The automotive industry has stopped being an exclusively male industry for a long time, even if it comes to cars, drivers or characters that appear in commercials. That doesn’t mean that car manufacturers will ever stop using the classical ways to promote their cars by associating cars with females, once they’ll generate increased sales on any conditions.
The innovation in promoting cars for the past years is the orientation to female audience and creative commercials directly targeted to women.
Here are some video commercials from 2010 and 2011 in which, beside watching cars on the road, you can admire gorgeous women, such as Dita Von Teese, Kylie Minogue or Amber from Sports Illustrated. Enjoy!
Chevrolet Camaro
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btrh69gaLTo[/youtube]
Mercedes-Benz have created a digital installation in order to showcase the new “pre-safe” feature. This is an automatic system that detects road danger and, in case it identifies a possible incoming incident, it has the power to control the car and avoid the accident, resulting in emergency stops, for example.
Consequently, an agency in Germany has created for Mercedes Transparent Walls to make the drivers understand the principales of this feature. They placed them in busy suburban streets, presenting how the “pre-safe” system works: live video projection of one side of a wall appears onto the other side of the wall, creating the impression of transparency. By those means, the drivers could see what was coming from behind the wall, giving them the possibility to immediately react to any possible danger.
Crowdsources EV Charging Infrastructure by PlugShare App
A new iPhone application for EV owners was released those days: they can find out where they can plug in, of course, by a stranger’s kindness.
For the moment, only a small and scattered charging infrastructure is available, but the founders of Palo Alto startup Xatori dream about something bigger. The PlugShare app is free of charge, creates profiles (with phone numbers, addresses and open “comments” field) and provides a map of the locations where a person could offer you plugging-in possibility, with the outlet’s characteristics available – a 120-volt or a 240.
Beside that, the application allows you to browse a list of public charging stations; it can search for stations and even call or send a text message to the networked members that could help you. For specific addresses, you have to create an account.
In other words, it is a community-oriented technology that can really help the newcomers to the EV technology to easier adapt to changing the vehicle’s type.
The PlugShare application still needs a lot of improvement in functions, infrastructure, time slots, but is definitely a great idea for the new generation of vehicles.
[Source: Wired]
Post tags: Tags: EV charging infrastructure, plug-share app
Women and Cops without Pants
Usually, women are afraid of cops…a lot, especially when driving. They lose countenance, they get intimidated and tensioned and make stupid mistakes. And in case they’re pulled over by a cop, things get much worse.
It’s very likely this attitude to come from women’s attraction and interest to men in uniform in general; but what happens when those cops are less dressed-up? Does abashment increase or decrease? What is your opinion?
Take your time of thinking while watching this video!
In order to show their commitment to arts and culture in the last 40 years, BMW has created a special book, with wheels, controlled by a remote control.
The creator of this innovative book is the Grammy-Award winning designer, Stefan Sagmeister, also the designer of well-known album covers for the Rolling Stones, the Talking Heads and Lou Reed.
CULTURE is a book describing BMW Group’s international cultural partnerships for the last years. The limited edition of 1488 hand-signed copies, which are not available for sale, were first presented to the public by BMW board member Frank-Peter Arndt at a press conference in Berlin on March 9, 2011.
Stefan Sagmeister explained:
“In a publication about all the cultural activities of the BMW Group it made sense to include four hidden wheels and a remote control that allows readers to drive the book around the room. Culture really moves.”
Beside the creative concept, the book itself is an artistic product by that fact that its covers, arranged in the proper numerical order, generate an abstract representation of the 1972’s legendary BMW “four cylinder” building from a bird’s eye view.
The book is divided into four parts, covering all the BMW Group’s main cultural activities – contemporary art, classical music and jazz, architecture and design and, finally, culture within the company. In addition, it contains more than 50 partly full-page color reproductions.
What do you think about BMW’s initiative? Is creativity overrated or is it quite limited into automotive industry?
Cars, adventures and hilarious situations – this is how the Cars 2 movie looks like, judging by the movie trailers, released by Disney a few days ago. Cars 2 is a Pixar CGI animated film, and will run in cinemas from June.
