The design of the upcoming Aptera car will provoke binary reactions—I for one think it's lovely. And unlike a lot of crazy electric cars, chances are decent that the Aptera will be produced. You can reserve one now for a fully-refundable $500 that goes towards the purchase price, which varies depending on your choice of all-electric or gas/electric hybrid, but still remains under $30k.

I want one badly, coupled with a natty suit and a tour through the leaf-strewn roads of New England. (And yes, this would be the post where you guys thrash me for wanting to buy something wholly new and wildly unnecessary since I live in New York and don't need a car. But look at her. Space egg calls to me.)

Aptera Electric/Hybrid Car On Pre-Order for $500 [Oh!Gizmo]

Michelin's XDA5 tires are being promoted as "self-healing" or "regenerating," but that's a bit generous. Instead the tires reveal new grooves and tread was they wear down, extending the usable life of tires by 30% before they must be retreaded.

The XDA5 series is designed for big rigs and over over-the-road haulers; you won't be using these on your Prius for a while. (Unless you're building a Monster Prius.)

Press Release [TheAutoChannel.com via InventorSpot.com via Crave.CNET.com]

Autopia has been given these concept photos of the production model of the "Imagine" from HumanCar, a sort of modern version of the old pump-action railroad cart* designed for use on roads, bolstered by some electric motors in case its riders didn't eat their breakfast. The Imagine uses the same basic chassis as the first "FM-4" model of the HumanCar, which is powered by the rowing of its four passengers and steered by leaning.

The whole system looks a little awkward to me, but there are some videos up on HumanCar's site that show them cooking down twisty mountain roads, so I guess it can't be as unwieldy as it might first appear.

And before you slag them for making something with no headlights, no enclosed cabin, etc., remember that these aren't designed to be a total car replacement, but a green option for people moving, short commutes, and the like.

HumanCar Imagine Comes Ever Closer to Reality [Autopia]

* There's a proper name for those railroad carts, isn't there?

Although just a student concept for now, the "iSlide" concept by Ofir Tal combines the gyroscopic self-balancing of the Segway with the size and nimbleness of a skateboard.

[iSlide] utilizes a hydrogen fuel cell and onboard gyroscope to attain speeds of around 15 kph. Described as a mix of snowboarding and skateboarding, the iSlide's motion is controlled by leaning forwards (to accelerate) and backwards (to slow down).

Somehow I doubt Mr. Tal has a hydrogen fuel cell inside his prototype; in fact, I wonder if this thing actually works at all.

Nevertheless, the likelihood of someone seeing me on the iSlide is about ten times greater than seeing me on a Segway, which puts it just over the "only if I were really drunk" mark but just shy of the "trying to impress a girl" threshold. ("Really drunk trying to impress a girl" does not factor in this scale, as that is a Boolean value.)

iSlide: Segway meets skateboard in radical urban transport concept [Gizmag]

I'll admit I was a bit disappointed to discover the Vectrix Electric Maxi-Scooter looked like, well, a scooter—the opening bit in this review of the unit by GizMag talked about doing burnouts, which led me to believe it was a full-sized electric sports bike. That said, for a city runabout the Vectrix looks like a decent vehicle, capable of up to 100kph top speed, which will get you motoring on the highway, provided the NiMH batteries are fresh.

The Vectrix also features a rider-controlled regenerative braking system, which allows you to kick back the throttle (on the handle, of course) to slow down the bike while reclaiming a bit of your power back. (A traditional brake is also on hand for faster stops.)

The bike's now available in Australia—that's why GizMag took it for a spin—but it's actually an American company that produces the unit, sourcing Italian chassis components, with assembly in Poland.

First ride: the Vectrix Electric Maxi-Scooter [GizMag]

After we posted about the 4x4 Van Conversion, reader "Blip Music" suggested we scope out a company called "EarthRoamer," who specializes in conversions of vehicles for long-term camping and outdoor use. So I did—and now I've got a powerful lust in my heart, having spent several hours this weekend looking over EarthRoamer's products and travel journals.

EarthRoamer makes two models: the XV-LT, a conversion of a Ford F550 truck, which they've been making since at least 2000; and the far more appealing XV-JP, a new model based around the extended-bed Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. While both models achieve the same goal—off-road-capable vehicles that can also provide comfortable living quarters—the XV-JP does it in a package that is far more practically sized, extending only about a foot in height more than a typical jeep.

I was seriously counting pennies for the first hour or so of looking at the the XV-JP until I happened on the price: a painful $77k, or $44k more than the Jeep itself. While that is certainly enough to make a man cry, it does start to make more sense when you recognize the degree of customization that has gone into each vehicle.

