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German man drives Mercedes G-Wagen on 557k-mile, 26-year road trip [w/video]

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Mercedes G-Class

It’s a common dream to just drop everything, load up the car and make a life on the open road traveling from place to place. The vast of majority of us just fantasize about it, but it’s a reality for the German couple Gunther and Christine Holtorf. They are just finishing what might be the world’s longest road trip covering around 560,000 miles in a Mercedes-Benz 300GD named Otto (pictured above right) over the past 26 years.

Their goal was to visit as many countries as possible, and they ended up reached 215, including places like base camp at Mount Everest; they definitely achieved their dream. The same distance would have gotten them from the Earth to the moon and back, plus a few thousand extra miles to just cruise around.

Holtorf claims that Otto remained mostly stock for the odyssey. "The entire drivetrain with the engine, transmission and axles is still original," he said. However, some upgraded suspension parts were installed to handle the extra load from all the supplies the couple needed to carry.

Otto isn’t retiring quite yet, but the hard part is over. The 300GD is going on display briefly at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and then taking a tour of the company’s dealers in Europe beginning in February 2015.

Coinciding with the latest stop in Otto’s voyage, the G-Class is celebrating its 35th anniversary. To commemorate it in Europe, Mercedes is launching the Edition 35 version (pictured above left) of the long-living truck. It gets obsidian black metallic parts for the bumpers, wheels arches, side mirrors and roof and a similar motif for the interior, as well. "I promise that there will still be a G-Class in the future," said Daimler chairman Dr. Dieter Zetsche in the company’s announcement.

There’s a full chronicle of the trip with many videos, but it’s in German. The BBC also has an excellent long-form piece about the couple in English. Scroll down to watch a brief video about the journey that’s also auf Deutsch and read Mercedes’ press release.

Continue reading German man drives Mercedes G-Wagen on 557k-mile, 26-year road trip [w/video]

German man drives Mercedes G-Wagen on 557k-mile, 26-year road trip [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Brilliant Ten: Nicole Abaid Studies Bats To Make Drones Smarter

Nicole Abaid
Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

As the sun set over the mountains near Jinan, China, Nicole Abaid sat by the narrow mouth of a cave and watched a colony of bats emerge. Unlike the radar that humans use, the bats’ echolocation didn’t seem to jam as the animals converged into a thin stream. Abaid, a mechanical engineer and mathematician at Virginia Tech, was there to discover why—an insight that could lead to more intelligent robots. 

After getting her start by studying how schooling fish come to consensus, Abaid has broken new ground with bat colonies. Bats can adjust their signals so they don’t overlap with their neighbors’ frequencies. Abaid suspected they may be able to share information too, so she modeled how they might listen in on each other to better avoid obstacles. She went to China to line the bat cave with infrared cameras and an ultra-sonic mic that could gather data to verify her model. “The big idea is to tell if and how they use each others’ signals,” she says. At the same time, she’s designing bat-inspired ultrasonic sensors to improve communications among robots. 

Ultimately, Abaid hopes to imitate how animals elegantly overcome challenges like radar jamming—research that could some day help us manipulate man-made swarms, such as underwater vehicles that rely on sonar. “Learning about how this biological system works could help us design how we control engineered systems,” she says.

This article originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Click here to read about the other Brilliant Ten honorees of 2014. 

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