Sam Schmidt is a former Indy car racer who tragically suffered a spinal cord injury after crashing his race car during a practice session 15 years ago. He has since founded Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, but being a team owner isn’t the same as being behind the wheel. Though he sadly may never walk again, the engineers at Arrow have come up with a solution that put the former driver back on the track.
Arrow’s team of engineers modified a Corvette Stingray that is controllable by Schmidt using just small movements of his head. Infrared cameras track Schmidt’s inputs by way of a baseball cap fitted with reflective data points, similar to how motion capture systems record 3D movement for use in computer animation.
By turning his head side-to-side, Schmidt engages the servos fitted in the steering wheel, as you might expect. Tilting his head back accelerates the car while braking is controlled by a mouth-held sensor. All the data is sent to a trunk-mounted computer before the info is sent to the actuators, taking just a hundredth of a second for the whole process.
If there’s a moment where motion tracking goes wrong, or if Schmidt heads off the track for any reason, a redundant GPS-guided system will take over.
Arrow’s modified Corvette allowed Schmidt to hit speeds of around 100 mph at the famous Indianapolis motor speedway, an impressive speed, given how Schmidt had to learn a whole new method of driving.
Schmidt and Arrow hope to have a system sophisticated enough to take things off the track and put Sam back on the open road within the next five years. Arrow’s systems, augmented by the advances in vehicle autonomy we’ve been seeing, should be able to return to Schmidt and similarly afflicted people a freedom long thought to be entirely lost to them.
BYD has launched the third-generation Qin Plus DM-i in China, and the first thing that caught my eye is its price. According to CarNewsChina, the plug-in hybrid sedan starts at 79,900 yuan, which is about $11,980. That’s an incredibly low price for a brand-new car, especially by US standards.
What’s even more impressive is the range. The Qin Plus DM-i can drive up to 137 miles on electricity alone, which should cover most people’s daily commutes without using a drop of gas. Once the battery runs out, the 1.5-liter engine takes over. Thanks to its 17-gallon tank and roughly 91 mpg with a drained battery, the combined range reaches up to 1,423 miles.
Apple won the PC market’s worst quarter, but that’s not the entire story. It won the race by stumbling less than everyone else.
PC makers shipped just 57 million computers worldwide in Q3, which might look good, but it’s a 21% year-over-year plunge (via Counterpoint Research). And despite Apple’s Mac shipments falling by 11%, to 5.6 million, its market share rose from 8.7% to 9.8%. How did that happen?
Update (October 22 23:54 PT): In response to our query, GM clarified that offline recording support is already available on eligible vehicles. Like Tesla's Sentry Mode, it requires owners to connect a USB drive to save incident recordings, which can be viewed on the vehicle's infotainment screen. The upcoming Connected Cameras feature will build on this by giving owners remote access to these recordings via the revamped OnStar app, allowing them to check footage without walking out to their car.
General Motors has announced plans to add a new Connected Cameras feature to its OnStar service starting next year, giving drivers a way to monitor parked vehicles remotely and capture footage of certain incidents.