Each EarthRoamer XV-JP operates entirely off its diesel engine and integrated solar panel, providing hot water (heated from the engine block), an on-board toilet, a shower, lights, heating and cooling (by fan), and various other amenities, including a refrigerator. The water tanks and batteries are stowed under the frame to help maintain a low center of gravity. The top folds out into a tent with a queen-sized bed. Except for stops to occasionally empty the septic system and top off your water and fuel, you could go weeks without the need for any other modern convenience. Oh, and the whole thing has been blown out with aftermarket parts that can withstand off-road use.

Part of why the XV-JP pushes all my buttons is that it would be the perfect vehicle to use on a trip through Central and South America I've always wanted to take. Toss in a laptop, a DSLR, and a satellite internet connection (since money isn't a limitation, obviously) and I could putter around the jungle in my mobile off-road blogging platform. I am sighing so hard right now!

Product Overview Page [EarthRoamer.com]

The "Sportsmobile Ultimate Adventure Vehicle" is built out from a full-sized Ford van, complete with raised 4x4 chassis and pop-up bed a la the VW Vanagon.

Sportsmobile vans are custom jobbers, which they're more than happy to build out for you (they also do non-offroad customs), but they're also willing to sell you plans for building the same getup yourself, should you prove handy with blowtorch and welder. The idea behind using a van is to convert the interior space into something more livable than a truck, without losing the off-road capabilities like an RV.

Company Page [Sportsmobile.com] (Thanks, Bug!)

As Core77 points out, the way this concept dashboard from Johnson Controls presents the speedometer is sort of hurdurrringly obvious:

While the bulk of the dashboard is ho-hum, at least one new detail is worth looking at, the speedometer gauge. While the gauge to the left of it has the conventional center-mounted needle, the large gauge has a "ring pointer," where the pointer is a graphic on a clear, rotating ring. This simple design innovation frees up the center of the dial so you can display more information.

They could also have the indicator locked to the twelve-o'clock position with the numbers themselves rotating, although it would probably be a little more difficult to visually parse the spaces between the hash marks.

What a difference a gauge makes [Core77]

Virgin America shared more details today on its partnership with in-flight wireless broadband provider AirCell -- air-to-ground wireless internet will be available on all VA flights "sometime in 2008," and will be offered two ways: BYOD (bring your own device, laptops or pdas or whatever), and also through the inflight entertainment system called Red.

AirCell also has a deal in the works with American Airlines for air-to-ground wireless, but from what I can suss out in the press release, two things make the VA deal different.

First, every single VA plane will have the connectivity, not just a chosen few. AA may be planning the same, eventually, but VA's committing to it from the start.

But even more interesting -- through "Red," VA will also be offering what amounts to a fleet-wide, airborne social network. Guests on one plane will be able to interact with other guests on that plane -- and with flyers on other planes within the VA fleet -- using Red. As I understand it, they've got some pretty ambitious plans in the works for in-flight interactivity. This could get really interesting.

Snip from joint press release issued just now by AirCell and VA:

Customized for Virgin America, the system is anticipated to allow guests to connect to the internet with the AirCell Broadband Service, using either their Red™ seatback video screens or their own wifi enabled portable gaming devices, laptops, PDAs or Smartphones. As such, in addition to the many entertainment choices currently offered by Red™ guests will be able to check and send web-email from their seatbacks through Red™’s TALK -- the airline’s onboard chat system -- using popular instant messaging services such as MSN®, Google® talk, Yahoo! ® Skype, and AIM®.

“We believe that broadband connectivity on our planes will help enhance the inflight experience for our guests,” said Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America’s Director of Inflight Entertainment & Partnerships. “Whether it’s IMing with your friends, updating your blog, getting a stock quote, sending photos from your trip to friends, watching a movie or sending a work email, we plan to make it all available on a Virgin America plane.”

Link to press release.

Previously on Boing Boing:

Getting high with Richard Branson: Virgin America's virgin flight

Update: Dan Gillmor rightfully scolds us for adopting a popular marketing term in this post. He says:

You're not a guest if you're paying... This drives me nuts. First the hotels pretend we're "guests" and now Virgin America is trying to pull the same thing. Please don't buy this language switcheroo.

The Di Blasi R7E folding motorbike design has remained mostly unchanged for the last 25 years. While that's a indicator of simple, solid engineering, it also means very few improvements have been made—I'm looking at the 50cc 2-stroke engine, specifically, and its need for a 50:1 ratio of fuel and oil. (Two stroke engines tend to cough out a lot of dirty exhaust, as well as noise.)

But there's no denying it's a cute and clever little runabout, capable of being folded down into a block that takes up less than five cubic feet of storage. It still weighs about 60 pounds, but I bet it's one of the only bikes you can have shipped to your door for under $100.

