class information available on their dedicated Nürburgring race page. There’s also a free iPhone app available that streams the same information, while the official ADAC 24h Rennen app for iOS ($0.99 in the App Store) provides up-to-the-second scoring, placement and other information from the race. And naturally, you can follow the action on Twitter by keeping tabs on the #N24h hashtag.

We’ll update this page with more resources as they become available, and feel free to include your own in the comments below.

Subaru Live Stream

Live video for mobile from Ustream

Nissan Live Stream

Live video from your Android device on Ustream

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The commercial space race is about to begin. Early Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. EDT, the first privately designed and built spacecraft destined for the International Space Station is expected to lift off from the historic Cape Canaveral Air Force Station not far from the Atlantic Ocean on Florida's east coast. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are designed and built by Space Exploration Technologies -- the company better known as SpaceX -- at the company's factory not far from the Pacific Ocean in Hawthorne, California.

Tomorrow's scheduled launch puts an exclamation point on a new era of space transportation. If the first era of space flight focused on a Cold War-driven race to show what could be done, and the second era focused on making space flight and delivering orbiting payloads routine, this new era is focused on making all of the above a lot less expensive.

SpaceX is leading the charge to bring down the cost of flying to space. Driven by a personal desire to make life multi-planetary -- aka travel to Mars -- the company's founder and leader Elon Musk has built a program with about $4 billion worth of contracts and launch orders already on its books. But it has only launched a few customer payloads so far.

With just a handful of launches under its belt, SpaceX has yet to successfully prove its business case of dramatically reducing the cost of delivering payloads into orbit. And both its founder Elon Musk, and current customer NASA, rarely miss an opportunity to emphasize the challenging nature of the upcoming ISS mission. But the company is on target for backing up its low cost promise and is managing to achieve this goal by spending hundreds of millions, rather than billions of dollars.

Musk honed his business skills in the internet startup arena of the late 1990s. He makes no secret that one of the keys to reducing the cost of space flight is operating an efficient company that is nimble and lacks the bloated layers that exist in many of the large, veteran aerospace companies that have been building rockets and spacecraft for the past 50 years. SpaceX has received large investments from private sources -- including a hundred million from Musk himself -- as well as funding from NASA. But the company operates more like a lean startup despite the fact it should soon overtake Russia as the number-one producer of rocket engines in the world.

Like at most startups, employees often wear multiple hats. Engineers, including Musk, work in an office-free open cubicle layout less than a minute's walk from where technicians are building rocket engines and machines are welding together space capsules. Leave your desk, walk past a conference room, open a door and you step into a giant rocket factory. Actually the first thing you walk past on the factory floor is open floor space that is the cafeteria, which is right next to the mission control room, then a few steps after that you walk by the rocket engine assembly line.

During lunch you can watch the software team rehearsing the upcoming mission to the ISS a few feet away to your right. You can hear the construction of aluminum-lithium being formed and machined into the cylinders that will form the body of the Falcon 9 rocket just out of sight in front of you, or watch the complex circuitry of the flight hardware and avionics being inspected under a microscope to your left.

More than 80 percent of the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft are built in-house. From the combustion chamber and nozzle at the bottom of the engine, to the capsule and its protective shield at the top. SpaceX designs and builds just about everything itself in a factory at the Hawthorne Airport where Jack Northrop built his legendary airplanes including flying wings and fighter jets. Just a handful of years ago, this same building was home to a factory making panels for Boeing 747s, today it is a self-contained space program hoping to make space flight as inexpensive and reliable as possible.

Photo: Jason Paur/Wired

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Image: Fisker Automotive

The Fisker Atlantic – the compact follow-up to the high-style Karma – debuted early last month to a fair amount of fanfare as early adopters heralded the new range-extended EV as more proof that affordable electrics are on their way. But according to leaked investor documents secured by InsideEVs, the Atlantic won’t go on sale for at least another two years.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the BMW-sourced, turbocharged inline four-cylinder engine will be beefed up to around 300 horsepower (over the stock output of 240 ponies), allowing the Atlantic to scoot to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds (slightly longer than the Karma), while only putting out 50 g/km of C02.

As Fisker pointed out during its reveal of the Atlantic on the eve of the New York Auto Show, the automaker is targeting a price in the “upper end of the BMW 3 Series range.” Figure a nicely equipped BMW 335i will set you back something north of $50,000, and Fisker’s internal estimates – as viewed in the leaked doc – of pricing between $50,000 and $60,000 line up nicely.

What doesn’t line up as nicely is the proposed timeframe for production. According to the documents, a prototype is anticipated to be built in mid-2013, with the start of Atlantic production beginning in mid-2014. That’s not too far off our own estimates, which should give Fisker time to sort out further funding and possibly a new battery supplier.

Image: Roboat.at

The aptly-named “RoBoat” has been taking home the World Robotic Sailing Championship (WRSC) crown for three years, but this July the team behind the world’s winningest autonomous watercraft will attempt to snag another record for the longest robotic sailing expedition.

The Austrian Society for Innovative Computer Sciences (INNOC) has been tweaking and iterating the RoBoat since its inception in 2006, adding an array of batteries and solar panels good for a maximum of 285 kW of juice, along with a back-up methanol-powered fuel cell that can provide another 65 kW of power if things get cloudy.

Combined with a three-stage communication system that utilizes WLAN, UMTS/GPRS, an IRIDIUM satellite setup for tracking and navigation, and an NMEA200 partnered with a PC running Linux, the RoBoat can sail human-free as the computers control everything from rudder position to tack and sails.

All this technology is fitted to 12-foot Laering keelboat originally designed as an instructional craft for young sea-lovers, complete with a 130-pound keel-ballast that keeps things upright in even the most torturous of off-shore conditions.

