REPOST: Memorable madness with the Toyota Aygo

By: Joe Clifford

Right from the outset the Toyota Aygo has made a name for itself as the ideal urban runabout, mixing cheeky styling and small dimensions with low running costs and engaging handling. What nobody could have anticipated, however, was that the model would also became something of a magnet for crazy antics.

To mark its launch, Toyota teamed up with BBC motoring show Top Gear for the first ‘car football’ match. Ten brand new Aygo models were kitted-out in team strips for a competitive five-a-side battle that clearly showcased the car’s manoeuvrability and pace, not to mention its robust qualities.

At the helm were top racing drivers, including the original Stig, Ben Collins. A few years later Collins fondly recalled his time with the Aygo in an interview for the Telegraph newspaper: “We trashed it to bits but it kept going even with the radiator hanging off and the headlights falling out of the sockets. It took a real pounding. We just went wild.”

Commenting further about his unabashed love for the model, Collins said: “We had about five or six touring car drivers on that day and we unanimously agreed we hadn’t had that much fun in a car that we could remember.” During the interview Collins went on to name the Aygo as his favourite car of all time, though it was also one of the cheapest he’d driven.

A surprise admission, perhaps, but from numerous JD Power customer satisfaction results we already knew that Aygo owners were among the most satisfied drivers on the road. The model has been a perennial winner in the City Car class despite increasingly tough competition. In its launch year the Aygo also received Top Gear’s Car of the Year title, albeit shared with the Bugatti Veyron, a car 120 times more expensive to buy.

Showing just how tough Toyota’s entry-level model is, battle-scarred players from the opening round of car football returned fighting for a Top Gear World Cup Final against a fresh team populated by the then-new Volkswagen Fox. Meanwhile, one of the Aygo substitutes was diverted to rival programme Fifth Gear for an incredible loop-the-loop challenge, which recreated the classic Hot Wheels set with a 40-foot loop that took car and driver through forces of up to 6G. The challenge was successful, setting a new loop-the-loop world record in the process.

Visit toyota.co.uk for full story.

Repost from The Economist: A hopeful continent

Africa is starting to show signs of economic progress--a very good news indeed.  Read the complete article from The Economist.

African lives have already greatly improved over the past decade, says Oliver August. The next ten years will be even better.

Image Source: economist.com

THREE STUDENTS ARE hunched over an iPad at a beach café on Senegal’s Cap-Vert peninsula, the westernmost tip of the world’s poorest continent. They are reading online news stories about Moldova, one of Europe’s most miserable countries. One headline reads: “Four drunken soldiers rape woman”. Another says Moldovan men have a 19% chance of dying from excessive drinking and 58% will die from smoking-related diseases. Others deal with sex-trafficking. Such stories have become a staple of Africa’s thriving media, along with austerity tales from Greece. They inspire pity and disbelief, just as tales of disease and disorder in Africa have long done in the rich world.

Sitting on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the three students sip cappuccinos and look out over a paved road shaded by palm trees where restaurants with white tablecloths serve green-spotted crabs. A local artist is hawking framed pictures of semi-clad peasant girls under a string of coloured lights. This is where slave ships used to depart for the New World. “Way over there, do they know how much has changed?” asks one of the students, pointing beyond the oil tankers on the distant horizon.

This special report will paint a picture at odds with Western images of Africa. War, famine and dictators have become rarer. People still struggle to make ends meet, just as they do in China and India. They don’t always have enough to eat, they may lack education, they despair at daily injustices and some want to emigrate. But most Africans no longer fear a violent or premature end and can hope to see their children do well. That applies across much of the continent, including the sub-Saharan part, the main focus of this report.

African statistics are often unreliable, but broadly the numbers suggest that human development in sub-Saharan Africa has made huge leaps. Secondary-school enrolment grew by 48% between 2000 and 2008 after many states expanded their education programmes and scrapped school fees. Over the past decade malaria deaths in some of the worst-affected countries have declined by 30% and HIV infections by up to 74%. Life expectancy across Africa has increased by about 10% and child mortality rates in most countries have been falling steeply.

A booming economy has made a big difference. Over the past ten years real income per person has increased by more than 30%, whereas in the previous 20 years it shrank by nearly 10%. Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent just now. Over the next decade its GDP is expected to rise by an average of 6% a year, not least thanks to foreign direct investment. FDI has gone from $15 billion in 2002 to $37 billion in 2006 and $46 billion in 2012 (see chart).

