cars

Why shortages of a $1 chip sparked crisis in the global economy

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by Bloomberg from https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com The chip crunch was born out of an understandable miscalculation as the coronavirus pandemic hit last year. When Covid-19 began spreading from China to the rest of the world, many companies anticipated people would cut back as times got tough. To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry — and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers — is that there aren’t enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can’t keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That’s contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators. “It’s not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don’t have a display driver, then you can’t build your product,” says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts — power management chips are also in short supply, for example — is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry […]

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BigIron Auctions to Host Classic Car and Motorcycle Auction

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Featuring Chevyland USA Inventory and Classic car curator Monte Hollertz vehicles and memorabilia on online auction block, closing May 6. BigIron Auctions announced today it is conducting an online auction featuring more than $1 million in classic cars and motorcycles, original Chevrolet parts and dealer memorabilia from the historic Chevyland USA car museum in Elm Creek, Neb. Monte Hollertz was a Nebraska farmer, turned classic car enthusiast who passed away in Jan. 2020. He began collecting different models of classic cars in the 1960s. Hollertz opened Chevyland USA in 1974 and took over as head curator in 1980. Chevyland USA housed more than 80 vintage vehicles from the early 1900s and newer. With more over 400 items, there is sure to be an item of interest for any car enthusiast or collector looking for items to add to their collection. Among the items included in the auction are: 1915 Chevrolet Baby Grand Touring H-4 4-Door 1922 Chevrolet 490 3Dr Sedan 1925 Chevrolet Superior Series K Roadster 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster 2Dr Coupe 1958 Chevrolet Impala Tri-Power 2DR Hardtop 1967 Chevrolet Impala SS 1969 Corvette Stingray Take a peek inside the museum to see some of items that will be sold during the auction. BigIron Auctions offer buyers an easy-to-use, secure, online platform in which to browse and bid on these classic cars and other items. There are never any buyer’s fees, the auctions are unreserved, and all equipment is lien-free. In addition, we provide complete transparency between the buyer and seller. To view the items included in the auction, please visit the BigIron Auctions site when the auction opens for bidding on April 15, 2021. The auction will close on May 6, 2021. NOTE: Interviews are also available for media who want to learn more about auction items or are interested

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What If Six Iconic Car Brands Built Motorcycles

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Here’s what would happen if Tesla, Bentley, Bugatti & 3 more car brands made bikes Unbeknownst to some, certain car brands started life by making motorcycles. Take Honda, for instance, or BMW. But what if iconic car brands made motorcycles? Budget Direct Motorcycle Insurance took six automakers consisting of two Brits, a quirky Japanese, two electrified Americans, and a French record-holder and went to work. The team specifically chose brands that you wouldn’t normally associate with two wheels, and here’s what they came up with: 1. Aston Martin Café Racer 2. Bentley Touring Bike 3. Bugatti Superbike 4. Mitsubishi Scooter 5. Rivian Dirt Bike 6. Tesla Sports Bike Click Here to read this article on Bikernet Join the Cantina – Subscribe Today https://www.bikernet.com/pages/custom/subscription.aspx

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11 Hollywood heroes who felt the need for speed and one grubby Biker

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Actors who make the jump from racing movie to race track aren’t as uncommon as you might think. It’s more than a silver-screen ruse, too; some actors invest their own off-camera hours in motorsports. Here are 11 stars who did just that, some with impressive amounts of success. CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE ON BIKERNET

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Different Kinds of Fuels and their History

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Simply put, there is no best fuel for a car. Each fuel has its own advantages and disadvantages. The focus these days is to extract as much energy as you can from a fuel and also keep the pollutants in the exhaust to a minimum. This is why companies are continuously looking for alternatives to improve efficiency and environment-friendliness. CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE

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Electric scooters can help cities move beyond cars v pedestrians

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by Alex Hern from https://www.theguardian.com The government is showing signs of legalising electric scooters on roads, but new laws should be about safety, not horsepower If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that being hit by a scooter hurts less than being hit by a bike. That may sound like a strangely negative place to start, but it’s sort of fundamental to why I’m glad the government is finally showing signs of legalising the use of electronic scooters on public roads across the UK. The current state of the law is a mess. Its broad strokes are reasonable enough: powered vehicles require an MOT and registration to use on public roads, while unpowered vehicles do not. Pavements are for foot traffic only. Access requirements complicate matters, but only a little: wheelchairs, both manual and powered – legally, “class three invalid carriages” – can go on pavements, while some – class four – can go on roads as well. Then, in the 1980s, the law was modernised to support the first generation of electric bikes. Fitted with simple motors that aided hill climbs, it felt silly to ban them as electric vehicles, and so a new category – the “electrically assisted pedal cycle” – was invented, and the laws amended further in 2015 to remove weight limits, allow for four wheels and increase the maximum power of the motor. Which means, as the law stands, you can ride a four-wheeled vehicle of potentially unlimited weight, largely powered by a motor up to 15.5mph, on public roads without training, licensing or registration. But not an electronic scooter. Nor, for that matter, a 5kg, 10mph “hoverboard”, unlikely to hurt anyone save its rider. Looking at the laws from the ground up, the distinguishing characteristic should be safety, not how a

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As Utah motorcycle deaths rise, cycle groups call for better ban on drivers using hand-held cellphones