When the RoBoat sets out into the Baltic Sea on July 9, it aims to cover some 150 nautical miles for up to 100 hours without human intervention. That will put the INNOC team ahead of the current world record holder – a research team from ENSTA Brest, France – which set a distance of 78.9 nautical miles in March of this year.

During the expedition, the RoBoat will partner up with marine biologists from the Oregon State University as the team studies the endangered harbor porpoise. The autonomous boat is keenly adept at studying underwater life, with an underwater microphone picking up the sounds of the porpoises, allowing them to track migration routes, pairing sites and other behaviors – doing it all in complete silence in the process.

And that’s not all. According to the project manager for the team, Roland Stelzer, “because [the RoBoat is] energy self-sufficient, in addition to marine biology, these solar energy powered robotic sailing boats can also be used for tsunami early warning systems, search operations, meteorological measurements and the recovery of oil spills.”

Image: Kippenberger Racing

The average episode of Top Gear runs around $1 million to produce. But those high-style, high-flying – and incredibly expensive – aerial shots just got slightly more affordable with the introduction of a new quadrocopter specifically developed for shooting automotive action.

Christopher Kippenberger and his Berlin, Germany-based production company, Kippenberger Racing, have been hard at work over the last few months putting the finishing touches on a customized drone capable of shooting high-resolution video. And unlike a helicopter rental, which can easily run tens of thousands of dollars after insurance, fuel, pilot costs and airspace approval, Kippenberger’s quadrocopter will only set you back around $5,000 after the two-man operation builds you a made-to-order drone.

“We wanted to make it as small [and light] as possible,” Kippenberger told Wired. “The price point has to be very attractive without the ridiculous markup [of other] UAVs on sale.”

While the quadrocopter does include GPS and routing software, the primary controls are handled by two operators: one manning flight direction and another controlling the camera angles.

“Full-fledged GPS way-point navigation is technically possible,” Kippenberger says, “but it’s only for expert operators [and] available on request.” Additionally, if the controller signal is lost or disrupted, the copter automatically switches over to GPS to land safely.

The hardware is, according to Kippenberger, a “special sauce” made up of a GAUI GU-INS flight controller, along with carbon fiber blades, lithium-ion battery packs and a custom camera mount designed to fit everything from DSLRs to larger video cameras.

“Our own drone is a turn-key solution,” Kippenberger told us over e-mail, pointing out that it’s perfect for both “professionals and novices, alike.”

The first video Kippenberger and crew produced using their new aerial rig was for Rent4Ring.de, one of several companies that loan vehicles to speed tourists visiting the famed Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany. That plays in nicely to Kippenberger Racing’s raison d’être, which the company’s namesake describes as “more of an image consulting agency.”

“Drones are strictly tools [for] creating a certain look we want to achieve,” Kippenberger says. “This is only the very early beginning of this movement and we are thrilled to be involved at such an early stage.”

Photo: Honda Motor Company

Honda has unveiled a new personal mobility concept vehicle that lets riders move around indoors at about the same speed as their legs could carry them.

The UNI-CUB is the evolution of the U3-X, unveiled back in 2009, and uses Honda’s proprietary balance control system to keep from tipping over. It also uses the company’s Omni Traction drive system, in which the rear wheel moves laterally in order to make turns easier. This allows side-to-side and diagonal movement, in addition to the ability to turn in place. The UNI-CUB moves in whichever direction the rider shifts his or her weight, and control through a smartphone’s screen is also possible.

Improvements over the U3-X include a saddle-style seating position that puts the rider at eye level with other pedestrians. Honda claims this “promotes harmony between the rider and others, letting the rider travel freely and comfortably inside facilities and among moving people.”

The UNI-CUB (left) and U3-X. Photo: Honda Motor Company

Despite those advances, the UNI-CUB has some of the same limitations as its predecessor: It can only travel at about 3.5 mph and its battery only lasts about an hour. Most importantly, it doesn’t have a backrest or the required stability to replace a wheelchair or other medically required mobility aid, so it’s essentially a very convoluted way for able-bodied people to get around no faster than they could walk.

So what’s Honda doing working on this project instead of devoting that time and money to building a better Civic? Think of it as a proof of concept, a chance for the robotics and motor teams to show off their research in a final project. The UNI-CUB may have limited real-world applications, but the technologies developed to make it possible may be quite useful across Honda’s portfolio of products.

Some day in the near future, balance control developed for the UNI-CUB could help improve stability control on an SUV, motorcycle or jet – or just keep poor ASIMO from falling down the stairs again.

 
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Image: Fantasy Junction

If you needed more proof that you can win a world record for just about anything, meet the Sea Lion. It’s an amphibious car capable of speeds of up to 180 mph on land and over 45 mph at sea, and it’s all yours for the bargain-basement price of $259,500.

On sale at Emeryville, California-based Fantasy Junction, the Sea Lion is the embodiment of our childhood dreams rendered in brushed aluminum and stainless steel, and powered by a 174-horsepower 13B rotary engine pulled from a 1974 Mazda RX3.

Image: Fantasy Junction

The Sea Lion was developed over the last six years by Mark Witt Applied Design (a one-man operation based in the San Francisco Bay Area), with the goal of setting both land and water speed records. Fortunately or unfortunately, there isn’t a governing body that officially recognizes such a feat, so the Sea Lion is destined to duke it out with other home-brew contenders for YouTube bragging rights.

According to the listing, “For the most part, a GPS display with a YouTube recording is internationally accepted as ‘valid’ for speed documentation. There has been talk of creating a corporate event, similar to Burning Man or Kinetic Sculpture Race, which records and awards the competitors with specific acknowledgements. This, however, may be more of a detriment than assistance. The addition of Rules and Requirements always diminish scientific achievement and exploration. And it just plain ruins all the fun!”

