Ten things we learned this week: 6 November 2015 edition

Volvo, you’re likely aware, loves safety. It has been pioneering side impact-this and airbag-that for years now. It’s even targeted no deaths or serious injuries in its cars from 2020.

It’s not just people who need protecting of course; kangaroos do, too. We’re not just being obtuse: it’s reported that over 20,000 ‘roos are struck in Australia every year.

The lively marsupials have a habit of jumping wantonly in front of fast approaching vehicles, their drivers given lows odds of dodging them given they’ve likely seen no signs of life for the last 200 miles.

So Volvo is using a bunch of XC90s to develop kangaroo avoidance technology. Really. Cameras and radars will aim to detect hopping, pouched animals, and automatically apply the brakes if needed.

Martin Magnusson, Volvo’s Senior Safety Engineer, said this: “In Sweden we have done research involving larger, slower moving animals like moose, reindeer and cows which are a serious threat on our roads.

“Kangaroos are smaller than these animals and their behaviour is more erratic. This is why it’s important that we test and calibrate our technology on real kangaroos in their natural environment.”

Ten Things loves it when the worlds of cars and football collide, and often the manufacturer/team tie-ups are entirely apt. MG and sub-par Burnley, for instance.

Here’s one to break with tradition, though: Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest footballer of the modern age (he’s the man with the most goals in Champions League history for instance, and he’s not yet hit 30), is now a global ambassador for… Tata. Video evidence is here.

Yeah, Tata owns Jaguar, but Messi represents the company’s own light vehicles. Y’know, like the Nano.

“I am extremely thrilled to be a part of the Tata Motors family,” said perhaps the best footballer ever. “Tata Motors is a true representation of India and a well-established brand, globally. It is important to believe in yourself and keep pushing to achieve success and that is what the first campaign stands for. I hope together we are able to inspire many more.”

When his Indica company car arrives is as yet unconfirmed.

“Males dressed as traffic cones, blocking the road like traffic cones.” It’s an obscure but utterly brilliant police report, filed this week in Kingston, London.

It naturally followed some Halloween japes, as a bunch of ‘lads’ – for they were drinking jovially on a Saturday night so we must refer to them as such – used the classic orange and white cone as the inspiration for their costume.

And if you’re dressed like a cone, why not act like one? That’s the alcohol-imbued logic they seemingly followed, blocking cars and buses in the road and taking photos of themselves playing entirely up to their outfits.

While Kingston Police expressed amusement at the prank – they’d been carrying sweets to distribute to trick or treaters, after all – they naturally rounded up the cones and got them to the side of the road as quickly as possible.

If only we could call them out to our local, oft-unattended road works…

Picture credit: @dtheochari

We apologise for dragging Halloween out when you’re no doubt dusting down your tree and polishing your baubles in anticipation for Christmas.

But this is interesting. Google – in the aim to make its ungainly self-driving pod the leader of autonomous car tech – has been teaching it how to cope with All Hallows’ Eve.

That doesn’t mean wantonly throwing Haribo at passing kids, nor locking its doors and switching off its lights, pretending not to be in.

What it does mean is rather more intelligent: it’s been learning what shapes it should recognise as pedestrians, and children in particular. The wild fancy dress addenda could otherwise confuse it, see.

Google employees were invited to bring their costumed kids to work and have them walk around the car so it could get its head around it all. "This gives our sensors and software extra practice at recognising children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they're in odd costumes,” said Google.

Giant cones, for instance…

This perhaps isn’t something we’ve learned this week. But it’s certainly been confirmed, and it’s all thanks to the words of Olly Martins, Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire.

Desperate to cover a shortfall in government money for policing, he’s suggested turning on the gantry speed cameras of the Bedfordshire stretch of the M1 motorway.

They often flash up – and enforce – speeds below the 70mph limit, to help control traffic when there’s a crash or bad weather. But Martins has suggested they permanently police the 70mph limit the rest of the time.

"Strict enforcement of the speed limit could raise £1m and to me that's better than losing 25 more police officers,” he said, as well as suggesting his force’s patrol cars could carry sponsorship on them. “I am running out of levers to pull to keep Bedfordshire Police financially viable," Martins added.

Dare we ask your thoughts?

We’ve long wished for the many, many potholes that torture our suspension and bend our alloys to be fixed. What we hadn’t expected, though, is that this may be done by scarily intelligent drones.

The University of Leeds has received a £4.2million investment to research the possibility of road-fixing robots. As well as fixing our broken roads, they would also prevent the traffic jams that inevitably spin off the road works that result from actual, vulnerable people carrying out such tasks.

Professor Phil Purnell is from its School of Civil Engineering. “We want to make Leeds the first city in the world to have zero disruption from street works.

“We can support infrastructure which can be entirely maintained by robots and make the disruption caused by the constant digging up the road in our cities a thing of the past.”

We’ll allow you a moment to be freaked out.

Staying with freaky tech, Audi has invested in some 3D printers and made a car.

Rather than one of its identikit saloons, though, it has chosen something more glamorous to warm our cockles. This, boys and girls, is the toy you really want for Christmas: a 1:2 scale 1936 Auto Union Type C racer.

“We are constantly exploring the boundaries of new processes’” says Prof. Dr. Hubert Waltl, Audi’s head of toolmaking. “One of our goals is to apply metal printers in series production.”

Naturally the car didn’t roll onto a printer tray intact; metal printing can currently craft objects up to 7.9-by-9.5 inches in size. But that covers many parts of a car, and the printer can handle steel or aluminium, crafting parts with a greater density than if they were made by more traditional methods.

How long before you buy your car online and print at home?

First the cardboard Lexus, now this. While other car makers chase mind-baffling new tech, others are keen to big up the importance of good old paper.

As this video proves, it wasn’t the work of a moment, like transforming an errant restaurant napkin into a floppy, deformed swan is.

Nope, this involved 2,000 pieces of paper, 200 hours and more than one person. It’s all to mark five years of Nissan Juke production, the tiddly crossover that seemingly brought the tiddly crossover to the big time (sorry, Suzuki Jimny) racking up over 700,000 sales in the meantime.

It’s also just in time for November 11, which is, we’re sure we don’t have to tell you, World Origami Day. We’d have thought that would have folded by now…

The onslaught of in-car tech can at times be dizzying and more than a little unsettling.

But it has significant upsides: the ability to track your car’s position via an app, for instance, can make it a damn sight easier to recover when some rapscallion has taken it without consent.

That’s exactly what happened in Vancouver this week, when Tesla Model S owner Katya Pinkowski discovered an ominously vacant rectangle where her car should be.

Using an app linked to the car on her husband’s phone, though, the pair managed to call the police and give them real-time updates on where the car was been driven, leading to the thief’s arrest and the return of their car.

“It was so much fun, actually,” said Cary Pinkowski, Katya’s other half. Yep. In the future, having your car stolen is fun...

Uber has been ringing the death knell for traditional taxis for a little while now, be it intentional or not. And it can probably take some of the blame for the rather sad development that ‘The Knowledge’ will no longer be taught to London cabbies.

If your knowledge is lagging behind, it’s the training school where black cab drivers learn the 25,000 streets of London they must navigate to successfully get London’s commuters and tourists between destinations. If you’ve ever been taken on indescribably intricate rat-runs through London’s back streets at the behest of your driver, it’s The Knowledge you can thank.

The three-decade-old training school has seen demand plummet in the last few years, though, Uber – and its reliance on satnav – one of the reasons identified.

The inevitable march of technology, or a sad day for a British tradition?