I love riding my bike, but I don’t like grocery shopping. Maybe if the two activities are combined I could have an alright time buying food. Luckily some random people have tried this.
Here’s a scenario: Imagine riding up to the grocery with a shopping cart bike. You park your bike at a rack and unlatch the cart to wheel into the store. Without using any bags, you can pay, put the groceries back in your cart, hitch up to your bike and ride off!
Via GroovyGreen.
Ironically, or appropriately, climate change and increasing gas prices have increased consumer interest in saving the environment. The Toronto Star is reporting that hybrid sales in Canada have increased by 90%. It’s good to see Canadians realize that their driving habits are connected to climate change.
In its pursuit of hybrids, Beatty said Toyota found it is more than a transitional technology to other auto power alternatives.
“It took a while for us to figure it out, but the hybrid really is a platform you can build other technologies on,” he said.
Several automakers are working on technologies such as electric plug-in cars that improve fuel efficiency or other projects that give consumers alternatives to meet their needs.
GM and Chrysler already offer deactivation technology that seamlessly shuts down in highway driving.
“The bottom line is there needs to be a multiplicity of technologies for consumers to choose from depending on their needs and driving habits,” said Stew Low, director of communications for GM of Canada.
The United States’ Department of Energy has concluded that hybrids save a LOT of gas:
The lab crunched all the statistics — number of hybrids on the road, new and old EPA mileage ratings, user-reported mileage figures, and the same mileage numbers for vehicles that most closely matched hybrids in terms of size, weight, and performance — and produced the following figure: To date, hybrids have saved 230 million gallons, or 5.5 million barrels, of fuel.
In Japan, Toyota has received approval to test their plugin hybrid:
While the car is still in testing phase, with eight plug-in OEM vehicles being manufactured and released for testing in Japan, hopes are high that Toyota will soon release this car to the general public.
Three fishing men from Northern Wales have invented a device that removes upwards of 95% of greenhouse gas emissions from an automobile. It’s called the Greenbox and it replaces the muffler of the car and is designed to be removable so new filters can be swapped in. The reason that the Greenbox needs to be swapped is because the gasses that it traps can be used to encourage algae growth – to make biofuel.
Can this invention get any better?
We’ve managed to develop a way to successfully capture a majority of the emissions from the dirtiest motor we could find,” Palmer, who has consulted for organizations including the World Health Organisation and GlaxoSmithKline, told Reuters
We’ve looked at what cyclists can do to keep their lungs clean before and now there’s some futuristic looking bike helmets that can clean the air.
Smog is a concern for cyclists the world over, and indeed that maybe why they bike, I know it’s one of a zillion reasons that I bike. Recently, smog has started to eat away at my lungs or something according to my doctor so I went and bought a breathing mask. After buying my breathing mask I found out about the stormtrooper helmet & mask, which I’d love to wear. Then there’s this breathing apparatus that filters out 98.5% of pollutants in the air!
Both those helmets look like they’re from the future! I like how people are getting creative when combining a filter and a helmet. Seriously, I want that stromtrooper helmet.