So let’s forget about the whole “world record” thing and focus on the engineering specifics.

Witt designed and built the entire vehicle with CAD and “spreadsheet calculations,” utilizing TIG-welded 5052 aluminum for the body and a host of CNC-milled bits and pieces to complete the Sea Lion.

The gearing has been set up to handle speeds of up to 179 mph, although the listing points out that the owner should swap in Mazda’s current Renesis rotary engine (donated from an RX8 and capable of putting out 250 horsepower in stock form or up to 600 hp when utilizing forced induction) to fully commit to chasing the amphibious vehicle crown.

Image: Fantasy Junction

A “highly modified” Berkeley 12 JC jet drive pump handles propulsion duties when things get wet, with a beautifully crafted fighter pilot-style stick controlling power in the water. Unsurprisingly, you can’t bring a friend along for your wet and wild ride as the Sea Lion is strictly a single-seater, but based on all the blunt metal objects strewn about the cabin, that’s probably a good thing.

The front wheels are hydraulically actuated to suck up into the wheel wells once you’ve ventured into the deep blue, with two aluminum covers plugging the holes and that massive chin spoiler actuating upward to split through the waves.

Witt goes on to state in the listing that he’s, “willing to continue working with the buyer on all future modifications [and] remain available as a consultant, engineer, machinist and psychiatrist for whoever decides to venture further into the amphibious record books.” All we ask is that you take us for a spin when you snag the keys.

Photo by Harris Technical Services

The term “black boxes” conjures up images of plane crashes for some and inspires conspiracy theories for others. For the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), the automotive black box became a key source of impartial information in the unintended acceleration controversy focused on Toyota vehicles.

That’s partly why Congress now seems set on passing legislation that would make an Electronic Data Recorder (EDR) – the technical name for an automotive black box – required equipment on all new cars. And lawmakers also want to settle who owns the data on the devices, although that issue won’t be nearly as cut-and-dried.

Bill 1813 that mandates EDRs for every car sold in the U.S. starting with the model year 2015 has already passed the Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a version of the bill with slightly different language. Car and Driver calls the wording of the bills “pretty vague” and notes that the Senate version stipulates that EDRs only “capture and store data related to motor vehicle safety,” and that access to the EDR’s information is only through an “interoperable data access port.”

“The EDRs became a vital piece of information for us to understand exactly what was happening in certain crashes and scenarios,” NHTSA Deputy Administrator Ronald Medford told Wired. “So the Congress, in our discussion with them, were very strongly encouraging us to require it. And we’re sort of surprised that we’re not requiring for everyone. The current regulation says that if you have an EDR in your car you must at a minimum collect a certain amount of information,” Medford added. “[The new law] would take out the option and say that all car manufacturers must have an EDR and must collect this information. I think 80 percent of the car industry already does it.”

According to Jim Harris, owner of Harris Technical Services in Miami, a firm that accesses and analyzes EDR data, almost all domestic vehicles contain EDRs that are accessible, along with their data via specialized software. A handful of Asian automakers include the devices and allow data to be accessed, but few European makers do. “There are cars that we know have EDRs and we can’t download the information because we don’t have the software,” Harris says. “And there are those that have them, but we don’t know for certain whether they do because the automaker doesn’t reveal the location or make the software available.”

The feds have been slowly inching towards a blanket policy covering automotive black box mandates for the past half decade. Since 2006, NHTSA has required that consumers be informed when an automaker has installed an EDR in a vehicle, although the disclosure is typically buried on the car’s owner’s manual. More recently, NHTSA mandated that vehicles manufactured after September 1, 2011 that include the devices must record a minimum of 13 data points in a standardized format.

Black boxes started out as a way for automakers to learn more about how air bags react in a crash. “In general, the better data we have about crashes, the more we know about the risks drivers face on the road and how to improve safety,” Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told Wired. Automakers also use EDR data to track manufacturing defects and issue recalls.

There’s also concerned that EDRs can be used to spy on drivers, although black boxes can’t tell who was driving, whether they were drunk or using a cell phone or who they were with. In addition to date and time, black boxes can currently only record the vehicle and engine speed, steering angle, throttle position, braking status, force of impact, seatbelt status, and air bag deployment.

Jim Harris pointed out that the data from a car’s EDR is only one part of the puzzle in a crash. “EDR data doesn’t stand alone,” he said. “We’ve found data records that did not match the physical evidence in a crash – not even close.” Other mitigating factors have to be taken into account along with EDR data, he says.

One of the most significant aspects of the pending legislation is that it would make clear who owns the data: the car owner or lessee. Well, at least until it passes and lawyers and insurance companies start parsing it. “The owner of the vehicle should be in control of the data,” said Paul Stephens, director or policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “And [law enforcement] would need a subpoena, just as you can’t go into someone’s house and grab evidence. But everything is subject to judicial procedure and it’s always possible to get a subpoena to get that information.”

Plus, the Senate bill makes it possible for first responders such as police, paramedics and firefighters to also have access to the data without a court order if it aids them in an emergency situation. Harris also noted that EDR data can quickly change hands in an accident. “If a car is in a crash and deemed a total loss by an insurance company, the insurer now owns the vehicle,” he said. “And the insurance company can access the data on the EDR can and possibly use it in legal proceedings against the former owner.”

Photo by Allen Tran

Google is evidently taking its campaign to make its driverless cars legal on U.S. roads from state capitals to the nation’s capital. A Google robo-Prius was spotted last Tuesday roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., only a day after Nevada became the first state to legalize autonomous vehicles on the Silver State’s roads.

U.S. News & World Report speculated that Google was in town to appeal to federal policymakers, and possibly take them for joyrides in one of the company’s self-driving Prius hybrids. The outlet also noted that Google has racked up a reported $5 million legislative lobbying tab in the first quarter of 2012 alone – more contributed to candidates’ coffers in the same time period than Apple, Facebook and Microsoft combined.

