Braking
California-based engineer Faizal Ali was riding his motorcycle on a San Diego freeway one day and downshifted in order to slow for an exit. Because he didn’t actually apply the brakes, however, his brake light didn’t come on. As a result, the following car almost ran into him. That experience prompted him to partner with Jesse Szynal and designer Fausin Mdisa to create Vololights – it’s a rear lighting system that activates no matter what method the rider is using to decelerate. Read More
Starting this summer (Northern Hemisphere), the Japanese-market version of the Honda Fit/Jazz will be offered with the automaker’s new City-Brake Active System. It’s designed to minimize the chances of collisions at low speeds. Read More
Rollersafe rollerskis incorporate wireless disc brakes
A Norwegian designer has come up with a way of making asphalt-based exercise a little safer. His RollerSafe street skis use a wireless disc-braking system that makes it easier to control speed and come to a safe stop. Read More
The European Commission plans to make Autonomous Emergency Braking systems (AEBs) a mandatory requirement in all new vehicles on the Continent by 2014. These systems typically use one or a combination of radar, lidar or video-recognition technologies to measure the distances between vehicles, warn drivers if they get too close, and to then engage the brakes if the driver fails to take any action. Read More
Electric commuter trains, while quiet and fast, have one glaring inefficiency – when they brake at a station, the energy of the moving train is lost, even when the motors are electrically reversed. Capturing the electrical energy generated during braking is simple, but efficiently redistributing it through the power grid is not. The result, in too many systems, is that the braking energy is simply wasted. Now an energy storage project in Philadelphia aims to capture and efficiently utilize that braking energy, providing a clear view into the potential of the forthcoming smart grid. Read More
Smart braking system joins list of firsts for Mazda CX-5
The CX-5 Crossover SUV marks a few firsts for Mazda. It will be the company's first production vehicle sporting the new KODO - Soul of Motion design language seen originally in the Shinari concept vehicle, the first vehicle featuring Mazda's efficiency-boosting Skyactiv technology, and the first to feature Smart City Brake Support (SCBS) - a system designed to avoid or reduce the damage from low speed collisions. Read More
Currently, brakes made from composite materials tend to be expensive, and as such mainly just find their way onto high-performance cars and motorcycles. That could be about to change, however. Researchers from Michigan-based materials company REL and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are developing aluminum composite brake rotors for everyday cars. Not only should they be much easier to produce than existing composite rotors, but they should also be 60 percent lighter than their iron counterparts, and last three times as long. Read More
Magura releases hydraulic rim brakes for road bikes
When most people think of hydraulic brakes on bicycles, they probably picture modern mountain bikes with disc brakes. As early as 1987, however, German bicycle component manufacturer Magura was making hydraulic rim brakes for mountain bikes. These featured the arms and rubber pads that we currently associate with V-brakes and cantilevers, but they were hydraulically activated. Now, 25 years later, Magura has released an aerodynamic hydraulic rim brake system for lightweight time trial and triathlon bikes. Read More
About a year and a half ago, the International Cycling Union – the organization that sets the rules for bicycle racing – announced that it would allow the use of disc brakes on cyclo-cross bikes. This was good news for off-road racers, who were willing to accept the slight weight penalty of disc systems in exchange for the performance advantages that they offer over traditional rim brakes. As a result, we’re now seeing various disc-equipped competition-level cyclo-cross bikes entering the marketplace. However, what does this mean for all the perfectly-good bikes out there that were made before the announcement? Well, it turns out that they can be converted to hydraulic discs, thanks to something known as the Parabox system. Read More
While Toyota took out the Tokachi 24-Hour Race in 2007 with a Supra HV-R hybrid race car featuring a quick-charging supercapacitor-based regenerative braking system, battery storage has so far been the norm for these systems in production vehicles. Now Mazda is charging things up with its new "i-ELOOP" system intended for internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. The i-ELOOP is billed as the world's first passenger vehicle regenerative braking system that uses a capacitor in place of rechargeable batteries to temporarily store energy captured from braking. Read More
