Dung-powered trike

Five trikes this month... at this rate, I'll have to rename the blog to three-wheeler or something.
The trike on the right is the Toto Neo. 
It recently toured more than 1000 km across Japan on its retro white-walled tyres, running on the methane produced from fermented sewage - collected from both animal and human sources. 
Yes, that would be gas from rotting shit, boet.
And nope, that toilet-seat and giant loo-roll is just to 'suptely' hint at the origin of the contents in the two tanks on the rear.
Toto does not plan to sell the Neo, like the electric trike built by Messrs Ayrton and Perry built in 1881 (see previous blog) the Neo is just to advertise the possibilities of poo.
The Neo weighs 380 kg and has a range of 300 km at speeds of up to 70 kph. 

Reuters quoted the riders who took part in the 1000-km relay across Japan as saying the seat "is actually quite comfortable to sit on."

The first electric car is back

Sure, most modern wheelchairs are faster,
but look at the curves on Starley's 1881
trike and tell me which is purrdier. 

The Autovision museum in Deutschland have recreated the world's first electric car, which Messrs Ayrton and Perry built in 1881 on a trike launched in the same year by leading industrialist and cycle builder, John Starley.
Messrs Ayrton and Perry used the trike to advertise their eevees for ladies, which had enough space to seat even a dame of Rubenesque dimensions in the appropriate riding fashion for the age, as related here by Wikipedia.
The reverse engineering to re-create this one-seater under Herr Horst Schultz (both pictured left), took more than a year, starting with finding a trike that survived two world wars and at least 40 generations of grandchildren.
The Ayrton Perry trike now gives the Autovision museum near Hockenheim an uninterrupted 130-years of "automotive locomotion options" as they were available to humans.
See the full video here on Youtube.

Serijas! This bakkie is for serious farming

BEFORE Ford started building the 23 all new Ranger models at their Pretoria plant, their engineers took a clean page to four corners of the world to ask bakkie users what they wanted from a workhorse. In Thailand, where three-metre high loads are the norm, the couriers wanted tie-hooks outside the load bin. The new Ranger’s hooks each carries half a ton. 

In KZN, farmers wanted to pull a shifting trailer full of heavy cows up a muddy incline. With 470 Nm from 1500 rpm, the 3.2 Ranger is now the strongest bakkie in SA and it comes standard with trailer sway control.

In Brazil, three adults wanted comfort in the rear. Ford’s engineers moved the B-pillar forward, creating a long rear door, more leg room and space for angled back rests.

The one-molecule size 4x4

Nature magazine reports how Groningen chemist Ben Feringa and a group of researchers from Swiss group Empa managed to built the smallest electric vehicle yet. This improves on the group's 2004 award-winning invention of a light-powered molecular motor.
Their new 4x4, shaped in a single molecule, features the equivalent of "motors" on each wheel and gets its power from an overhead supply - in this case the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.
The reseachers say a 500-millivolt charge rotates the wheels about 180 degrees.
Chemists is not quite sure how it works, but surmise that "electrons tunnel through the molecule, causing reversible structural changes in each motor/wheel."

Ben Faringa

Its builders do not call it a tiny car but a"molecular transport machine," and hope to power future versions with laser to deliver medicine precisely where needed or repair/destroy cell structures in the human body.
Like the seven years it took to get here, the next step may take a while yet. The nano works only at cryogenic temperatures, on copper inside a vacuum.

UK's best eevee

Photo by electric cars report

This is Gordon Murray, with the T27 electric car he designed, which in November 2011 won the:

- ‘Most Energy Efficient Small Car (Prototype)’, 

- ‘Best Overall Pure Electric Vehicle’ and 

- ‘Best Overall Entry – RAC Future Car Challenge Winner’ in 2011 RAC Future Car Challenge.

The Future Car Challenge is an eco-rally that does not mess about on race tracks in unusable prototypes on bycycle wheels. 

It is a race in real conditions, covering the 57.13-mile from Brighton to London to sift out the electric car that guzzles the least power en route.

Eleven car companies entered this year, with 65 entries. The T27 electric car beat 'em all.

And once you get past the T27's rather duck-like front (does it remind anyone else about the pre-war CV2), it is actually a bit of a looker.

More impressive still

The state of power guzzlers

I often get asked "whence the best electric vehicle and whither the future?" (although of course not always in Chaucer's ancient English). 

Basically, you can rely on China for proven cars, the U.S. for more (yawn) hybrids, the West for out-of-the-box style, Japan for out-of-the-box style that actually works, India for out-of-the-box style that mostly works cheaply, and Africa for firmly-in-the-box style that can also shoot you, but quietly.  

Good trucks sales signal bad times

Truck, vans and bus sales had their third best monthly total recorded in 2011 so far.

However, like with agricultural tractors sales this year, most of the 1 335 extra heavy trucks sold in October 2011 would have been orders placed by fleet operators anxious to avoid the impact of a weaker rand on the price fully imported units.

Like the raise in tractor sales, the record-high truck sales for
the past two months show farmers and industry don't
trust where the rand and business are heading.

So we have now have a new way to translate truck sales - no longer is it a good reflection of business confidence, in fact, its baaaaad. 

I'd go so far as to say the last two months' worth of high sales figures signal that local industry expects the rand to stay subdued and rail to be dysfunctional until 2013.

Supporting me in this view is no less than the vice president of Hino in South Africa, Dr Casper

Told you so

Back in 2007, I went on national air on Radio Sonder Grense and told the nation we will be paying R10/litre in 2010.

If you want travel frequently,best
pack your own fuel pump.

I darkly explained that the price of crude has nothing to do with the economics of supply and demand and everything to do with politics... the kind of politics that plunders of a nation's coffers under a slew of false flag attacks.
Unfortunately, South Africa play by the same game rules and fuel, despite the new field just now being set up for drilling off Namibia's shores, will keep on going up with a few cents each year.
We should all be looking at driving one wheel at a time?

The Ryno motorised wheel.