Getting lawmakers in the seat of a self-driving Prius has become Google’s M.O., according to Matthew Newton, editor of DriverlessCarHQ.com, a site dedicated to covering autonomous cars. “Google has been giving free rides to policymakers in California, Nevada and Florida,” Newton told Wired from his home base in Melbourne, Australia. “So it makes sense that they would do it in D.C.”

Now that Google has largely cleared the technical hurdles of getting self-driving cars on the road, the next step is gaining public acceptance – and winning over policymakers, Newton added. And due to its considerable lobbying war chest and cultural clout, Google apparently has no problem getting access to powerful politicians. Some, in fact, are seeking out Google rather than the other way around.

According to Politico, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) went for a spin in a Google self-driving Toyota Prius last month, as part of a GOP effort to reach out to Silicon Valley’s deep well of tech innovators and their deeper pockets. We couldn’t confirm whether other elected officials may have been taken for a ride by Google. (Our request for more information went unanswered as of press time.)

And in the same way that Google surreptitiously clocked close to 150,000 miles on California roads before news of the company’s fleet of self-driving Prius hybrids leaked out, the search giant also furtively cruised into Washington, D.C., last week. But then U.S. News and World Report science and technology reporter Jason Koebler spotted the Prius and his friend Allen Tran snapped the blurry picture above with his camera phone.

Koebler told Wired that Tran took the picture and posted it on Facebook. “I saw it when I got home from work,” Koebler said in an e-mail interview. “Twenty minutes later, I was riding my bike to the movies and saw it right around the corner from my house – just a weird stroke of luck.” Koebler said he tried to whip out his camera phone but wasn’t fast enough on the draw, and the car drove away.

“I was going to chase after it,” Koebler added. “There were two guys in the front seats [and I] wanted to talk about what they were doing, but I missed the light. Had I known Google would have been so hard to get in touch with, I would have tried harder. But they’ve been responsive to media requests in the past so I was surprised I didn’t hear back from them on this.”

According to DriverlessCarHQ, the Washington, D.C., Department of Motor Vehicles said in a tweet that Google didn’t inform the agency of its plans to operate the car in the nation’s capital. (As with most states, D.C. allows drivers to operate out-of-state vehicles.) And U.S News & World Report said that officials for the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had no knowledge of Google’s plans.

Photo: NASA

Elon Musk is one step closer to his end goal of making human life multi-planetary. No, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket hasn’t boosted the Dragon spacecraft into its rendezvous orbit with the International Space Station quite yet. That launch is scheduled for Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral in Florida. But as Floridians were drifting off to sleep last night, halfway around the world a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off with a pair of cosmonauts and an American astronaut bound for the ISS.

Last night’s launch was part of the reason SpaceX delayed the launch by about two weeks from its previously scheduled lift off. NASA and SpaceX wanted to avoid a potential traffic jam in orbit with two separate spacecraft scheduled for trips to the space station. And the successful launch was one of the final variables before SpaceX will finally get the chance to test its Dragon capsule.

The last scheduled SpaceX launch on May 7 had to be scrubbed due to more software testing. There is a manual override option, but the Dragon will mostly be an autonomous, robotic spacecraft during its rendezvous in orbit. In fact, the manual override is one of the many things being tested during the test flight. The entire mission includes two separate demonstrations by SpaceX to fulfill requirements NASA has set for commercial companies to be able to deliver cargo payloads to the ISS.

The SpaceX delays should make things a bit easier for the ISS crew currently in orbit. The three man crew was expecting to handle the SpaceX rendezvous and berthing on their own. But now with the Soyuz capsule currently in orbit, three more crew members are expected to be on board the space station on Thursday. The original three are still expected to handle the rendezvous and berthing of the Dragon using the station’s large robotic arm – the picture above is from a rehearsal session from inside the Cupola observatory module where the berthing will be orchestrated. But the three extra crew members should make the laborious unpacking and cargo transfer much easier.

If successful – and SpaceX, Elon Musk and NASA have all reiterated the fact this is a test flight and therefore a big “if” – the Dragon spacecraft will be the first commercially developed, launched and operated spacecraft to deliver supplies to the ISS some time early next week. There will be just over 1,000 pounds of supplies and gear on the way up, and the Dragon will carry several hundred pounds of cargo back to earth as well.

According to NASA, nothing on board the Dragon is essential to the operation of the ISS or the crew. But for several groups of young students, the payload is very important. Tucked inside Dragon along with some food, clothes, batteries and a laptop, are 15 experiments chosen from from 779 student teams that submitted proposals for doing research in low earth orbit.

The winning teams were scheduled to fly their experiments on a Soyuz rocket, but in the rarely predictable scheduling of rocket launches, the manifest changes meant the middle and high school student projects are set to launch on the Falcon 9 this Saturday. All of the experiments are housed in a single modular housing and include research on microbial life and water purification in a micro-gravity environment.

For Musk the success of this week’s mission may not be guaranteed, but he told us last month that there will be other opportunities for flights to the ISS later this year and he’s absolutely confident that SpaceX will deliver to the ISS. The cargo mission and eventual contract with NASA is just one step in Musk’s grand plan of traveling to Mars. Something he believes will happen in the not too distant future and one day will be available for anybody who wants to spend $500,000 for the roughly 130,000,000 mile trip.

Wired will have live coverage of Saturday’s launch over at our new Open Space.

Two weeks ago, a patent filing by General Motors was uncovered that proposed using data collected from its OnStar service to tailor public advertisements to individual drivers.

