June 23, 2008 Lijen's Cars of the Week – Week 1

07:14pm by Lijen (Site)

First of all, I’d like to extend a gracious THANK YOU to everyone out there that has installed the facebook app and helped us promote it. We had a killer first week, and our community is growing very quickly thanks to all of you! What’s even more exciting is all of the creative and inspiring cars that we’ve seen after only a few days! That being said, here are my personal favorites.

Also, for those of you who have not added the app on facebook yet, hurry up and ADD IT!

http://apps.facebook.com/vdreamracing/

I dare you to challenge me. Go ahead and try!

June 18, 2008 vDream Facebook App Soft Launch!

03:24am by Cheechoo (Site)

vDream has soft launched its Facebook App! Very exciting times. It’s still a bit buggy, especially with IE7 and Safari, but it should work just fine on Firefox. We decided to soft launch because we actually accidentally did it over the weekend and got over 100 users. How the users found it is beyond me, because we did no advertising or anything. It was on like page 3 of car-related apps. So somebody must have been browsing through pages and pages of indexed facebook apps and stumbled upon it, and added 100 friends. Crazy stuff.

But we are officially in soft-launch mode, trying to fix bugs, and trying to challenge as many people as possible, in order to keep the site moving. Go out there and install the app! Challenge some random folk!

Type “vdream” in the Apps search field on facebook. GO GO GO!

May 29, 2008 Tesla Sighting!

04:05pm by Cheechoo (Cars)

Lijen and I went to the Daly City Outback Steakhouse looking to get ourselves some Angioplasty Fries (better known as Aussie Cheese Fries, or the “Worst Food in America” According to Men’s Health), because we felt that blood is flowing too freely through our arteries and we should give heart disease a fighting chance. But before we could embrace gluttony and minor heart attacks, we ran into a beautiful orange Tesla Roadster!

Literally, there are only 40-some on the roads in the whole of America. However, it was a dealer’s car (The “DLR” on the license plate), so it actually wasn’t an owner’s. It was probably some show car that some tesla employees decided to take for a spin. Luckily they shared our views on Heart Disease and decided to eat at the same establishment as us!

The current news on the Tesla is Drivetrain 1.5. They had problems with their 2-speed automatic transmission, but recently developed a single-speed transmission that both eliminates the old problem, AND ADDS TORQUE. Two great things, in my opinion. Hopefully I’ll see more and more of these beauties on the road this year.

May 14, 2008 The Big Apple

08:45pm by Lijen (Team)

A major perk about not having an office is being able to work from just about anywhere that has free wifi. Imagine having office spaces in different places all over the country! Every morning commute would be an adventure. Every workday would be filled with new faces. Every lunch break with new dining options (trust me, after eating Subway for 3 years straight… LUNCH OPTIONS DO MATTER). Now I know that a lot of you get the opportunity to travel all over the world for your work, and as an engineer I think I speak for many of my fellow engineers when I say that I have always been immensely jealous of my friends with those kind of jobs. Well, this week I got a small taste. My morning commute today was a quick hop on the 123 line from 135th Ave. in Harlem and a brisk walk through the NYU campus. I found a bustling college-town cafe called Think that was recommended to me by a friend, and am about to head over to Times Square to get some good eats. mmm, I wonder whats for lunch.

May 05, 2008 Nissan Leads Japanese Sportscar Scene

12:35am by Cheechoo (Cars)

According to Road & Track magazine, the next iteration of the Z will be almost 7 inches shorter than the original, 200 lbs lighter (YES!) and will have 350bhp/280lb-ft. These stats on paper are pretty mind-boggling if you consider the base price of ~$35,000.

Unfortunately it seems the price has to increase a few grand from the original. But at a sub-$40k range, this should give a lot of models on the market a run for their money. Road & Track named the Porsche Cayman S as a car that could be slapped by this new Z. Its main competitor, the Honda S2000 will be left in the dust with the quickness, even the new CR version that’s coming out (they didn’t change anything, really).

Along with the upcoming GTR (Z06/GT3 beater), Nissan is really showing their muscle in terms of their sports car models. I’m eager to see Honda and Toyota try and best the Nissan hype with their NSX and LF-A, respectively.

April 29, 2008 Cars Illustrations in vDream

05:47pm by Lijen (Site)

The neatest feature, in my opinion by far, that vDream boasts is it’s car rendering engine. Now I know that when many of you car buffs out there hear the word “engine” you immediately think to yourselves, “how many liters is it?” or “how many cylinders does it have?”. Well, this is a different kind of engine.

The car rendering engine is the technology behind all of the 100% customized car illustrations in vDream. As you will see once the facebook app launches, each vDream user owns their own virtual car onto which they can install a variety of after market parts. Aside from affecting a car’s performance, many of these after market parts will affect the visual appearance of a car. User’s will have hundreds of ways to express themselves by stylizing their cars, including installing full body kits, upgrading their wheels, lowering their cars with after market springs, and hanging fuzzy dice on their rear view mirrors. You can even pimp your ride with a Boba Fett bobble head dashboard accessory!

