Tag

technology

Browsing

Say what you will about American politics, but the US House of Representatives has passed the “SELF-DRIVE Act” (H.R. 3388) – a bipartisan bill that would open up autonomous vehicle regulation for manufacturers.

The big advantage of the SELF-DRIVE Act is that it would supersede the varying and ad hoc state rules that manufacturers must currently adhere to while developing their autonomous platforms.

The bill would also do away with some safety standards put in place for vehicles with drivers, such as where the steering wheel and foot pedals must be located.

Lastly, the SELF-DRIVE Act would require the Department of Transportation (DOT) to research and develop a way of conveying to consumers the level of automation a vehicle possesses.

While the launch of the Ducati’s Desmosedici Stradale V4 engine and leaked photos of the Ducati Panigale V4 dominated the news on Thursday, Aprilia Racing was quietly changing the sport of motorcycle racing, as it debuted an augmented reality helmet that its mechanics will wear in MotoGP.

Aprilia has partnered with DAQRI and Realmore to make the augmented reality helmet come to fruition – DARQI is making the hardware, while Realmore is responsible for the software.

As followers of augmented reality (AR) tech may already have guessed, Aprilia Racing’s AR helmet will allow its mechanics to visualize and share information, overlaid on what is occurring in the pit box.

Transport is changing, and one of the biggest ways in which it is changing is the shift to electric vehicles. That change is slowly starting to seep into the world of motorcycling as well.

Electric motorcycling manufacturers have sprung up in many places around the globe, though more often than not as tech startups in Silicon Valley rather than as engineering firms from more traditional motorcycling regions.

The more established manufacturers have also started to show an interest. BMW offers an electric scooter, the C Evolution, and KTM sells the Freeride E in three different versions. Slowly but surely, a solid engineering base is starting to form for electric motorcycles.

This change has not gone unnoticed by Dorna. The Spanish firm who run MotoGP is making plans for an electric bike racing series, provisionally scheduled to be starting in 2019.

That is very provisional, however: a lot of work still needs to be done before such a series can take place. Bikes need to be found, and circuits need to be modified to ensure they have the facilities needed to host, and most especially, recharge the bikes ready for racing.

To find out more about what an electric bike series might look like, and how far along the planning stage Dorna is, we spoke with MotoGP Director of Technology Corrado Cecchinelli.

Reducing greenhouse gases will be a huge part of transportation in the coming years, as countries get more serious about climate change and the factors that cause it. This should be obvious, if not already present.

Vehicle emissions have put tremendous pressure on governments, and we are already seeing a trend in Europe for vehicle manufacturers pushing to stop the production of gasoline-powered vehicles within the few decades.

This puts electric motorcycles, cars, and trucks at the forefront of future transportation plans, but Bosch has another idea to solve our transportation and climate needs: synthetic fuels.

The next generation of manufacturing is rapidly upon, if you will excuse the pun. Rapid prototyping and 3D metal printing is about to get considerably faster and cheaper, if you believe the hype surrounding manufacturing startup Desktop Metal, which just got another $115 million in funding, I might add.

Until now, traditional 3D metal printers relied on lasers to melt metal powders so they could be “printed” into complex shapes, which not only limited what alloys could be used in those situations, but it was also fairly time intensive.

Using what it calls “microwave enhanced sintering” though, Desktop Metal can print with virtually any kind of metal (including steel, aluminum, titanium and copper), and do it at a much faster rate – 100x faster than other additive manufacturing processes, if you believe them.

They are hard to spot, but if you look closely at the 2017 Ducati Desmosedici GP (a bevy of photos are after the jump) you will see something very unique going on with the front suspension. This is because Öhlins and Ducati have teamed up to develop new fork technology, namely carbon fiber fork tubes.

The Öhlins carbon fiber fork tubes can be seen on the machines of Andrea Dovizioso and Jorge Lorenzo, starting from the season-opener in Qatar, and are noticeable for their matte black tube finish, with gold ends.

Öhlins is coy about how much weight savings are involved with the forks tubes, but they are noticeably lighter when they are in your hands, something we have first-hand knowledge of, as we had one to pass around at the Two Enthusiasts Podcast live show at Austin, Texas this year.

Beyond simple weight savings though, the likely purpose of using carbon fiber fork tubes is to adjust the flex of the front suspension.

BMW Motorrad continues to explore the electric scooter space, and at this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este the German company debuted a new mobility concept, which it calls the BMW Motorrad Concept Link scooter.

A zero-emission vehicle for the new era – so says BMW’s press materials – the design is perhaps the most intriguing feature, with the core of the machine looking very similar to the BMW C Evolution electric scooter.

Alongside the rise of self-driving cars, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology is set to massively change the motorcycling landscape – arguably for the better.

The technology comes in a variety of forms, but its basics involves cars, trucks, motorcycles, and possibly even pedestrians sharing basic travel data, like which lane they are in, how fast they are going, and whether they are changing lanes, coming to a stop, or a similar action.

Being able to communicate these basic pieces of telemetry, and thus alert drivers and trigger self-driving systems, means a big safety increase for all motorists – motorcyclists especially.

Bosch estimates that one-third of motorcycle crashes could be prevented with V2V technology – basically any car-motorcycle crash where the car driver didn’t see the motorcyclist, or vice versa.

The day will come when we have to report to our autonomous vehicle overlords, and it will be an interesting day when that happens, as it will have big implications for the motorcycle industry.

Until autonomous vehicles become the status quo though, they will have to continue to conform to the transportation landscape as it is right now, and one of the more difficult challenges that automobile manufacturers face is how to handle motorcycles, especially as they filter and split lanes.

The Ford Motor Company is already working hard on that issue, and recently it was granted a patent by the USPTO for its lane-splitting detection system for autonomous vehicles.

Fuel injection has finally come to the two-stroke market for production motorcycles, with KTM (and thus also Husqvarna) debuting two enduro machines with transfer port injection (TPI) on their single-cylinder smokers.

This has been a long time coming in the two-wheeled space, even though we have seen TPI and direct injection on other two-stroke vehicles, like snowmobiles and personal watercraft for quite some time now.

KTM is really the last manufacturer to support two-stroke motorcycles though, so any progress in this space is a welcomed breath of life for off-road riders. New technology truly could be the savior to two-stroke motorcycles, as emission standards continue to become more restricted with each passing year.

While the Japanese brands have focused their efforts on four-stroke motorcycles, KTM and Husqvarna are showing that there is still a market for these lightweight and efficient enduro models.

There is an Austrian boat-ton of high-resolution photos waiting for you after the jump. Like…a lot. Using the Erzberg mine as a back drop, these stunning shots will probably make you run out to your local KTM dealer. They certainly have us thinking. Enjoy!

We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that Husqvarna will be following suit with its Austrian sibling, and adding fuel-injection to several of its two-strokes enduro motorcycle for the 2018 model year.

After a long history of rumors and development, KTM finally debuted fuel injection for a production two-stroke model just a few weeks ago, using the technology on two of its upcoming enduro models, the KTM 250 EXC TPI and KTM 300 EXC TPI.

Husqvarna will use the same technology for its own motorcycles in the same segments, announcing today the the all-new 2018 Husqvarna TE 250i and 2018 Husqvarna TE 300i enduro models with transfer port injection.