This is a story of a box truck and its bouncing baby box. An automatic transporation-focused Twitter bot named @tw_kotsujiko run by @90ntyan posted an amusing video this week of a storage box falling out of a moving truck and bouncing back into the truck's cargo area. What seemed to be a trick or prank of some sort was likely the result of a perfect blend of air flow and pressure that directed the box back to its home.
Via Jalopnik, the video was filmed on a highway in Asia. The box truck is seen driving with the rear door open and several pieces of cargo inside. Specifically, there appears to be at least three mid-sized boxes made of cardboard or styrofoam.
At six seconds in, the box falls, hits the pavement, does some flips, and drops right back into the truck. Then it falls off again, bounces again, and perfectly places itself in the corner of the truck, aligned with the other boxes. Despite the opportunity to venture into the great outdoors, the young box simply coudn't muster the will and might to leave the nest.
The text attached to the video roughly translates to, "certainly there is a Karman vortex behind the truck." A second translated comment reads, "Some people are debating Kármán vortex and slipstream, but they both mean the same phenomenon. The former is the 'vortex' that can be formed behind, the latter often refers to the act of using it." According to NASA, "von Kármán vortices arise when winds are diverted around a blunt, high-profile area," a phenomenon first described by physicist Theodore von Kármán in 1912.
We're not qualified to detail the exact science behind it, but basically the box, which apparently has nothing remotely weighted inside, falls out, is kicked up by one air stream, and is kicked back in by another. *Aaron Paul voice* Yeah, science!
Where there's space, there's wood to make it more functional. At least, that seems to be the ethos at customization shop Solid Wood Worx. The Huntington Beach, Calif.-based company has turned vehicles such as the Ram ProMaster, Nissan XTerra, Toyota 4Runner, and Ford F-250 into small, livable mobile homes. The most recent project is a Subaru Outback, which uses a unique series of cabinets to meet a fairly complex checklist of asks.
Noticed by Motor1, the Outback belongs to an adventurer named Sean who is setting out on a six-month climbing trip. She reached out to Brian, a woodworker and former cabinet builder, at Solid Wood Worx with her vision of the Outback as a sleep-in camper. She wanted a flat place where she and her 80-pound dog could sleep, a slide-out kitchen with stove and fridge, storage for climbing gear, storage for clothes, and a designated space for a water supply. Possibly the biggest ask was an integrated solar panel with a battery and inverter for off-the-grid living. Brian made it all work.
With the solar panel and spare tire hitched to the Thule roof rack and out of the way, Brian built an interior platform that stretched from the rear hatch to the back of the front seats. Since this eliminated any use of the rear seats, they were taken out. The platform itself has built-in drawers, and the upper portion is split into two functional spaces. The right side has just enough room to fit a small mattress, but Sean looks small, so it should work perfectly. Beneath the bed is the sliding drawer that stows the camp stove. On the left side is a massive amount of storage that doubles as secondary kitchen prep space. On top of that is a small fridge that opens on top like a cooler.
With the kitchen area in its "out" position, a secondary panel opens up to the space where the spare tire used to be. Inside that, Brian's team fitted the wiring, fuses and equipment for the solar panel's battery storage. For this project, Brian used a 100 amp-hour battery and a 100-watt solar kit from Renogy. That power feeds an inverter, a few USB plugs, and the small fridge.
Looking through the rear passenger door, there are even more storage spaces for things such as clothes, bedding, shoes, and a laptop. The water tank slides in behind the front seat.
In most of his builds, Brian uses three-quarter-inch nine-ply pine plywood that he gets from Home Depot. It costs roughly $35 for a 4x8 sheet, and each piece weighs about 60 pounds. He says he uses it because it is almost always readily available and because it generally has less marks, a nicer finish, and is more often a straight piece of wood. Other plywoods are also more likely to chip or cut poorly, which is an obvious issue for quality control. For lighter builds or saving space, he occasionally uses five-ply boards.
In some of his videos, Brian even lays out some plans and instructions on how to build your own drawers or start a van build of your own. For more information on this and other cool projects, check out Solid Wood Worx on Instagram or YouTube.
