News

New technology from Google will allow restaurants, shopping malls and garages to offer free taxi rides to their customers. A patent awarded to the internet giant reveals how the company plans to use advertising revenue to fund free local travel - possibly using its own fleet of self-driving taxis . How will the free Google taxi work? In the...

An ambitious plan by Boris Johnson to spend £100m on transforming a handful of outer-London boroughs into ‘mini Hollands’ could result in an influx of Dutch-style bikes. [quote type="cycle_insurance"] Most of the budget will be spent on major improvements to infrastructure including the scrapping of gyratories and the re-connection of...

A French boat building company has unveiled the Foldavan - a lightweight bicycle caravan that collapses for easy storage and towing. Wooden Widget already produces a range of collapsible boats and sailing dinghies that can be towed behind a bicycle and the Foldavan shares many of the same design principles. Built from wood, carbon fibre and...

The demise of the paper tax disc later this year spells the end of second-hand cars being sold with tax remaining – new owners will always have to pay for vehicle excise duty (VED) immediately instead of being able to take on the vehicle’s existing unexpired tax. According to the ‘Draft Clauses and Explanatory Notes’ for the proposed...

As cars become progressively faster and larger, help for pedestrians might be at hand in the form of Prosthesis - a 5-metre tall, battery-powered walking machine from Canada. A team of engineers in Vancouver is building Prosthesis, a gargantuan human-controlled robot designed to walk and run. As car drivers are now surrounded by air bags,...

An increasing number of of bike makers now work with bamboo, but for cyclists not quite ready to trade in their steel, aluminium or carbon frames, American woodworkers, Ruphus, offer a first step towards the light, strong and durable natural material in the form of ‘Slim’ - a rear mudguard made from bamboo that doubles as a carrier for a...

A new design of tilting trike aims to alter the way cyclists think of the cargo bike. [quote type="cycle_insurance"] Butchers & Bicycles is the start-up business, based in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen (hence the name), behind the MK1 - a cargo bike designed to retain the performance and fun of a conventional bike. The MK1 is...

America is the home of the gas guzzling car, so in the face of record-breaking petrol prices it is perhaps no surprise that it is giving birth to the Elio – a super-efficient, three-wheeled car that squeezes 100 miles from a gallon of petrol and costs the equivalent of only £4,500. The Elio uses a 900cc, 3-cylinder, fuel-injected and...

If you have ever longed for the ability to turn all traffic lights in your path green, a new gizmo from Audi comes close to making the dream a reality. Traffic Light Assist uses information beamed to the car by Wi-fi to count down the number of seconds before the next red light will change to green. The system corrects itself when the car...

Smartphones are a ready-made satnav for your bicycle, but they are fragile and unlikely to survive even a minor spill. Shwinn believes the answer is the CycleNav – a handlebar-mounted Bluetooth-enabled headlight that displays navigation instructions data from your phone, but allows the handset to remain safely in your pocket or bag. [quote...