Keeping Alive The Future Of Cars, 1980s Style

Here at Hackaday we’re a varied bunch of writers, some of whom have careers away from this organ, and others whose work also appears on the pages of other publications in different fields. On…

DIY Quad-Motor Go-Kart Is A Thrilling Ride

[Peter Holderith] set out some time ago to build an electric go-kart. That by itself is not terribly unusual, but where his project diverts from the usual is in the fact that each of the four wheel…

Kid’s Ride Gets Boosted Battery, ESP32 Control

That irresistible urge to rescue an interesting piece of hardware from the trash is something that pretty much every Hackaday reader will have felt at one time or another. Sometimes it’s some…

A Drone Motor Does E-Bikes

On paper, the motors from both an electric bicycle and a drone can both take about 500 watts or so of power. Of course, their different applications make them anything but equivalent, as the bike m…

TOMOS Moped Becomes Electric Beast

The TOMOS 50cc moped, a small motorcycle produced in Yugoslavia and the Netherlands, has for decades been a common sight on European roads and provided the first taste of transport independence for…

Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those d…

Trick Your (1970) Pickup Truck

[Dave] wanted an old pickup, and he found a GMC Sierra Grande truck vintage 1970. While it had an unusual amount of options, there weren’t that many high-tech options over 50 years ago. The f…

Retrotechtacular: Build Your Own Dune Buggy, 1970s Style

The custom car phenomenon is as old as the second-hand car, yet somehow the decades which stick in the mind as their heyday are the 1960s and 1970s. If you didn’t have a dune buggy or a van w…

Concrete Clears Its Own Snow

Humans are not creatures well suited to cold environments. Without a large amount of effort to provide clothing, homes, and food to areas with substantial winters, very few of us would survive. The…

Magnetic Power Cable Makes Mobility Scooter Much Better

Sometimes, you have to wonder what major manufacturers of assistive tech are thinking when they design their products. [Niklas Frost]’s father has MS and uses an electric mobility scooter to …

Arduino Gear Shift Indicator Finds ‘Em So You Won’t Grind ‘Em

Now, it’s been a shamefully long time since we’ve driven a car with a manual transmission, but as we recall it was pretty straightforward. It certainly didn’t require a lot of hel…

Running Power And Data Over Just Two Wires

When you’re hooking up equipment across a vehicle, you’re often stuck sending power and data to and from things like sensors or actuators. The more wires you have to run, the more hassl…

Shôtarô Kaneda’s Motorcycle, For Real

For fans of the iconic anime Akira, there’s only one way to traverse the mean streets of post-apocalyptic neo-Tokyo, and that’s the futuristic mount of motorcycle gang leader Shôtarô Ka…

The Insurance Buys The Wheelchair, But Not The App To Run It

The writer Cory Doctrow coined the term enshittification to describe the way that services decline in quality as their users become the product. He was talking about online services when he came up…

Older Nissan Leafs Lose Their App, Are They The First Of Many?

There was a time when all you needed to use your car was a key. On older vehicles it was a traditional metal key, on more recent ones it had some kind of RFID chip for the immobilizer. As vehicles …

How Powerful Should An Electric Bike Be? The UK Is Asking

As electric drives sweep their way to dominance in the automotive world, there’s another transport sector in which their is also continuing apace. Electric-assisted bicycles preserve the feel…

Retrotechtacular: The Free Piston Engine

We all know how a conventional internal combustion engine works, with a piston and a crankshaft. But that’s by no means the only way to make an engine, and one of the slightly more unusual al…

Car Driving Simulators For Students, Or: When Simulators Make Sense

There are many benefits to learning to fly an airplane, drive a racing car, or operate some complex piece of machinery. Ideally, you’d do so in a perfectly safe environment, even when the ins…

3D Print Train Wheels For Garden Railway

There’s something magical about a train, whether you call it a railway or a railroad, plenty of us have hankered after our own little piece of line on which to shunt wagons or chuff around ou…

AI-Powered Bumper Sticker Provides Context-Sensitive Urban Camouflage

While we absolutely support the right of everyone to express their opinions, it seems to us that it’s rarely wise to turn your vehicle into a mobile billboard for your positions. Aside from p…