While they're built in Italy, an American company, Folding Motorbike, Inc., has taken to importing them, although they don't list their prices on their ridiculous flash website, nor do they discuss street legality. Another company is selling them on eBay for three grand, which seems like a lot of money when you can buy a slightly used one in the UK for well under that. Considering how inexpensively one can pick up the far more stylish Honda CT70 Trail Bike on eBay, albeit in various states of disrepair, the ability to fold your little two-stroke down into a block will need to be pretty important. Which is why there is also the R7ES model, I suspect, which replaces the carbon steel frame with one of stainless, the better to resist corrosion when stashed aboard a boat.

Folding Motorbike's Noisy, Gaudy Company Page [FoldingMotorbike.com]
Another, Cheaper American Importer [DiBlasi.com]

From a scan of a 1930s Popular Science which had such a nice cover illustration I had to include it:

All that is needed to attach the device to the windshield is to moisten the small vacuum cup fastener and press it firmly against the inside of the windshield, setting the candle in an upright position under the windshield wiper. The flame should be about a quarter of an inch away from the glass, and the candle may be adjusted to this distance by merely bending the metal holder. A shield keeps light out of the driver's eyes.

Can you imagine trying to sell a product today that involved fire in a moving vehicle? I wonder how well it worked. I'd expect it would get soot all over the glass.

CANDLE KEEPS ICE FROM FORMING ON WINDSHIELD (Dec, 1930) [Modern Mechanix]

Let us bask for a moment in the majesty of the Airbus A380 cockpit, full as it is of flush flat panels, knobs, and various things to keep the pilots distracted so the autopilot can do its job.

AVING got a chance to tour one of Korean Air's new A380 and has several pictures.

Korean Air to unveil the inside of Airbus A380 - Detailed Image [AVING.net via Red Ferret]

Although the military overtones of the test kept official record keepers from monitoring its test flight, UK defense firm QinetiQ put its unmanned, solar powered drone "Zephyr" into the air over the weekend, where it flew for 54 hours straight. (That would be a world record, if they cared enough to submit it.)

These sort of flyers will be all over the skies in the near future, taking much the same surveillance and communications duties as satellites without the prohibitive cost of orbital launches.

Solar plane en route to everlasting flight [NewScientist.com]

Bonus Link: This is a good of a time as any to mention one of the loveliest trains ever crafted, the Burlington Pioneer Zephyr, a.k.a. "The Silver Streak." [Wikipedia]

If you soon find yourself driving at a reasonable speed down the highway only to catch the impending dopplering stacatto from three-second clips of "Mama Said (Knock You Out)," you may soon share the road with a "Horntones"-equipped vehicle, capable of blasting short MP3 clips from its built-in loudspeaker.

The Horntones FX-550 Player is the heart of the system and is the primary user interface. It has 256 mega-bytes of flash memory to store hundreds of Tones (depending on the length of the audio clips utilized). It features a blue LCD display and has 9 preset buttons. Each button can play a different Tone for the selected Theme. It also has a USB port that is used loading new Themes and Tones. Two negative-trigger inputs are also provided for future use to interface with your extra buttons or other compatible devices.

The Horntones system is only $250, putting it well within the budget of almost any kid who thinks blasting fart noises and Simpson's quotes at intersections is the height of hilarity.

Product Page [Horntones.com via Gadget Lab]

Having a car lift in your home garage is a dream for many amateur mechanics, but the cost is painfully prohibitive. (Not only for the lift, but for all the additional concrete work that has to be done, not to mention proper, environmentally-sound drainage.)

The Eastwood Tilt-A-Car is a much cheaper option, although it sacrifices much of the convenience of a lift: you'd have to drain all the fluids before cocking a car up on its side. (If only you had a lift!)

Eastwood claims the Tilt-A-Car will tilt a car or truck up to 6,800 pounds all the way to 90 degrees.  Two rocker assemblies attach to the wheel lugs on one side of the vehicle while a threaded lift screw connects to the lugs of a wheel on the opposite side. A 3/8″ corded or cordless drill then lifts the car up by pulling the ends of the threaded rod inward. 

$1,400 plus freight shipping, plus $30 for a bottle of bourbon to steady your nerves. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Catalog Page [EastwoodCo.com via Toolmonger]

This new "Mobility Weapon Mounted Installation Kit" (MWMIK) may look like some anachronistic sci-fi movie prop—you know, the kind where it's 1,000 years in the future, but everybody still drives Hummers?—but the four-ton 4x4 is an actual real-life vehicle, intended to be used by the British in Afghanistan. It's certainly got the ability to bring a lot of firepower to the table, including "a .50 calibre machine gun or an automatic grenade launcher and a general purpose machine gun," but if I recall correctly, the current trend in anti-guerilla warfare is to put more armor on your vehicles, not leave them open-topped like a dune buggy.