Image Source: economist.com

Many goods and services that used to be scarce, including telephones, are now widely available. Africa has three mobile phones for every four people, the same as India. By 2017 nearly 30% of households are expected to have a television set, an almost fivefold increase over ten years. Nigeria produces more movies than America does. Film-makers, novelists, designers, musicians and artists thrive in a new climate of hope. Opinion polls show that almost two-thirds of Africans think this year will be better than last, double the European rate.

Africa is too big to follow one script, so its countries are taking different routes to becoming better places. In Senegal the key is a vibrant democracy. From the humid beaches of Cap-Vert to the flyblown desert interior, politicians conduct election campaigns that Western voters would recognise. They make extravagant promises, some of which they will even keep. Crucially, they respect democratic institutions. When President Abdoulaye Wade last year tried to stand for a third term, in breach of term limits, he was ridiculed. A popular cartoon showed him in a bar ordering a third cup of coffee and removing a sign saying, “Everyone just two cups”. More than two dozen opposition candidates formed a united front and inflicted a stinging defeat on him, which he swiftly accepted. Dakar celebrated wildly, then went back to work the next day.

Image Source: economist.com

At the end of the cold war only three African countries (out of 53 at the time) had democracies; since then the number has risen to 25, of varying shades, and many more countries hold imperfect but worthwhile elections (22 in 2012 alone). Only four out of now 55 countries—Eritrea, Swaziland, Libya and Somalia—lack a multi-party constitution, and the last two will get one soon. Armies mostly stay in their barracks. Big-man leaders are becoming rarer, though some authoritarian states survive. And on the whole more democracy has led to better governance: politicians who want to be re-elected need to show results.

Ways to salvation

Where democracy has struggled to establish itself, African countries have taken three other paths to improving their citizens’ lives. First, many have stopped fighting. War and civil strife have declined dramatically. Local conflicts occasionally flare up, but in the past decade Africa’s wars have become a lot less deadly. Perennial hotspots such as Angola, Chad, Eritrea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are quiet, leaving millions better off, and even Congo, Somalia and Sudan are much less violent than they used to be. Parts of Mali were seized by Islamists last year, then liberated by French troops in January, though unrest continues. The number of coups, which averaged 20 per decade in 1960-90, has fallen to an average of ten.

Second, more private citizens are engaging with politics, some in civil-society groups, others in aid efforts or as protesters. The beginnings of the Arab spring in north Africa two years ago inspired the rest of the continent. In Angola youth activists invoke the events farther north. In Senegal a group of rap artists formed the nucleus of the coalition that ousted Mr Wade.

Third, Africa’s retreat from socialist economic models has generally made everyone better off. Some countries, such as Ethiopia and Rwanda, still put the state in the lead. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s prime minister from 1995 until his death last year, achieved impressive gains by taking development into his own (occasionally bloodstained) hands. Others, such as Kenya and Nigeria, have empowered private business by removing red tape. Yet others are benefiting from a commodities boom, driven by increased demand from China, which has become Africa’s biggest trading partner. Over the past decade African trade with China has risen from $11 billion to $166 billion. Copper-rich Zambia and oil-soaked Ghana are using full coffers to pay for new schools and hospitals, even if some of the money is stolen along the way.

Inevitably, Africa’s rise is being hyped. Boosters proclaim an “African century” and talk of “the China of tomorrow” or “a new India”. Sceptics retort that Africa has seen false dawns before. They fear that foreign investors will exploit locals and that the continent will be “not lifted but looted”. They also worry that many officials are corrupt, and that those who are straight often lack expertise, putting them at a disadvantage in negotiations with investors.

So who is right? To find out, your correspondent travelled overland across the continent from Dakar to Cape Town (see map), taking in regional centres such as Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg as well as plenty of bush and desert. Each part of the trip focused on one of the big themes with which the continent is grappling—political violence, governance, economic development—as outlined in the articles that follow.

The journey covered some 15,800 miles (25,400km) on rivers, railways and roads, almost all of them paved and open for business. Not once was your correspondent asked for a bribe along the way, though a few drivers may have given small gratuities to policemen. The trip took 112 days, and on all but nine of them e-mail by smartphone was available. It was rarely dangerous or difficult. Borders were easily crossed and visas could be had for a few dollars on the spot or within a day in the nearest capital. By contrast, in 2001, when Paul Theroux researched his epic travel book, “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, he was shot at, forced into detours and subjected to endless discomforts.

Another decade from now a traveller may well see an end to hunger in some African countries, steeply rising agricultural production in others, the start of industrial manufacturing for export, the emergence of a broad retail sector, more integrated transport networks, fairer elections, more effective governments, widespread access to technology even among many of the poor and ever-rising commodity incomes. Not everywhere. This report covers plenty of places where progress falls short. But their number is shrinking.

