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Smart bike helmet boosts cycling safety with turn signals, brake lights, and GPS

By Albert Khoury Published July 5, 2016

Whether you use a bike to commute, exercise, or to enjoy the passing scenery, safety is always an important factor. Bicycle helmets have come a long way to become lighter and stronger than ever before. However, there is always room for improvement, and as more products become “smarter” in the name of safety, helmets are also catching up. Last week, Brooklyness Inc. launched the Classon smart bike helmet on Kickstarter, and it’s already nearing triple its $30,000 goal.

The Classon features cameras front and back to scan the environment. An algorithm interprets the information and sends it to you. A light under the visor can tell you when a car is approaching from behind or when a vehicle is in your blind spot. The light blinks in your peripheral vision and its intensity can be adjusted to your preference.

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brooklyness-classon-bicycle-helmet Gesture sensors read your movements to activate turn indicators. When you signal a turn or lane shift with your hands, left or right blinkers activate on the front and back of the helmet, communicating your intentions to those around you.

The integrated accelerometer detects when you are reducing speed and activates a red brake light on the back of the helmet.

With the Classon App, you can receive simple navigation instructions without taking your eyes off the road. Your phone sends information to your helmet, which activates directional lights under the visor indicating whether you should go left, right, or straight. The app also gives you access to data and stats from your ride.

Want others to feel what you’re experiencing? You can stream or capture videos and share them on the fly. Afterwards, you can edit the video and create GIFs. This feature can also help if you are involved in a traffic incident.

No matter how much you contribute to the campaign, you’ll receive a 6-month “Classon Club” subscription along with your helmet. This includes helmet replacement, video access, GPS navigation, and access to all new features released in future updates.

The first couple of options are gone, but you can pledge as little as $150, which will get you the helmet with all its integrated features, as well as a six-month subscription to the Classon Club. Estimated delivery is April 2017.

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Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Cars

Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs

Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

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Computing

DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models

DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.