Sundance Channel

Summer road trip, 1909 style

Perrin Drumm — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:05:50 +0000

More than a decade before women had the right to vote in this country, Alice Ramsey became the first one to drive across it. The car was a 1909 Maxwell Model DA, given to her by Maxwell as a kind of advertising stunt with the idea that women would like the DA when they saw a woman driving it and encourage their husbands to buy one. It’s easy to misconstrue her journey as a statement about women’s rights, but Ramsey, 22 at the time and fresh out of Vassar, wasn’t exactly a suffragette. In fact she only accepted the challenge because it had already been done by a man.

Jayhawk engineering students transforming Volkswagen Bug into eco car

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:54:22 +0000

A 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle is probably not your idea of a dream car. At 25 mpg, it's probably also not your idea of a green car. But a group of mechanical engineering students at the University of Kansas have completed a year-long project aimed at making a Bug much more eco-friendly... with an eventual goal of creating a 500 mpg vehicle.

Artists creates “invisible” car

Matthew Rodriguez — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:10:34 +0000

A 22-year-old art student at the University of Central Lancashire, Skoda Fabia painstakingly painted a car so it blended in with her studio’s parking lot resulting in people “stopping in the street to look and coming up and almost bumping into it.”

Project P.U.M.A: a greener solution for urban mobility?

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:00:49 +0000

With two seats, two wheels, and a maximum range of 25-35 miles (at 25-35 mph), the P.U.M.A. (which stands for Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) won’t work for your next road trip. But this new concept vehicle, a joint project of GM and Segway, may be just the ticket for the driving most of us [...]