Apparently the old Land Rovers used by the British troops have been open topped before anyway, so it's not really worse, at least.

Army to use 'Mad Max' 4x4 to fight Taliban [Daily Mail via Gizmodo]

Marc Merlin has a very nice write-up of his experiences at this year's Burning Man along with a heap of pictures, but I would have been remiss in my nerdly duties if I didn't share this picture he took of a particular art car.

I don't know how you'd otomatopiate Jawas, but let me assure you I tried. Let me give you my best Threepio instead: Oh my!

Burning Man 2007: The Green Man [Marc.Merlins.org]

With a production rate of just five cars a year—making 800 cars a year Tesla look a lot bigger—Monaco-based Venturi is about to release its take on the electric sports bra car, the squickily-named "Fetish."

The Fetish will have a zero-to-60 time of around five seconds and will be available for €450,000—about six times the price of the Tesla.

GreenTech Media has a short feature about Venturi and its CEO, Gildo Pallanca Pastor, as well as a video of the Fetish in action.

Venturi Goes Kinky [GreenTechMedia.com via Earth2Tech]

Toolmonger has discovered this killer biodiesel machine that's small enough to be used at home and runs on regular household 110-volt power. It costs $7,500 and requires you keep methanol and sulfuric acid on hard (and source oil, of course), but once you get it all cooking you can make up to fifty gallons of high-grade diesel every two days for less than a dollar a gallon.

Biodiesel for Dummies [Toolmonger]

Another clear winner from our "In the Year 2000" Flickr pool, included in a cluster of great photos uploaded by "beamjockey." He explains:

Models of spaceplane designs from Bell Aircraft, perhaps in the 1950s, perhaps related to the BOMI skip-glider proposal. These models are in the fine Niagara Aerospace Museum in Niagara Falls, New York. in which Bell plays a starring role.

I love how abstract the shapes are. I wonder if Bell actually intended to build the spaceplaces with that shape or if they were just getting the general point across.

Bell Spaceplanes Rear View 0354 [Flickr]

Oh, happy day! The best multi-dimensional drift racing series on the web is coming back for more dinosaur archeology adventures. (If this video doesn't fill you with abundant glee, you may want to watch the video below. Or you may have really good taste.)

He's got the tools. Now there's just one thing left to do: he's got to drift!

Previously: Video: The Inassailable Awesomeness of Overdrift [BBG]

Modern Mechanix provides this scan of a 1946 Popular Science, pointing to this three-wheeled prototype from French auto manufacturer Mathis. A little digging uncovers that a "Mathis 333" prototype was built and shown at the 1946 Paris Motor show, but never entered into production.

Had it been made, the Mathis 33 would have been powered by a 707cc flat twin watercooled engine, including "separate radiators for each cylinder." (That means two whole radiators!)

Sadly, Mathis gave up the ghost in 1950 and the sleek little 333 never made it onto the mean streets of Paris. Fortunately for us, the prototype is still around.

(And yes, I know there have been other three-wheeled cars, like the Reliant Robin, but I like the cut of the 333's jib.)

AUTO IDEAS (Nov, 1946) [ModernMechanix.com]
Mathis 333 Page [3-Wheelers.com]

This wrist-horn is said to have been built in the 1880s for bicycle pilots who needed to warn passers-by that their luxuriant mustache was about to be unfettered to catch a strong Nor'East wind. Wuuuurrrrrrrt! All ahead full, to the Pinstripe Promenade!

No Time For a 19th Century English Bicycle Wrist-Horn & 21st Century Wristcam [Watchismo Times]

A columnist on Maine Today points out a large amount of power that goes wasted each night on the electricity grid that could be better used to power vehicles (or anything else):

Each night across the Northeast, there is a large percentage of renewable power generation capacity that sits idle. This means there is a large amount of unused and under-used capacity in the existing electrical grid.

According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy study, there is so much excess capacity that if every light-duty car and truck in America today used plug-in hybrid technology, 73 percent of them could be plugged in and "fueled" without constructing a single new power plant

He doesn't link the study; I'd like to find out exactly how "renewable" the power production might be. Plug-in cars come with their own set of problems—battery recycling, for one—but I'm all for trying out alternate methods of powering our vehicles. We're not going to decrease our oil use with a single solution.

[MaineToday.com via GroovyGreen.com]

New Anti-Gravity Helicopter - Watch more free videos

The blades of the Russian MI-24 Hind helicopter in this video are perfectly in sync with the "shutter" of the videocamera filming it, making it appear as if the blades are not moving at all. [via Dan's Data]