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by Lee Davidson from https://www.sltrib.com/ Motorcycle groups revved up a call Thursday for something they say might have saved several of the record 48 riders who died on Utah highways last year: a better ban on the use of hand-held cellphones while driving. “Every time I ride my motorcycle, I always have to worry that there’s people right next to me, or in front or behind me, that are texting” or talking on cellphones, said Elvecia Ramos, founder of The Riderz Foundation, at a state Capitol news conference. “It drives me crazy.” She’s not alone. “We’re getting hit by people who are on their phones. We’re all getting hit by left-hand turns” by drivers without peripheral vision because their phones block it, said Annette Ault, Utah chapter president of American Bikers Aiming Toward Education. “And we don’t have any protection,” said Terry Marasco, legislative and policy analyst for The Riderz Foundation. 8“We don’t have any air bags. We don’t have any seat belts.” “And we don’t have any metal around us,” Ault added. So they are calling for passage of HB101 by Rep. Carol Moss, D-Holladay, to create a better ban. Hand-held use of cellphones while driving has technically been illegal in Utah since 2007. But it can only be enforced if another moving traffic violation is committed at the same time, such as speeding. So few tickets are ever written. It also complicates the enforcement of laws that have banned texting while driving since 2009. Police report that when they pull over people they see texting, they often claim to have been merely dialing a phone number — complicating whether they may issue a ticket if they committed no other moving violation. Moss has tried — and failed — for years to allow direct citations for talking-on-the-phone violations. Republican

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Aurora’s self-driving system needed more motorcycle experience. So a biker club helped out

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by Sasha Lekach from https://mashable.com The San Francisco chapter of the Iron Order Motorcycle Club doesn’t usually concern itself much with self-driving cars, but autonomous vehicle company Aurora recently spent the day driving around with the club’s bikers. Aurora, the company co-founded by former Tesla Autopilot head Sterling Anderson, is developing an autonomous driving system it calls Aurora Driver. That system, like all self-driving programs, needs practice on the road, whether that’s in autonomous mode logging real-world miles on public roads, in a computer simulation, or being manually driven. Its perception system is taking in everything around it: pedestrians, bicycles, other cars, trucks, delivery vans, e-scooters, errant shopping carts, construction crews, and, yes, motorcycles. That data is used to predict and react to future scenarios on the road. Motorcycle sightings aren’t rare, but to make sure the machines were more familiar and comfortable around this specific vehicle Aurora needed to devote a machine-learning day to this one vehicle type. So the perception team gathered a group of six motorcyclists to simply drive around the Aurora vehicles. (Aurora isn’t developing the actual cars, but the tech that will work in a car to make it drive autonomously). The cars were in manual mode for the motorcycle testing since it just needed to collect the data. The motorcycle cycle club brought some volunteers and even some Aurora employees and one employee’s dad came out to ride the motorcycles. Being a tech company, Motorcycle Learning Day (that’s what I’ve dubbed the special motorcycle event) wasn’t a free-for-all with revving and vrooming around. The data team wanted to collect specific information from a variety of scenarios that autonomous cars are likely to encounter in the real world. First up was testing different “positions,” meaning motorcycles in the same lane as the car, in front

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Hennessey’s Venom F5 engine bench tested at a furious 1,817 horsepower

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by Loz Blain from https://newatlas.com It’s only been live for a week, but we’ve already had to update our list of the world’s most powerful cars, after Hennessey Performance surprised itself with an extreme dyno reading. The Venom F5 is the car Hennessey hopes will demolish not only the fastest production car record now held by Bugatti, but also the 0-400-0 record recently reclaimed by Koenigsegg. With a long enough piece of road, there’s every chance this wild machine could be the first to break 500 km/h (310.7 mph), which is the next nice round number to aim at since the Chiron hit 300 mph (483 km/h) last month. That’s if Koenigsegg’s Jesko doesn’t get there first. To claim the record, the Venom will need power. Lots and lots of power, to fight through the massive force of wind resistance you get at speeds more than four times faster than highway limits. Up until this morning, Hennessey was saying the Venom F5 would make some 1,600 horsepower, a truly staggering total and enough to place it equal fifth on our list of the most powerful production cars available, alongside the Jesko and the Chiron Super Sport 300+. But the engine hadn’t been dyno tested until now. And while 1,600 horses was the target, even John Hennessey himself appeared surprised with the bench test readout of 1,817 hp and 1,193 lb-ft (1,617.5 Nm) of torque. “We exceeded our target horsepower number. Actually, we blew our target number out of the water by delivering over 1,800 horsepower,” said Hennessey. “The F5 engine has a very broad power band with over 1,000 lb-ft of torque available from 2,000 to 8,000 rpm. Give it the full throttle and it’s the most furious engine that we have ever built. Thus, we gave our F5 engine

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Vision Zero Invasion of the Car Itself: NMA

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Attack on Cars, All Control, All the Time In three years, all new cars and light-trucks purchased in EU countries will be required to include standard price-increasing features that will change how motorists drive. Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection voted in February to approve a range of new vehicle safety standards initially proposed by the European Commission a year ago. Vision Zero began in Sweden in 1997; getting us out of our cars under the guise of safety seems to have always been the goal. Features include advanced emergency braking systems (AEBS), advanced driver distraction warning (cameras inside the car) lane-departure warning systems, reversing detection, tire pressure monitoring systems, and Event Data Recorders (EDRs or Black box crash recorders). Many drivers like these add-ons while others do not. READ the Attack on your Freedom and Destruction of your Rights by Clicking Here Join NMA and Bikernet Today www.Bikernet.com

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