November 12, 2009

People from Drenthe just don’t get fined

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 2:56 pm

Golly gee whiz darn! The police of the province of Drenthe, a region that boasts mostly farms and open spaces, can’t fine enough drivers of any kind and can’t meet their quotas. They don’t do naughty things like drive through red lights, they wear helmets on motorbikes and scooters, and don’t drink and drive. Sadly, the province is missing out on a lot of income due to the respect for the law in Drenthe and there’s of course nothing the police can do to turn people into asocial SOBs like in the rest of the country.

No wait, I have an idea: let the cops abuse people. Beat them up for nothing and kick tail lights in. It works wonders.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: a Grecav Eke pick-up microcar, by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

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October 6, 2009

Engineering shorts

Filed under: Automobiles,Aviation,Online by Branko Collin @ 8:48 am

soyuz_clogNews from the tech trenches.

– The Nuna 5 solar powered car ran into a ditch last Saturday while preparing for the annual World Solar Challenge, writes Telegraaf (Dutch). The student-built car was driving at a speed of 110 kph at the time. Driver Jelle managed to get out unhurt, but several components of the car, including the solar panel, turned out to be damaged. The team from Delft University expects to have repaired the damage before the October 25 start.

See here for a drag race between Nuna 5 and its predecessor, Nuna 4, during happier times.

– Layar (augmented reality) includes an application that will let you spot the houses of the famous called BN’er Verkenner (Celeb Scout). US actor Brad Pitt, enjoying a quite afternoon in his Amsterdam canal house, was its victim in this video posted at Engadget.

Layar is a mobile phone tool that adds a geographic layer to your Android phone’s operating system, letting you check out what’s available near your current location.

– The Netherlands has its own space organisation. The NSO (Netherlands Space Office) was kickstarted last Wednesday by Minister Maria van der Hoeven (Economic Affairs) and astronaut André Kuipers. The NSO is supposed to help design and build a Dutch space programme, according to Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch).

Kuipers was recently selected for a half-year stay at the International Space Station starting December 2010.

(The illustration is a mock-up by me, not an actual NSO lifting body design space craft on top of a Soyuz rocket. Photo of a Soyuz rocket by NASA.
Photo of a big clog by Jocelyn Kinny, some rights reserved.)

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August 16, 2009

The Electric Kart project [HAR 2009]

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:59 pm

The E-Kart or Electric Kart is an experiment to see “whether we can somehow conceive our own home-built electric vehicle—we bought an old go kart frame and converted it to a zero emission kart, using parts from an electric scooter,” according to its makers, Anthony Liekens and Walter Schreppers.

I talked to Liekens at HAR. The electric scooter was used simply because they had one available from China that wasn’t rated for use on the road in Belgium, and also because this solution was cheaper than getting the required parts separately. Originally, they wanted to buy an electric motor that would draw 4800 watts. The current scooter-based model uses 500 watts.

When I visited E-Kart Village, Anthonie was mourning a flat front tire, but in true hacker spirit, he told me that they were looking into the many and diverse applications of duck tape to overcome this problem. And sure enough, a day later I saw the kart zip across the campground again.

The E-Kart has a top speed of 23 km/h, and because it can access all its torque immediately, accelerates very fast. The E-Kart blog has lots more info, including videos and a complete, illustrated history.

Now it’s off for me to the last of the talks of HAR 2009. I hope you enjoyed reading about the camp as much as I enjoyed attending.

Update: I appear to have forgotten to include the link to the E-Kart blog, an oversight I have now corrected (see first paragraph)—B.

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August 11, 2009

Motorbiking to Kazakhstan to help fight cancer

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 9:53 am
devries

Together with his friend Tom van Ees (left), Martin de Vries, 35, (right), plans to drive by motorbike from their hometown Den Bosch (‘s-Hertogenbosch) all the way to Kazakhstan, his brother proudly started telling people online the other day.

Saturday, 15 August, they will set off on a 17,000 km route to the capital of Almaty and back, going through 15 countries on the way, with the goal of raising money to fight cancer. “Still one in every three people in the Netherlands gets cancer. That is way too much. We are paying for the costs of our trip ourselves, so all the money we raise will go to this great cause.”

Find out more about their plight, the blog and their pictures by visiting the specially setup website around2seas.nl.

