July 21, 2009

Vote for the next Google Street View target

Filed under: Bicycles,Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 9:16 am

Google has had a tricycle custom built to take photos in locations that Street View cars and vans have difficulty accessing. They already had the trike take pictures in Italy and the United Kingdom, and now it is heading to the Netherlands.

If you like, you can vote which Dutch locations will get the Street View treatment, candidates include the old Parliament buildings, the Efteling theme park, and the Scheveningen boulevard which sports the only pleasure pier of the country.

(Link: Algemeen Dagblad. Photo of an Efteling dragon by Jeroen Kransen, some rights reserved)

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June 27, 2009

Tricycle car company Carver keels over

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:20 pm

Carver Europe, producer of the tricycle car with the same name, has gone bankrupt, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The Carver is a cross between a regular car and a motor cycle, of which the cockpit and front wheel can roll (or list if you are nautically inclined)—something the Reliant Robin never quite got the hang of.

CEO Willem Verheul told the paper that there wasn’t enough of a market for the 50,000 euro vehicle: “We were hoping to sell 300 per year, instead we only managed 200.” The ‘s Gravendeel, Zuid Holland based company will lay off nine employees.

One company that is going to be distraught at the news are flying car / vaporware makers Pal-V, who based the design of their eponymous vehicle on the Carver One. When earlier this year Pal-V promised a demonstration of its technology, it disappointed the collected international press by showing a gyroscope and a Carver, but not the hybrid that everybody has been waiting for these past years.

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson once famously said about the Carver: “Absolute, hands-on-heart, I have never had so much fun in a car,” and his side-kick whose name I forget called it “the gadget to end all gadgets.”

(Photo by Wikimedia user Detectandpreserve, some rights reserved.)

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