Wait for it

The biggest reason to be hopeful is that it takes time for results from past investment to come through, and many such benefits have yet to materialise. Billions have already been put into roads and schools over the past decade; the tech revolution has only just reached the more remote corners of the continent; plenty of new oilfields and gold mines have been tapped but are not yet producing revenues. The aid pipeline too is fairly full. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone has invested $1.7 billion in Africa since 2006 but acknowledges that “it takes years and years to shift the system.” Some aid will be wasted, some new roads will remain empty and more than a few barrels of oil will be stolen. Yet whereas currently not even half of Africa’s countries are what the World Bank calls “middle income” (defined as at least $1,000 per person a year), by 2025 the bank expects most African countries to have reached that stage.

As the hand-painted number 3 bus pulls out of Cap-Vert and travels through the streets of Dakar, the views, bathed in buttery late-afternoon sunlight, reflect aspects of Africa’s current triumphs and tribulations. On the left are new tenement buildings with running water for the urban poor. On a hill to the right stands a 160-foot (49-metre) bronze statue of a man with a muscular torso resembling Mr Wade in his younger years on which he spent $27m of public money. The bus leaves the capital behind and chugs on, passing craggy cliffs and flooded pastures, single-room huts and mangrove forests. Several hours later it crosses a muddy creek near the city of Ziguinchor, heading south towards Guinea-Bissau.

REPOST: Motion Control Keeps Electric Car's Four Wheels—And Four Motors—On the Road

It weighs half as much as a sports car, and turns on a dime -- so its no surprise that the electric car being developed at Ohio State University needs an exceptional traction and motion control system to keep it on the road.

With four wheels that turn independently, each with its own built-in electric motor and set of batteries, the experimental car is the only one of its kind outside of commercial carmakers' laboratories.

"It is considered one of the promising future vehicle architectures," said Junmin Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and Director of the Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory at Ohio State. "It would make a good in-city car -- efficient and maneuverable, with no emissions. Our task is to make a robust control system to keep it safe and reliable."

In a paper in the January 2013 issue of the journal Control Engineering Practice, his team described the car's ability to follow a specific trajectory.

In tests on good road conditions at the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, Ohio, the car followed a driver's desired path within four inches (10 cm). To test slippery road conditions, the researchers took the car to an empty west campus parking lot on a snowy day. There, the car maneuvered with an accuracy of up to eight inches (20 cm), and the vehicle traction and motion control system prevented "fishtailing" through independent control of the left and right sides of the car.

Wang characterized these results as more accurate than a conventional car, though the comparison is hard to make, given that conventional cars are much more limited in maneuverability by the transmission and differential systems that link the wheels together mechanically. The four independent wheels of the electric car give drivers greater control and more freedom of movement.

The experimental car also weighs half as much as a conventional car -- only 800 kg, or a little over 1,750 pounds -- because it contains no engine, no transmission, and no differential. The researchers took a commercially available sport utility vehicle chassis and removed all those parts, and added a 7.5 kW electric motor to each wheel and a 15 kW lithium-ion battery pack. A single electrical cable connects the motors to a central computer.

One hundred times a second, the onboard computer samples input data from the steering wheel, gas pedal and brake and calculates how each wheel should respond. Because the wheels are independent, one or more can brake while the others accelerate, providing enhanced traction and motion control.

In fact, a driver who is accustomed to conventional cars would have a difficult time driving a car of this experimental design, known as a "four-wheel independently actuated" (FIWA) car without the help of the vehicle motion and traction control system. With its ability to turn sharply and change direction very quickly, the car could be hard to control. Wang has tried it.

"Without the controller, it's very hard to drive. With the controller, it's quite nice -- quiet, and better control than commercial four-wheel drive," he said.

The main challenge for his team -- which consists of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral students as well as a few local high school students -- is to make the whole traction and motion control system energy-efficient and fault-tolerant, so if one wheel, motor or brake malfunctions, the others can compensate for it and maintain safety. It's a situation analogous to a multi-engine plane losing an engine: the other engines have to adjust thrust and angle to keep the plane safe and on course.

Future work will concern the FIWA car's energy efficiency for increasing its travel range in urban environments, and optimizing the weight distribution in the car.

Wang estimates that we won't see a FIWA car on the road for another 5-10 years, as researchers continue to develop new algorithms to control the car more efficiently and add more safety features.

The coauthor on the paper was Rongrong Wang, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, and the team's high school participants came from the Columbus Metro School, a state of Ohio public STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) high school open to students from around the state.

This research was supported by Junmin Wang's awards from the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (2009) and the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Program (2012); the Honda-OSU Partnership program; and the OSU Transportation Research Endowment Program.

Content source: www.sciencedaily.com