Here are a couple babies that the car rendering engine has popped out as examples of what it is capable of and as a sneak peak of what vDream will have to offer.

April 08, 2008 Facebook Here We Come

12:03am by Lijen (Site)

I know I know, it’s been a long long time since I’ve posted any updates about the site. Bad Lijen. Getting a little anxious are we? Heres a little update on what Jas & I have been spending the last 3 laborious months of our lives doing; and no, its not just sitting on our bums playing Rock Band, watching South Park, and eating cheese (although we tend to do a bit of that too…).

As many of you probably already know, during the past 3 months we’ve diverted all our attention toward developing our new … drum roll please ... vDream facebook application! You should expect to see a working version at the end of April. We’re really excited to roll this out! At this point I’m guessing that most of you have heard of vDream and know that it is this mysterious car website that we’ve been working on for quite a while now, but don’t really know any details (I guess you could call it “What is the Matrix?” marketing). The facebook application will be a lite version of the main site and should give you a solid idea of the vDream vision and the kind of experience we want to bring to car enthusiasts on the web.

Unlike most facebook apps that use generic facebook styles, our app is going to have a CSCI (crazy sexy custom interface). We think that our CSCI, great car illustrations, and comprehensive real-world part database will differentiate us from the 2 billion other car applications on facebook. The app is also entirely build on RESTful web services thanks to Ruby on Rails (sorry if I got a little too nerdy there. I can’t help myself sometimes…). What this means to the layman is that if it is successful, we’ll be able to port it over to other 3rd party application platforms such as MySpace and Bebo apps with relative ease.

I’ve attached a screen shot of the CSCI that you can expect to see more of at the end of the month. What’d I tell ya? Pretty sexy ey?

March 27, 2008 Ford sells Jaguar and Land Rover to TATA

12:44am by Cheechoo (Cars)

The big news in the Automotive industry today is that Ford Motor Co. has finally sold its marque UK brands Jaguar and Land Rover. It was sold to India’s up-and-comer Tata, who recently unveiled their $2500 Nano micro-passenger car.

In my opinion, this can only mean good things for all parties involved:

First, Ford gets rid of the financial leech of the two UK brands. They haven’t been selling cars recently, most notably because of cost-cutting techniques like turning the entry-level X-type “luxury sports sedan” into a glorified Ford Contour. I guess consumers didn’t want to pay top dollar for an expensive version of a run-of-the-mill sedan. Now that Aston Martin, Jaguar, and Land Rover are all gone, Ford can concentrate on its core competencies, and maybe actually start selling more cars. They should have brought the Focus RS to the states a lonnnnnng time ago. Just start importing more of Ford Europe’s designs and it’s a done deal. Plus with all that new money in the bank they can start some real-deal R&D to make some pretty cool stuff.

Second, the marque brands can finally have some breathing room for both their models and their image. With Ford not breathing down their necks to re-use their own platforms (see: Ford Contour = Jaguar X-Type), the brands can finally rebuild their empire their own way. And I’ve heard from a few people in the market for an upper-echelon flagship sports car not wanting an Aston because it’s just “an expensive Ford”. Now they can get rid of that stigma and rebuild their prestige. Jag and Aston have some of the most storied histories in all of the Automotive World, and they can finally start adding to it again.

Third, Tata’s new ownership of these brands adds another rung on the ladder to bring India into the First World in terms of industry and economy. They seem to be off on the right foot in letting the UK factories and management stay.

All in all, it’s a great plus for the Automotive Industry as a whole. Each brand involved gets something out of this little debacle, and we as consumers might see things like: way cooler UK luxury sports cars, better Fords, and maybe Tata will even try to import the Nano over here! (lol)

Full article here.

March 24, 2008 The US's Conservative Fears of Technology and Change

03:17pm by Cheechoo (Cars)

I just read about the Wired blog’s post about the BMW 118d winning the “World Green Car Award.” It’s a 1.8L 1-series that runs on Europe’s clean-diesel. This gets people thinking: well, why don’t they bring something like that to the US? Well, why don’t they?

The problem is, the United States is either one of two things: 1) So insistent that diesel is bad for the environment and dirty (the diesel we get in the US is dirtier… but not clean-diesel in europe), and we can’t get by that stigma, even if diesel becomes 1000% cleaner than gasoline, 1000% more efficient, 1000% more powerful, and 1000% cheaper; people will still think the word ‘diesel’ means ‘dirty’. That and/or we are 2) So pwned by big-oil that our huge oil corporations will stop any change from happening by way of lobbyists (which is what has been going on for years.)

If you just take a step back and look at what’s happening: The world’s cleanest car without sacrificing power, comfort, or looks, will not come to the US, which is the world’s biggest car-consuming country, and is also on the forefront of green technology and enviro-friendliness. Just doesn’t make sense.

I am all for things like this. I’m big on protecting the environment, and I’m also a big car enthusiast. People think you can’t be both of those because they are mutually exclusive. But This BMW (Hell, I don’t even like BMW that much) bridges the gap completely. It has 221 lb-ft of torque in a 1 series...