Like the billboards Tom Cruise encountered in Minority Report, the OnStar-linked ads would be tailored to passing motorists based on personal information they’d shared with their telematics service. Perusing the patent’s text, nightmare scenarios flooded our thoughts. Kids in the backseat? Be prepared to see ads for Happy Meals and nearby amusement parks. Headed to the doctor’s office? A friendly reminder to schedule a colonoscopy, in flashing 40-foot letters.

The most alarming aspect of the patent is how it proposes gathering personal data. Expectedly, the patent covers the use of location-based information from OnStar’s turn-by-turn navigation system. But more intrusively, it also includes the use of in-vehicle cameras to determine unspecified demographics of vehicle occupants. Even power seat positions could be used to estimate the age of a driver.

Scary stuff. But put away the roll of tinfoil, because this patent probably isn’t going anywhere soon – or ever.

Like any tech company, OnStar routinely files hundreds of patents for any innovation that might be even remotely valuable to their future business interests. Patents are filed as soon as new ideas are conceived, and the process is often done just to make sure nobody else profits off the idea in the future.

In OnStar’s case, the company let us know it files about one patent application every five days. This one was filed in August of 2010 and sat through a quiet period of public comment until Jalopnik took note of it. Submitting paperwork to the patent office is as far from implementing a new technology as putting a poster of a Porsche 936 on the wall is to driving like Hurley Haywood.

As for the billboard patent, “It doesn’t mean we’re ever going to do something about it, and we don’t have any plans to ever leverage it in the near future or at all,” said Nick Pudar, OnStar’s vice president of business development. “We were surprised that anyone noticed it,” Pudar admitted.

Sounds pretty cut and dry, eh? Or maybe that’s exactly what OnStar wants us to think. Still paranoid, we asked automotive privacy expert and Santa Clara Law professor Dorothy Glancy to take a look at it.

It turns out that OnStar joins Honda, Bridgestone, Apple, RIM and GM itself when it comes to filing patents that cover the interaction between telematics services and advertising. “From what I can see at the Patent Office, there are a lot of issued patents in this technology area,” Glancy said, estimating that there are 35,000 targeted advertising patents, 143 of them specifically dealing with vehicle telematics.

“All of this goes to say that the patent application is pretty unremarkable in the patent world,” she said. “If this patent ever does issue, it would likely be much narrower than what is claimed in the application.”

It’s no surprise that there are so many patents filed where vehicle data and advertising intersect. Where you go when you get in your car would be incredibly valuable information for advertisers. With GPS data, they could determine where you shop, what routes you frequently travel, where you work and how often you take a vacation. It’s why advertisers love the personal data that users voluntarily give up when they “check in” on Facebook and apps like Foursquare.

According to Glancy, merging telematics and advertising goes “beyond what people expect when they seek navigational guidance or directions to a destination,” she said. “I believe that people whose personal location information is sold should be able to know about it, consent to it or not, and also get a share of the action.”

That’s a concern that OnStar is acutely aware of, and why we probably won’t be seeing any ads for big and tall clothing stores flashing at drivers who push their seats all the way back. ”I think if this ever did occur, we’d do it in such a way that it makes sense to customers,” Pudar said, stressing that any potential use of personal data would “absolutely” require an opt-in from users, and that the burden of safeguarding consumer privacy and safety would be on OnStar.

“If a customer were to choose to participate, it would be very clear what the parameters were,” Pudar said. “Everything we’d do would be with customer consent and direct opt-in.”

In addition to the privacy concerns, Glancy says that encouraging drivers to look away from the road and up at a billboard is a safety issue. “The contemplated targeted messages would seem to be flashing from one target to another pretty quickly, especially in a congested area,” she said. “That seems like a pretty serious driver distraction to me.” Additionally, she cited a 1995 study she conducted in which drivers said in-vehicle advertisements were just another form of “visual spam.”

All those reasons are exactly why OnStar said that a filed patent for dynamic billboards doesn’t necessarily speak to a solid business case for implementing a new technology. “Again, not having plans to pursue this, we haven’t thought through the details of what we’d ever do,” Pudar said.

That doesn’t mean that advertisers haven’t, though. ”The marketing and advertising community is going to get creative to leverage every technology that’s available to them,” he said. If a marketer does decide to implement a system similar to the language in OnStar’s patent, it’ll have to license it through OnStar first.

Photo: GM 

Image: ATK

The Utah company that built the solid rocket boosters for the now retired space shuttle program announced plans to enter the next phase of American space flight with its own private launch system. Alliant Techsystems, or ATK as it is better known, says it plans to build a complete rocket and spacecraft package to transport astronauts and cargo to and from low earth orbit. The announcement adds another potential company aiming for NASA contracts as pressure from lawmakers and former astronauts is pushing to trim the selection to a single option.

The new launch system from ATK will use its Liberty rocket which was submitted as part of the NASA’s current Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, but was not selected. Instead programs from SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corporation are participating in this round of CCDev funding and testing.

Liberty will be the name of the new program, and this time it will include a capsule spacecraft, launch abort system and the rocket itself. ATK plans to begin flight testing in 2014 and is aiming for a crew flight in 2015.

The spacecraft for the Liberty launch system is a seven seat, composite capsule that originated as a research project to see if composites could serve as an alternative to the aluminum materials NASA was using to develop the Orion spacecraft. Orion is a capsule being built by Lockheed Martin for NASA missions beyond low earth orbit, namely asteroids and eventually Mars. ATK says the composite spacecraft will land in the water and will be reusable up to 10 times.

The composite capsule being developed for ATK's Liberty rocket. Photo: ATK

The the first stage of the Liberty rocket is powered by a solid fuel motor similar to those ATK built as the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. The new solid rocket includes a five segment motor that was initially designed to serve to launch the now defunct, Constellation spacecraft to the moon. The new Liberty rocket will use the Ariane 5 liquid fueled rocket as the second stage to boost the composite capsule into orbit. The Ariane 5 is built by the European company Astrium, and is a workhorse of the European Space Agency’s launch program.