(Link: Lykle de Vries, Photo: Martin de Vries)

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July 31, 2009

Van advertises nothing

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 5:32 pm

Initially I spotted this delivery van on the J.M. Coenenstraat in Amsterdam simply because unlike most of its brethren it lacked any form of advertising on its sides. Only when I looked closer I noticed the URL. No, that is not ‘shopped.

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July 29, 2009

Cross-border speeding: Dutch cash in on Belgians

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 10:50 am
800px-bord_nederlandjpg

Down South in soft-spoken Maastricht, Limburg, the police raked in a cool EUR 2.5 million from Belgians caught for traffic violations last year, 37,417 of which were speeding violations.

And what about the Dutch on the Belgian side? An estimated 15,000 Dutch people brought in EUR 1.5 million according to the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, which is a lot less.

The amusing part is that Belgian Limburg has twice as many speed cameras as Dutch Limburg (Yes, both countries share the name of a province).

As an exercise in pure unfounded speculation, the Belgians have more physical room to get their motors going whereas in the Netherlands you’ll miss four exits if you bat your eyelids too long. Germans often get caught speeding into the Netherlands because slowing down is not fun and takes time. When you’re going a roaring 220 km for like an hour (been there, done that, yes it sucks petrol fast), slowing down to 50 km feels like going backwards in time.

(Link: blikopnieuws.nl, Photo by Wikipedia user Naaldenberg, some rights reserved.)

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July 25, 2009

Invalid car failure as getaway vehicle

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:27 pm

Last Sunday the Utrecht police caught a 37-year-old thief who had stolen two car radios.

Witnesses had spotted the man breaking into a car and called the police, who had no trouble whatsoever taking over the thief’s low-speed microcar to stop and arrest him, reports Telegraaf (Dutch). The article doesn’t tell whether the man was actually disabled or whether he merely used an invalid car as a decoy. Still, I am sure there is a lesson in there somewhere.

Those with reduced mobility often use a microcar to get around in the Netherlands. These cars are typically rated as mopeds, and cannot go faster than 40 kilometres an hour. A popular brand is the Canta.

(Image based on a public domain icon from the US FHWA Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.)

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July 19, 2009

Inner city cargo train system in Utrecht

Filed under: Automobiles,Sustainability by Branko Collin @ 1:28 pm

When I was a teenager, I had to bike through the narrow and windy cobblestone streets of a typically Dutch city centre to get to school, and part of that ride was spent waiting behind large, four-ton trucks delivering who knows what. Maybe it was 50 envelopes or a crate of tomatoes. It gave me the time to muse about a system where cargo was off-loaded just outside the city centre to smaller, horse-drawn carts for further distribution.

Although Utrecht-based company Cargohopper ditched the horse, they did implement this scheme for distributing goods to inner city stores to a tee. The small width, 1.25 metre, will surely lead to less irritation for the other road users.

Some figures from the company:

Cargohopper is a vehicle that can tow 3 metric tonnes in a linear line by means of a 48 Volt 28 hp electric engine. Its max speed is 20 km/h, but that is more than enough as it is only driving in the inner city of Utrecht and does not do more than 60 kilometres a day.

[…]

Once empty, it collects dry cardboard, paper and empty packaging from shops for recycling, so it never runs empty. In this way, Cargohopper removes up to 100,000 van kilometres from the inner city streets and saves about 30 tonnes of CO2 annually.

(Link: Autobloggreen. Photo: Cargohopper.)

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July 18, 2009

Amsterdam more affordable, except for parking

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 9:23 am

Amsterdam slid from 25th most expensive city in the world to 29th, according to a recent Mercer study, as Dutch News reports. The one cost with which Amsterdam tops every other major city in the world is parking.

Other Dutch cities did not even make it into the top 50, with Berlin being a ‘cheap’ European capital at 49—is East Berlin dragging that number down? The top three of the Cost of Living list this year are Tokyo, Osaka and Moscow, in that order.

Car owning visitors to Amsterdam* are out of luck though. According to Parool (Dutch), quoting a study by Colliers International, Amsterdam proudly leads the list of most expensive cities in the world when it comes to parking, with a daily rate of 70 USD. The second city on that list, London, only charges around 55 USD a day.

(more…)

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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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