Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Raser Technologies develops 100MPG Hummer H3 just to spite Al Gore



That's right: last week at SAE World Congress, Raser Technologies unveiled a prototype Hummer H3 that gets 100 miles to the gallon. Insane, right? We agree. Raser partnered up with FEV to turn the famously non-environmentally sound gas guzzler around. The prototype boasts an E-REV power train engine, and three lithium ion battery packs under the rear of the vehicle. The batteries provide enough juice for about 40 miles, when the range extender starts up, providing an additional 400 miles -- averaging about 100 MPG -- before it needs to be plugged in again. The company is looking to start up low volume production by 2011, though there is no word on possible pricing at this time. Hey -- who says electric cars have to be small, tasteful affairs? Fierce! One more shot after the break.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

OWC ships 4-bay Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID box



You won't find an Ethernet port here, but you will find everlasting peace, love and a grand total of four direct connection options alongside four hot swappable bays for up to 8TB of local storage. OWC's latest is the quad-interface Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID box, which sports FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 sockets 'round back. Users are graced with a number of selectable RAID settings -- 0, 1, 5, 10 or Span (NRAID) -- and the front-panel LEDs keep you informed at a glance. The box is shipping right now in a variety of configurations ranging from $679.99 (500GB x 4) to $1,149.99 (1TB x 4), and despite the unmistakable cheesegrater design, these actually won't zero out your data if plugged into a PC.