The solid rocket first stage and liquid rocket second stage puts the Liberty at 300 feet tall. The towering height is more than 110 feet taller than both the space shuttle on the launch pad or SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Like the other companies developing new launch systems, contracts from NASA aren’t the only thing ATK is looking at with its new launch system. The company also wants to use its Liberty system for satellite launches as well as for space tourism in the future.

A diagram showing the combination of the solid rocket booster from the space shuttle and the European Ariane 5 used to make the very tall Liberty rocket. Image:ATK

Currently the Liberty is being privately funded by the companies involved with the project – led by ATK – though much of the work was done during previous NASA programs. ATK is expected to enter Liberty in the next round of competition for funding from NASA’s CCDev program. The current, second round of CCDev will end later this summer. In addition to the recent pressure from lawmakers for NASA to end the multi-company competition and select just one supplier, some very famous space veterans are also calling for ending the funded competition early and choosing a single company.

Apollo mission commanders Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and James Lovell told Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) they support his efforts to “an immediate downselect to a single competitor or, at most, the execution of a leader-follower paradigm in which NASA makes one large award to a main commercial partner and a second small award to a backup partner” according to Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The three astronauts argue NASA will not have the money to fund multiple companies to develop launch systems and spacecraft capable of delivering people and cargo to low earth orbit. Currently NASA relies on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft at a price of more than $60 million per seat.

NASA managers argued last week that continuing the funded competition will result in the most cost effective and capable rockets and spacecraft to replace the now retired space shuttle fleet.

In August NASA is expected to announce the next round of CCDev funding which will likely go to at least two companies with awards between $300 and $500 million.

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German conglomerate Siemens has introduced a new electric truck that uses overhead electrical wires to power hybrid trucks.

Unveiled at the Electric Vehicle Symposium in LA this week, the ”eHighway of the Future” concept puts overhead catenaries over heavily-traveled trucking routes. When hybrid diesel-electric trucks pass below, they run on electric power only. No wires? No problem: The trucks’ diesel engines will do the heavy hauling.

Its a system that Siemens says has many applications. It could work on a busy highway where electric power can reduce emissions, or be used in city centers where a diesel engine makes too much noise.

The setup is similar to streetcars and trains, and it takes the issue of range completely out of the equation when it comes to hauling freight with electrified trucks. All that trucking companies need are rigs equipped with hardware that connects with catenary wires and software that can switch from diesel to electric power.

On the infrastructure end, things get a little more complicated. Overhead wires would have to be installed over at least one travel lane of an interstate highway, and just like a train or electric streetcar a truck would have to run directly beneath them. We’re not sure how that would work when it comes to merging. Trucking companies would also have to pay electric bills to whichever agency ran the eHighway infrastructure.

Already, the system is being tested in Germany. Here in the US, the first trials will be at the heavily congested ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Videos: Siemens

Photo by Basem Wasef/Wired

In this unprecedented age of obscene horsepower and affordable performance, the Porsche Cayman R is the Jenyne Butterfly of the sports car world.

Who is Jenyne Butterfly? Look her up, preferably not at work.

At 2,855 pounds (or 2,910 pounds with a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission), the Cayman R is the lightest road car built by Porsche.

Ms. Butterfly’s sinewy muscles are cut on gracile bone, and articulate her long limbs with purposeful flexibility. She’s graced with the sort of physique you’d associate with an Olympic swimmer or an extreme yogi. She also possesses a preternatural ability to fling herself across a pole with fluid undulations that appear to disobey the laws of physics.

Extracting 330 horses from a mid-mounted 3.4-liter flat-six, Porche’s compact two-seater is outpowered by $24,000 Hyundais. It’s also in no danger of winning any luxury accolades, and its superstar big brother, the 911, is undeniably more glamorous. And yet, this low-slung pipsqueak is also a punchy performer, an aggro animal that’s been pruned like a bonsai, resembling a sort of scaled-down supercar.

Continue reading our review of the Porsche Cayman R on Wired’s Product Reviews section.

Image: Flight of the Century

An electric-vehicle veteran is turning his efforts from two wheels to a pair of wings as he sets his sights on electric-powered airplanes for his latest world record attempts.

But Chip Yates isn’t satisfied with simply flying faster and higher than any previous piloted electric airplane, he is completely reinventing how electric airplanes are thought of with an infinite-range aircraft, or at least one that could fly for a very, very long time. The breakthrough idea uses autonomous flying battery packs that can be released when empty, with charged packs flying to the airplane and docking for use as needed.

Like all electric vehicles, the design challenge is all about range, range, range and range. And battery technology is always the excuse for not being able to dramatically increase distance between charges. Historically, one of the biggest challenges for long-range airplanes has been weight. And heavy batteries don’t make for a good mix of range and light designs. So Yates isn’t waiting for any breakthrough in battery technology, and is instead pushing for a breakthrough of his own in how the batteries are used.

When Yates decided he wanted to add to his world records for electric motorcycles, the former Boeing employee opted for a flight across the Atlantic in an electric airplane. For several years Yates and a team of friends developed what would become an electric-powered superbike, which he raced several times and set a world record last year for the fastest electric motorcycle at nearly 200 miles per hour. But it turned out aviation was a more natural fit for Yates. And that’s when work got underway.

“We really were a team of aerospace engineers that did an electric motorcycle first,” Yates said from his shop in California. “So doing airplanes is more so where we belong.”

