The kids at +Motor Trend Magazine try out the
+Ford Motor Company focus St and like it
Please go and sign this petition right now.
Ford talks about the real world fuel efficiency of its latest hybrids
On Friday, while +Ford Motor Company was showing off its new lineup of Transit and Transit Connect vans, VP of product development Raj Nair took a few minutes to discuss some recent reports on the fuel efficiency of the C-MAX and Fusion hybrids. There have been numerous reports that customers are falling short of the EPA label estimates in real world driving.
For those of us that have been paying attention, it's been pretty clear for many years that hybrid vehicles can exhibit a great deal of variability depending on the driving conditions. Back in late 2010 when I was working at GM and they were launching the Volt, they spoke extensively of the 3 Ts and how they would affect the electric driving ranging.
Those 3 Ts are terrain, temperature and technique. All vehicles get worse mileage in winter for a variety of reasons http://green.autoblog.com/2009/11/12/greenlings-why-does-mileage-drop-in-winter/ but hybrids are particularly sensitive because battery performance is reduced as the temperature drops (or gets too high for that matter).
As the boys from Top Gear demonstrated a few years back when they raced a Prius against an M3, driving aggressively in a hybrid will also degrade efficiency because the engines are tuned to operate best under the light loads typical of the driving cycles used to estimate efficiency.
Nair talked about these factors as well as break-in effects when he spoke to media. He specifically mentioned a 5 mpg improvement as the vehicles go beyond 6,000 miles on the road. Since the C-MAX and Fusion haven't been on sale for very long yet, they will probably get better as time passes. A check of the user submitted numbers on fueleconomy.gov http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=33010&id=33083 already shows the averages climbing from where they were just a couple of weeks ago.
The people of Grand Rapids and Michigan as a whole should be proud of Brandon Dillon for standing up for democracy even when not one single Republican would.
The arguments for having more guns as a solution to the gun violence in America just make no sense. America already the highest concentration of guns in the world with 88.8 firearms per 100 people. Gun violence is proportional to the number of guns available.
So while I abhor what happened in Newtown CT, the calls for new gun control laws seem unlikely to have any significant impact as long as we already have almost 300 million guns in the wild. Unless and until we dramatically reduce the number of weapons, the violence will almost assuredly continue unabated.
Self-shifting Audi R8s finally have a decent gearbox
The first time I ever drove an +Audi USA R8 was way back in 2008 when I drove two different examples in the span of a few months, both with the rather unfortunate R-Tronic automated manual transmission. At various times over the years, I had many unkind words for this gearbox most notably during this episode of the Autoblog podcast http://www.autoblog.com/2010/03/16/autoblog-podcast-170-the-hooniverse-visits/ when I referred to it as a piece of crap. Needless to say the folks at Audi PR at the time weren't thrilled by my assessment.
On the other hand the manual transmission was wonderful as I noted in this review http://www.luxist.com/2009/11/17/review-2009-audi-r8-5-2-fsi-v10-an-everyday-supercar/. In the aforementioned podcast I referred the R8 while talking about the S5 Cabrio and its absolutely sublime S-Tronic gearbox http://www.autoblog.com/2010/04/12/2010-audi-s5-cabriolet-review/
Unlike the single-clutch R-tronic with its hydraulically actuated gears, the S-Tronic is a dual-clutch unit with silky smooth and fast shift action. This year Audi finally did a refresh of the R8 and installed a 7-speed S-Tronic beefy enough to handle the output of the V8 and V10 engines in that car and according to +Jonny Lieberman of +Motor Trend Magazine who was fortunate enough to go to Italy to drive it, it cures all the problems caused by the old transmission.
+Motor Trend Magazine technical director +Frank Markus takes a road trip in the north east with a +Ford Motor Company Shelby GT500 convertible
Apple needs to learn how the Internet works before iCloud evaporates
Last week a former Apple employee posted a scathing breakdown of Apple’s cluelessness in cloud services. The article notes that Google is getting
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At Defendinnovation.org, the EFF has posted some good proposals on software patent reform. These ideas are an excellent start, but frankly I don't think they go far enough. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we'll see any change anytime soon.
Defend Innovation
The patent system is in crisis, and it endangers the future of software development in the United States. Let’s create a system that defends innovation, instead of hindering it.
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+NASA has posted this cool picture as its +Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD), taken by Stephen Confer. APOD page http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120926.html
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