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Vespa’s first electric scooter will arrive in 2018
Last year, Vespa announced that it was working on an electric scooter and today it has released some specs and an approximate availability date. The Vespa Elettrica is a silent, fully electric scooter with acceleration capabilities in line with those of traditional scooters, according to Vespa. It has a 62-mile range and can be fully charged in just four hours through a normal wall-mounted electrical outlet. The battery will reportedly last around 10 years, but will drop to 80 percent capacity after 1,000 charge cycles or so. The Elettrica comes in a chrome grey color, but buyers can choose between seven color options for the decorative trim.
The Gita is your rolling robot porter
Though robots are increasingly making their way into factories, offices and even airports, they're still not something you'd encounter walking down a city street -- and definitely not in a way that's personally useful to you. We'd all love to have our own personal BB-8 droid to follow us around and help get things done, but so far we've had to settle for robotic vacuums and airport greeters. Piaggio Fast Forward promises to bring us a bit closer to that science-fiction reality with its smart cargo vehicle, the Gita. It's relatively small, attractive and can follow you everywhere, ready to lend a hand when you've taken on too much to carry.
Vespa's creators just unveiled a personal cargo robot
The Vespa brand's owner, the Piaggio Group, doesn't have a reputation for cutting edge tech (it only just started making an electric scooter). However, it's making up for that in style. It's establishing a robot-focused company, Piaggio Fast Forward, and has unveiled that company's first product: meet Gita, a personal cargo robot. The machine can haul up to 40 pounds of supplies either autonomously (if there are maps) or by following a human operator. It's fast enough to keep up with you on a bike (22MPH), and its zero turning radius promises the "human agility" needed to navigate sidewalks. If you don't like the idea of driving a car or pushing a dolly just to get your groceries home, this might be just what you were looking for.
Driverless vans set off on intercontinental trek from Italy to China (video)
You might not have expected the future to look like your granddad's groovy camper van, but take a closer look here and you'll find that this is indeed nothing like your forefather's people carrier. The VisLab team from the University of Parma have taken a fleet of Piaggio Porter Electric vehicles, strapped them with an array of cameras, lasers and other sensors, and topped them off with solar panels to keep the electronics powered. Oh, and lest we forgot to mention: the vans are (mostly) autonomous. VIAC (or VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge) is the grand name given to their big demonstration: an 8,000-mile, 3-month tour that will ultimately find them arriving in Shanghai, China, having set off from Milan this Tuesday. You can follow the day-by-day development on the blog below, though we're still being told that practical driverless road cars are a measure of decades, not years, away.
Piaggio MP3 Hybrid trike hits the streets in early 2010 for around $9k
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/autos/Weirdest_looking_motorcycle_ever'; It's certainly an odd beast, but Piaggio's "MP3 Hybrid" scooter / trike / whatsit has itself a ship window and a vague pricetag. Piaggio hopes to start selling the vehicle in the US by Q1 2010, with a price ranging around $8,000 or $9,000. The plug-in hybrid can run off of a standard charge for 40 miles, and has a gas-powered generator (like the Volt) for extra power, with a promised 141 mpg overall. It's packed in with some regenerative breaking, a high-performance battery-boosted mode to make one pretty hot scooter -- if you can get over those looks and the extra wheel.
Piaggio debuts 141MPG plug-in "MP3 Hybrid" scooter
The NYPD may have ditched a few of their Piaggio scooters in favor of some all-electric Vectrix models a little while back, but it looks like the Italian company may be about to get back in their favor, as it has just unveiled its new MP3 Hybrid plug-in scooter that promises to get an impressive 141MPG. Apparently, the three-wheeled scooter can operate in either a full-electric mode, or one of three hybrid modes, which brings the 125 cc gasoline engine into the picture to let you do zero to sixty about five seconds. As with some other PHEVs, the scooter also makes use of regenerative breaking to help recharge the batteries, which can apparently be fully topped off in as little as three hours when plugged in at home. No word on a price just yet, but Piaggo says it "could" be on the market as soon as next year.