After deciding on trying to fly a transatlantic route in an electric airplane, Yates immediately ran into the problem of how to fly that far using only electric power. The challenge seems almost insurmountable. Current long-range electric airplanes are able to fly hundreds, not thousands of miles. And many, with less than an hour of flight time, are aimed at the recreational market. The Swiss team building the Solar Impulse aircraft are developing a system what would use the sun to charge batteries and climb during the day, and then fly on battery power while descending during the night. But Yates said he wanted to do it no matter what, and his team immediately started thinking about possible solutions.

“Electric airplanes are already penalized by having batteries with very poor energy density,” Yates says, “and then they’re double penalized by the fact that you can’t get rid of them when they’re dead.”

So he came up with the idea of simply starting with a full load of battery power, and then releasing the battery packs as they were consumed.

The unmanned flying battery pack docked to the top of an electric airplane. Image: Flight of the Century

Like a gasoline-powered airplane, this would mean starting very heavy. The Voyager aircraft weighed just 2,250 pounds before being filled with gas for its record-setting non-stop trip around the world without refueling. Once the tanks were filled, the Voyager weighed 9,695 pounds at takeoff. But with gasoline, as the airplane flies and uses fuel, it loses weight, increasing efficiency and range. Yates imagined by dropping batteries he could accomplish the same thing.

In a brainstorming session the team immediately thought the idea had flaws, one of which is the fallacy of using clean energy but dropping batteries everywhere. So they thought about dropping them with a parachute and recovering them. Better, but still not the best. Then an idea was pitched to put small wings on the battery packs so they could glide to a specific location and would be easier to recover. From that point it wasn’t so much of a leap to then think they could carry fewer batteries, and every time one was released, another winged battery pack could fly up to the plane to resupply the missing power pack.

Since that brainstorming session, they’ve been able to work out the basic details and are convinced the idea of using autonomous flying battery packs is not only feasible, but is something worth pursuing. Yates has just three full-time people working on this project, but there are roughly a dozen who are helping, including engineers from SpaceX and Boeing, “guys who are good at docking,” Yates points out.

Initially the team will use steerable parachutes to try for some of their record-setting flights. Yates says they can immediately increase their range by 40 percent by using a pair of battery packs. Once the first is depleted, it will be jettisoned with the parachute while the remaining pack will be repositioned to maintain the aircraft’s center of gravity. He believes he can increase the range by 90 percent by using and dropping around 10 battery packs.

The long, high-aspect-ratio wing is a mainstay of efficient flight. Image: Flight of the Century

The end goal is to develop the technology that would allow for an efficient mothership of sorts that could fly over very long distances with the autonomous batteries docking and being released during flight from either ground-based airports or possibly even recharging stations at sea (pictured at top).

The project is called Flight of the Century and Yates believes that one of the flying electric aircraft could fly non-stop for weeks, months, years — essentially until the vehicle itself wears out by constantly being recharged with the unmanned flying battery packs.

Yates recently acquired an airplane to begin testing his ideas. He’s starting with an airplane well known for its innovation, long-range capabilities and very famous designer, a Rutan Long-EZ. Designed by legendary aerospace guru Burt Rutan in the 1970s, the Long-EZ — and its predecessor, the VariEze — have set several records, including endurance and distance records. Many of those records were set with Burt’s older brother Dick Rutan at the controls. The older Rutan was also part of the Voyager crew that flew the airplane on its record-setting flight.

The Long-EZ is currently being modified for electric flight, which will include using much of the technology Yates and his team developed for his record-setting motorcycle.

The project is internally funded by Yates’ company W. Morrison Consulting, which has a history of working on government contracts. He says his idea has potential applications in both the civilian and military arenas, but there is not a commitment in either direction at the moment.

Ford has announced that the upcoming 2013 Fusion will offer an available suite of driver assistance technology, like adaptive cruise control, active park assist and collision warning.

While active safety features have increasingly been offered on luxury cars over the past five years, the Fusion marks the first time such systems have been available in a moderately priced, midsize family sedan. Currently, the full-size Taurus sedan and Explorer SUV are the most affordable cars in Ford’s lineup to offer such provisions.

“The new Fusion is a showcase of how we will use sensors and vehicle data to enhance the driver’s own capabilities when behind the wheel,” said Paul Mascarenas, Ford’s Chief Technology Officer. “Driver assist technologies will continue to provide increasing levels of convenience in the near-term. In the future, they also will help us manage issues such as traffic congestion and CO2 reduction.”

Among the technologies on board: Driver Alert, which uses a camera pointed at the road to detect patterns of motion that are consistent with drowsy driving. If it senses that you’re falling asleep, it’ll trigger a “series of alerts” including a coffee cup icon on the dash, all intended to get you to pull over and take a break. Unfortunately, no actual coffee is dispensed, and it also won’t let your boss know you’re going to be late for work because you stopped for a nap.

Additionally, there’s the whole suite of active safety systems that have become familiar across the Ford lineup, some of which were developed by Volvo during Ford’s ownership. There’s BLIS, the blind spot warning system with cross-traffic alert, and adaptive cruise control with a collision warning feature. Pull-drift assist adjusts the power steering to counter the effects of crosswinds. Also on board: active parking assist, which takes care of the steering during parallel parking and — just in case your spouse isn’t there to do it for you — lets you know when to hit the gas and the brake.

We’ve tested out most of these features on other Ford products and found them to be of varying levels of usefulness. BLIS is no substitute for properly adjusted mirrors, though it’s a helpful shortcut when quickly contemplating a lane change. And with new vehicle designs reducing driver visibility, back-up cameras and parking assist systems have become almost indispensable. The great hope for active cruise control is that it will help “smooth out” steady traffic flows, helping to reduce the backups caused by excessive braking and acceleration in traffic.

