dottocomu

Kawasaki Heavy's battery-powered tram

Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) announced late last week that they're developing a tram (or a Light Rail Vehicle, in their terms) powered by nickel-metal hydride batteries, and that they've already succeeded in getting a test unit to run for 10km on a single charge.

The SWIMO, to get its misleadingly amphibious-sounding monicker out of the way, is apparently named for the fact that it is a MOver that WIns the ability to Smoothly run in areas with no electrical power and lets you get on and off equally Smoothly. (Apologies for the reverse order, but it would've gotten even more complex had we tried to reproduce the Japanese syntax). Someone fire the KHI acronym department already.

The 10km test appears to have been run with a 1950s-desgined two-carriage train provided by minuscule Kyushu-based Chikaho Electric Railroad, so once the SWIMO prototype (which presumably will be a lot lighter) appears in 2007 KHI expects the range to go up quite a bit. Japan could certainly use a few less cars, and our completely arbitrary opinion is that trams are cooler than buses. Obviously, though, what we really want is the space-age version rather than the dowdy artist's impression shown here.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

Japan's first WiFi trains get underway

This is one of those Holy Grail stories we've been watching develop for what seems like years: the Japanese railway industry's achingly slow progress toward getting WiFI onto its trains. Finally, though, the consortium developing wireless access for the Tsukuba Express (fittingly, the line linking one of Japan's most noted concentrations of corporate R&D with its largest consumer-electronics paradise) have announced that from August 24 their service goes into commercial operation. It will be available on around 60% of Tsukuba Express trains, to users of NTT DoCoMo's Mzone and Mopera U hotspot services. The infrastructure is 802.11b only for the moment, and speeds average out at around 1.4Mbps, though project partners Metropolitan Intercity Railway, Intel and NTT-BP seem enthusiastic about expanding the range of services on offer.

[Via Ascii24 (Japanese)]

Cellphone fan taxi charging

When we first saw the turbine-like device in the photo to the right we figured we had stumbled across plans to create a fleet of jet-powered taxis and that a pair of retractable wings had to be hidden somewhere about. Unfortunately, on reading the accompanying article it turns out that this is the main part of a wind-powered cellphone charging attachment for taxis that we wrote about on Engadget a while back. Since the company rolling these out, Ecolo 21, boasts a fleet of precisely 20 taxis and will be fitting the wind charger to exactly one for now the environmental impact is set to be, er, limited, but they do plan to roll them out across the fleet in due course.

We'll keep our eyes out for any taxi companies that appear to be going the jet-powered route, of course.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Hokkaido installs musical roads

Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms through your tires. Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car. The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide; unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the pitch of the note produced. They're planning to use different melodies for different areas, picking songs that have some association to the locale. We'd love to see them burn different tunes into different lanes at nasty junctions so you could instantly tell if you were heading the right way--it would make picking the point at which you go for escape velocity and exit the Shuto Expressway on a busy day a good deal less stressful.

[Via Slashdot J (Japanese)]

BMW's dog seatbelts

We're not dog or car owners at present, but we've Googled enough to know that pet seatbelts do exist and that veterinarians recommend them. However, BMW Japan's launch of a Y21,000 dog safety belt has to count as rare enough to merit attention (not to say ridicule). Comes in three sizes, to suit pooches of 7-40 kilos. Note to self: Do not have head-on collision with 40-kilo dog in back of car, seatbelts or no.

Our earlier Google suggests these may be Japan-only at the moment, but not being pet restraint experts it's hard to say.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]