WISH LIST

The latest driving tech

Staying focused on the road while glancing at your smartphone or satellite navigation for direction can be a distraction. That’s why Hudly has created its transparent heads-up display to keep your journey information right in your sight-line. Paired wirelessly with your smartphone, this 6.2-inch display allows you to view the road and its vibrant directions simultaneously. Also equipped with light sensors, this heads-up display will automatically adapt its visibility to suit your environment.

Bring Alexa along for the ride with this plug-in speaker from Anker. Paired with your smartphone, VIVA can make calls, stream music and provide audio navigation with simple voice commands. Plugged straight into your vehicle’s power outlet, this travel-size companion comes equipped with two USB ports so you and your passengers can charge smart devices on the go.

Keeping your tires at the correct pressure is of vital importance to not only staying safe on the roads, but to maintain low fuel consumption. With the ZUS smart safety monitors by Nonda, you receive real-time alerts if your tires are leaking air or in need of a refill. Taking only minutes to install, these high-tech dust caps simply screw on each tire and give you feedback on how each tire is performing, recording a detailed history of pressure changes over time.

Open a window into your vehicle’s health with GOFAR. By simply plugging the GOFAR adapter into your car’s computer, receive real-time information about any mechanical problems or performance information sent straight to your smartphone. In the same way a Formula I drive monitors their fuel efficiency on the track, the GOFAR Ray keeps you up to date on how you consume fuel with the simple dashboard light array(排列). If you’re hitting the gas too hard, the GOFAR Ray will illuminate red to let you know you’re wasting fuel and green when you’re driving optimally(最佳地).

If you want to get to know your car inside out, then the Automatic connected car assistant is the perfect addition to your vehicle. By simply plugging the compact diagnostic device into the vehicle, a whole host of information about your car is available at your fingertips. Using the Automatic app, this driving assistant can give detailed diagnostics about maintenance issues and performance alongside crash alerts, your vehicle’s real-time location and roadside assistance.

If your car isn’t Bluetooth connected, then Jabra Freeway is a great gadget to listen to high-quality sound and answer and make calls at the touch of a button or through voice activation. With three built-in speakers, Freeway offers impressive surround sound. However, if you prefer your vehicle’s speakers, the built-in FM transmitter will connect your smartphone straight to the car’s internal sound system. Equipped with a motion sensor, Freeway will always sense when you get into the car and automatically connect to your smartphone.

Monitoring groups of animals in the wild is a tricky business. Fixing radio transmitters to them is invasive, and can alter their behaviour in unexpected ways. Hidden cameras is an alternative, but individual beasts are hard to tell apart. And nocturnal (夜行的) creatures are difficult to see in the first place. Fortunately, there is another less obvious way to monitor animals recently: by eavesdropping (窃听) on them.

A network of underwater microphones has already been used to count and track migrating whales by identifying their individual calls. At a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month, researchers from Ohio State University explained how they have now applied a similar technique to bats.

Working in the university’s Bat Lab, Stephen Burnett and Mitchell Masters recorded a total of 1, 449 echo-location calls — the high-pitched sounds that bats use to probe their surroundings — from 24 big brown bats. They then used signal-analysis software to analyse each call according to ten numerical parameters describing length, time, frequency and so on. Cluster analysis, a statistical technique that groups things together on the basis of similarity, found 29 distinct clusters of calls, which was reasonably close to the actual number of bats.

Indeed, even when presented with just two calls from each bat, rather than several dozen, the software provided a fairly accurate estimate of numbers. This suggests that, by recording bat sounds in one place over the course of a few nights, it should be possible to estimate the size of the local bat population.

Similar bio-acoustic(生物声学的) techniques are being tried on other animals. Christopher Clark of Cornell University, who pioneered the acoustic monitoring of whales, is now involved in a project to monitor elephant populations in the Central Africa. Unlike their tropical cousins in eastern and southern Africa, these animals are mostly resident in forests. That makes them difficult to count by such conventional means as flying over them with a pair of field-glasses.

Using microphones, Dr. Clark hopes to identify both the elephant making each call and the place the call was made from. It should then be possible to determine the population, track the migration of different groups of animals, and monitor their health — merely by listening.

Even as Google plans to test its fleet (车队) of self-driving cars on public roads this summer, its business model remains a bit of a mystery. By 2025, as many as 250, 000 self-driving vehicles could be sold each year globally, according to a study by an industry research firm.

“Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, ” said Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project. For now, Google has no plans to sell any of its self-driving cars. They are strictly for research. But they will hit public roads this summer near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Previous testing has taken place only on closed courses.

The cars are built to operate without a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal. “Our software and sensors do all the work, ” Urmson said. “the vehicles will be very basic — we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible — but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. ” The prototype (雏形)   are the first of a 100-car fleet the tech giant is building.

In the long run, Urmson sees a future of safer roads —the majority of auto accidents are caused by human error —and fewer traffic jams. Robotic cars could also shuttle people who can’t drive because of age or illness.

Google has said that self-driving cars could launch new business models in which people buy the use of vehicles they don’t own. The company has already tested other types of self-driving cars on public streets, including modified Lexus sport-utility vehicles, under a special permit program by the California Department of Motor Vehicles that requires a human driver at the controls.

The state has issued six other companies permits to operate such cars, including Delphi, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Tesla, Bosch and Nissan. The vehicles that will be tested on open roads this summer will have removable steering wheels, accelerators and brake pedals to allow “safety drivers” to take control if needed. Google says the cars are safe. The vehicles have sensors that “can detect objects out to a distance of more than two football fields in all directions, which is especially helpful on busy streets with lots of intersections, ” Urmson said. “We’re looking forward to learning how the community understands and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle, ” Urmson said.