So far, Ford hasn’t announced any pricing details about the 2013 Fusion, but we expect the driver assist options to add quite a bit of heft to the base MSRP. On the 2013 Explorer Limited, driver assist tech is bundled with rain-sensing wipers and HID headlamps and costs an additional $6,595.

Image: Ford

When we last heard from Helen and John Taylor, they’d just finished a drive through all 48 contiguous states in a Chevy Cruze Eco, achieving 64.42 mpg in the process. Now, the couple from Melbourne, Australia has set a new record: 1,626 miles on a single tank of fuel.

This time that fuel was diesel, and the car was a stock 2012 Volkswagen Passat TDI SE with a six-speed manual transmission. Though it’s window sticker promises 43 mpg highway, the Taylors managed to squeak out 84.1 mpg using the hypermiling techniques that they’ve developed. The new record is a 99.5 mile improvement over the old one, set in Europe with a previous-generation diesel Passat.

On their three day journey, the couple drove across nine states and travelled from Houston, Texas to Sterling, Virginia. To make sure nobody pulled a Rosie Ruiz, police officers in Texas and Virginia witnessed the sealing and unsealing of the fuel filler door.

What’s most remarkable about the mileage that the Taylors achieved is that they made sure to replicate real-world conditions. In addition to themselves, they had 120 pounds of luggage on board and shared driving duties in everyday traffic situations. To ensure that their trip mirrored the average commutes of Americans, the Taylors drove 14 hours a day mostly during daylight hours.

“We’re excited to have broken the record for the longest distance driven on one-tank of fuel,” said John Taylor. “The Passat TDI was the perfect car for the trip. It offers plenty of interior and cargo space, yet is frugal enough to help us achieve this record.”

In addition to setting 89 fuel economy records, the Taylors teach hypermiling techniques and lobby governments to add fuel economy to drivers education curricula. Among their tips: travel downhill in the highest gear possible and don’t exceed speed limits.

Photo: Volkswagen

Photo: Infiniti

There’s a new automotive contender for 2012’s revolutionary safety tech crown, and no, it’s not a Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Audi. Nor is it a Volvo with its perennial, somewhat over-inflated reputation for safety. It’s the 2013 Infiniti JX, the brand’s new midsize (read: plenty large enough) SUV with the heart of suburbia set squarely in its crosshairs.

Now as a vehicle, it’s roughly what you’d expect from the upscale Nissan division, and while certainly nice enough to deserve a place in the market, don’t expect it to make major waves in the auto enthusiast community. Where it does stand out without question, however, is in its impressive roster of high-tech safety features.

As a premium ride, it comes with all the obvious bells, whistles and airbags expected of any modern car. It also includes most high-end safety features seen on other luxury vehicles, like active cruise control and a blind spot warning system. It features lane departure warning, as well as full-on lane departure prevention. (Yes, that means it can control the steering wheel if you become too immersed in the consumption of your burrito).

Basically, it’s fair to assume that if a safety feature exists, it’s quite likely equipped on the JX. So instead of rambling on about that stuff, let’s take a closer look at some of the more interesting equipment that makes the JX unique.

Like nearly all luxury vehicles these days, the JX utilizes a central interface for controlling most aspects of the car, in this case managed by an eight-inch touchscreen display.

Photo: Infiniti

Built into this system is the Infiniti Connection program, the brand’s version of always-connected service (think OnStar) that offers some intriguing features and good for four free years from the date of purchase.

In addition to the expected safety perks like collision and theft notification, emergency calling and remote door-locking (and unlocking, of course), Infiniti thought a bit outside the box.

Google Calendar is now synchronized with the car (and can set the GPS to navigate you to your appointments), which is hugely cool, but safety-conscious owners will be more pleased to learn that they can use their Infiniti Connection to set alerts to be sent from car to computer or phone (both text or voice).

Why would you want to do that? Well, you can remotely set approved driving areas, restricted speed limits or valet usage, and be instantly alerted if any of these rules are broken. Considering the average JX buyer will be a reasonably well-to-do mother, this should come in handy when the keys are passed to the teens. The kids themselves? Well, they’re probably not going to be too happy about it.

As far as active, preventive accident-safety tech, Infiniti’s got you covered there as well.

Photo: Infiniti

Most car aficionados are familiar with rear-view backup cameras, and possibly have also seen an “around view” monitor of some sort or another, a feature now popping up on many of the latest premium vehicles. For those who haven’t, though, this is where the screen displays a trick bird’s eye view of the vehicle from the top, offering a full 360-degree shot of its surroundings courtesy of a spate of cameras flanking the sides and rear.

At first glance, you’ll think this image of your car is somehow being piped in via satellite – it’s very convincing. And while this is cool enough, the JX ups the ante a bit further, with its Moving Object Detection system actively monitoring these surroundings for any movement – and producing both a visual and audible warning if it spots anything you should be aware of before you rudely introduce it to your bumper.

Infiniti is also introducing its Back-Up Collision Intervention system on the JX. In a sense, this system is a cousin to the aforementioned Moving Object Detection, but takes things yet another step further.

Photo: Infiniti

If the JX’s radar and sonar sensors spot something crossing your path as you reverse (say, a child riding a bike down the sidewalk, or an oblivious driver flying by in the parking lot), it’ll not only notify you with its visual and audible alerts, but if you fail to react, it’ll go ahead and apply the brakes on your behalf – all the way down to a complete stop if need be. And then scold you in a condescending computer voice (okay – we made that last part up). That system works at speeds of up to about 15 mph.

Basically, you’d have to actively try to bump into something at this point.

While these systems are far from full-on accident-proofing your ride, they certainly mark an important milestone. While you’re not quite safe from accidents at greater-than-parking-lot speeds, technology is well on its way there. Macho drivers may not like the idea of their ride becoming automated, but let’s face it: Most people suck at driving and can use all they help they can get. Infiniti to the rescue.