I chose not to spoil the surprise of the movie and let the trailers speak for himself. Enjoy!
Women are active, even on their celebrating day: yesterday, on 8 March, women from “Woman on Wheels” community have chosen Citroen DS3 the sport car of year 2010!
Which do you believe that are the cars that women prefer from those presented at the Geneva auto show? For easy decision making, HERE you can find a helping summary of the cars launched at this year Geneva show.
Translogic has developed the submersible Seabreacher, a watercraft that runs both on and under the water, and sometimes even soars over it.
The Seabreacher is the creation of Rob Innes and Dan Piazza, co-founders of Inerspace Productions, and is powered by a 260-horsepower 1500-cc Rotax four-stroke engine. This makes the Seabreacher to reach the speed of 50 miles per hour over the water, and of 25 mph under it.
We warn you even from the start that this may seem an irresistible and enjoyable experience to you!
[Source: Translogic]
Post tags: Tags: seabreacher
Proposed Power Window Safety Law Was Dropped
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has decided to drop the proposed power window safety law. According to consumers, NHTSA has decided to withdraw the rule imposing the auto-reverse option to be used by all the auto manufacturers. This option was created to prevent the injuries on hand or neck. The motivation of the new attitude towards this measure comes from the fact that the number of injuries or deaths that could be avoided by using this technology isn’t as significant as it should be to can adopt such a compulsory measure.
The auto-reverse option for windows was intended to prevent incidents caused by children who accidentally would step on or press the button. The problem was already been taken into account by many of the manufacturers for the new cars, having created a system that needs to be pulled up to activate the window and limiting the risks.
[Source: Consumer Reports]
Post tags: Tags: automotive law, power window safety
I don’t know who had this crazy idea of building a penis car (by the way, a pink penis car), but let’s recognize it: he has found a surprising and a strange way of proving that cars and penises can genuinely blend in harmony into a man’s life – a funny penis car.
After this video I think I am not the only woman to believe that, actually, there was nothing to be proven, and that he should have better left this car-penis ambiguity unclear to many of us. However, it’s definitely funny and hilarious, though quite silly, with its blond-haired “Prince Charming” driver.
A fun occupation has been created for car fans: a miniature MINI Cooper that can be controlled by an Android-powered BeeWi, using the Bluetooth connection. The toy has an intuitive motion control from the orientation sensor or the touch-screen interface of a smartphone; it has a fast motor and full directional steering.
Here it is the demo movie:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbEkzI57uc&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
If you want such an invention for yourself, all you need is 33 AA batteries, an Android 2.1 and a smartphone or a Nokia Symbian S60 (3rd or 5th edition).
You know what’s fun? A man trying to pull his car out of the parking lot for over 5 minutes and not succeeding, and a woman doing this in less than two minutes. A little embarrassing, I say, for men, of course!
At TED 2011 Google has offered an aggressive test of what its self-driven car can do, and the conference’s attendees were allowed to be passengers on this closed course.
To work, the car must be programmed in advanced by Google on a special route. If used on regular streets, a destination would be programmed in as with a GPS, so that the car uses navigation to self-driving to the destination.
In the video below you can enjoy the demo test, filmed from the outside
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ulKUJtZ3o[/youtube]
and from the inside
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_eVE6KQ4Jg[/youtube]
What is your opinion: would you feel safer into such a car and enjoy peacefully your drive, knowing that you don’t really drive or have fully control on it?
Whoever has said that women can not handle parking in tight spaces is wrong. Watch the video below and you’ll change your opinion: that’s what we call the clear sign of feminine perseverance and patience when it comes to parking their car.
A man would have probably used his horn until the owners of the two cars that had blocked his would have appeared. That woman has chosen a more elegant way to solve the problem, even though more women were involved, not just the driver.
Do you have any examples of this type? Share it with us!
We all know the eternal dispute between men and women: women – who know better about everything, and men – with the “everyone must always do what I say” attitude, maybe because of their extreme masculinity. Cars and driving issues aren’t excluded from this dispute.
The funny car video below could be another example of women’s stubbornness of following their line of thought, no matter what circumstances, no matter the risks. It’s a female thing, I guess!
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