Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Here at Ars, I've made no secret of my love for wagons or my regard for the current generation of Chevrolet Corvette. Now, thanks to the clever people at Callaway Cars, it's possible to get both of those in one carbon-fiber package: the Callaway AeroWagen. The AeroWagen is the latest product from a company that has been tuning Corvettes—with GM's blessing and warranty—for the past three decades. The coolest bit is that the carbon fiber AeroWagen hatch is a straight swap for the stock rear hatch of the current C7 Corvette. The modification will bump the 'Vette's cargo capacity by a couple of cubic feet, but perhaps more importantly, it transforms what was already one of the best-looking front-engined sports cars on the market into that rare automotive beast, the shooting brake.

Jonathan Gitlin

Callawho?

It is easy to forget just how far American performance cars have come in the past couple of decades. The latest-generation Corvette is an extremely good sports car, whether you opt for the regular 'Vette, hotter Grand Sport, or Z06. And the recently deceased Dodge Viper ACR remains one of the fastest road-legal ways around a race track, up to and including the Green Hell.

Enlarge (credit: GM)

General Motors has acquired Strobe, a lidar startup that could give the giant automaker a leg up in the race to make self-driving cars a mainstream technology. Kyle Vogt, founder of the self-driving car startup Cruise (which GM acquired last year), announced the acquisition in a Monday blog post.

Lidar—short for light radar—is widely seen as a key sensor technology for self-driving cars. By sending out laser pulses and measuring how long it takes for them to bounce back, lidar builds a detailed 3-D map of a car's surroundings.

The first generation of automotive lidar sits on top of the car, spinning around to collect a panoramic 360-degree view of the vehicle's surroundings. These mechanical systems have worked well enough for building self-driving car prototypes, but their complexity makes it hard to achieve the low cost and durability required for the mass market.

Enlarge / Signage at Sulphur Bay, Rotorua, New Zealand. (credit: David Davies/PA Images via Getty Images)

In Rotorua, New Zealand, the evidence of geothermal activity is everywhere. Often, the grates covering street drains will steam. Every now and again, a homeowner will wake up to find that their backyard has been replaced by a steaming hole in the ground. But all of this was nearly lost in my youth thanks to humanity's attempts to tap into it. Geothermal fields cannot be endlessly plundered, it turns out.

But this is a good-news story. Geothermal activity, in 2017, supplies some 17-18 percent of New Zealand's electricity. But there are many places in the world that have volcanoes, and many of them are more active than New Zealand's. In New Zealand, geothermal fields cover sleeping volcanoes, not the restless, ready-to-throw rocks volcanoes. Which raises the obvious question of why the islands' sleeping volcanoes can be tapped so effectively.

Finding out answers raises a couple more general questions: what does it take to have a good geothermal energy supply, and is tapping it really as simple as sticking a pipe in the ground?