My father rented a Hyundai Kona this morning for a road trip along the Oregon Coast. It's a base SE model in Surf Blue that typically starts at $21,085. As my parents were leaving, I explained that the Kona comes standard with Apple CarPlay, and then showed my dad how he can use Google Maps through the car's standard touchscreen and USB port. Just plug in your phone, press the Apple CarPlay button prominently displayed on the home screen, and voila! Yes, you have to "unlock" your iPhone the first time, but never again thereafter.
OK, now let's contrast this experience with the $102,895 2020 BMW 740i I've been driving the past week. To use Apple CarPlay, I had to …
Connect my phone to the car's Bluetooth system, which means interacting with both the phone and finding the appropriate menu with BMW's iDrive interface.
Make sure I'm allowing for Apple CarPlay to be used with that Bluetooth connection and not just interacting with iDrive.
Confirm the Bluetooth PIN is correct on my phone and the BMW, and then agree to some other things.
Assuming your phone and car are now paired (an iffy assumption as you'll soon see), you must now find Apple CarPlay in iDrive.
To do so, press the Media menu button on the center console, twirl the iDrive knob down the various media types: Presets, Sirius XM, FM, AM, some other stuff, and then Apple CarPlay.
Great, press that icon. Congratulations, you can now use Apple CarPlay.
So, that is quite obviously a pain in the ass, but it does allow you, in theory, to use Apple CarPlay without plugging in your phone. You can therefore leave said phone in your purse, for instance, or keep it charged on the standard wireless charging pad, freeing the cabin from the unsightly iPhone wire that gets in the way of the cupholders.
That's all excellent, plus you'd only have to do that Bluetooth song and dance once, right?
Wrong. I had to do it constantly, both in the BMW 740i as well as the BMW M850i and BMW X7 that have recently passed through my garage. Sometimes it would just take an interminably long time to re-establish the Bluetooth connection. Sometimes it would never re-establish it at all. My phone would indicate it's connected to the car, but the car wouldn't respond in kind. In the 740i, I would connect it once as described above, it would work as it should, then it would essentially forget the next time I drove the car. It's a Groundhog Day of annoyance.
Now, the car would remember my phone if I initially set it to pair with Bluetooth only, no CarPlay. I could still play things through the car, but would have to control my phone with my phone. So at least there's that.
As an added bonus, all of these BMWs claimed that my "USB device (was) not supported" when using the non-Apple lightning wire I use successfully in every other manufacturer's car. The white Apple wire, by contrast, worked fine to successfully charge my phone.
Now, I did not attempt any of this using a different iPhone other than my 6s, so this is a less-than-scientific inquiry. However, my phone is fully updated and I never have these problems with the cars of any other brand that require a hardwire for CarPlay connection. Furthermore, Senior Editor Alex Kierstein reports having similar BMW-CarPlay connectivity issues in an X2 and 3 Series, with inconsistent behavior and an inability to connect his iPhone 6 without deleting and re-connecting via Bluetooth. The 330i also froze his wife's iPhone, forcing a hard restart. According to BMW, the system requirements for Apple CarPlay to function are "an iPhone 5 or newer running iOS 9.3 or higher." That would include both of our phones.
However, there's a kicker to all this: BMW offers Apple CarPlay as a subscription. Oh sure, it's standard on the 7 Series and other high-dollar models for a year like Sirius XM is, but after that trial period, you're paying for it constantly. Once again, CarPlay is standard on a $21,000 Hyundai Kona and cars even cheaper than that. At the very least on other cars, it can be a one-time option charge or included in a package or upper trim level. None of this subscription business. Just plug in a cable and go.
Quite simply, this is unacceptable. If I spent my own money on any of these BMWs, I would be furious. Actually, I didn't spend my own money, and as an X7 full of friends can I attest, I was still furious. Even when I actually could maintain a connection to Apple CarPlay, the interaction between the system and iDrive is still suboptimal relative other car companies. While there are obvious functional benefits of connecting to Apple CarPlay through Bluetooth, that connection clearly doesn't work well enough. That BMW charges you extra for it is absurd. It should be standard, and it should work. Or you should at least be able to bypass the Bluetooth-CarPlay dance entirely with a cable connection.
Then again, it could be worse: Several of our editors have Android phones. Android Auto isn't available on any BMW. On the $21,085 rented Hyundai? Standard.
