Ford’s modern camouflage design keeps prototypes safe from spies. By Kyle Kock.

Spy photography, the art of capturing prototype vehicles testing on public roads or racetracks, has long been the bane of automakers trying to keep their upcoming products “secret” until the right time to unveil them to the world.

Before, you needed specialised equipment to capture images worthy of publication. Now, the modern smartphone has empowered ordinary members of the public to be able to snap up what interests them and make it publicly known via social media, personal blogs, or even to sell the particularly soughtafter stuff to various media outlets. The technology accessible to the ordinary man has even allowed amateurs to take professional-level images.

To keep as much of its upcoming vehicles under wraps as possible, Ford has had to continually update the camouflage it uses. The technology started out with what was essentially a cover-up, usually heavy black vinyl cladding. That’s still broadly used across the industry, but the art of disguise has evolved to a new level. Current methods involve different designs and techniques that trick the human mind.

Essentially, the complex patterns are of such a design that styling distinct to certain new models can’t be made out. The result is obscure photographs. This is of particular importance to Ford, which factors design as the number two reason for purchases, following fuel consumption.

Although vinyl cladding certainly did have its place, it was vehicle-specific, added a lot of weight to a prototype vehicle and negatively affected vehicle aerodynamics. Stickers, on the other hand, can be universally applied and can even be stuck on in a random manner. Further to that, faux body panels are also employed to give the illusion of extra length and height, misleading nosy spy photographers and those not patient enough to wait for the final product.

Remember when you first fired up GPS navigation? That mysterious voice guiding you along your path, making you miss the turn off because it lost signal. Then Google Maps gained the powers of turn-by-turn navigation and Google acquired Waze to endow Maps with live traffic and alternate route suggestions. You thought you were done with these archaic relics of a time before ubiquitous smartphone ownership. You were wrong.

Tomtom and Garmin are slowly turning the corner and adding useful services to breathe life into dying product lines. These solutions might not be for everybody, but it’s good to see innovation that will inspire companies like Google to keep improving its offering. This 6-inch unit is Tomtom’s halo product that showcases the company’s superior traffic data powers. It syncs to your phone via Bluetooth to tap into live traffic. The service has also gained a new feature called Traffic Dispersion, so Tomtom won’t send all of its users along the same alternate route. Yes, the GPS units are using a hive mind to try to thin out traffic by intelligently rerouting drivers.

Tomtom has also integrated its services into other software, so you can now plan your schedule in Outlook and use My Drive Connect to sync those addresses to your device. All that data then gets processed along with traffic data to give the user realistic departure times and estimated travel time.

There’s an interesting trend happening in electric cars: dual motors. One motor to drive the front axle and then an entirely separate power plant on the rear. The combination of the two is a concept known as a road lock and it will change your life when you pilot this set-up off-road.

The argument for the electric 4x4 is based on the unique power delivery properties of the electric motor. From the lowliest Leaf to the ludicrous Tesla P90D, when you put your foot down you have 100 per cent of the available torque from standstill.

What manufacturers are proposing in the SUV space is using that 100 per cent torque to negate the need for low range. Just one massive problem that anyone who has ever tried to fly a drone against the wind will tell you about: electric motors consume much more power when working hard.

All of this is distinct from all-electric 4x4 drivetrains, of course. Enterprising locals are among those who have pursued their own initiatives using existing platforms. Two of these previously featured in Popular Mechanics* are a game viewer based on a Land Rover Defender and the Freedom1 Jeep Grand Cherokee EV.

Kia and Volkswagen seem to be the furthest along in terms of concepts that could make it to market. Both manufacturers have opted for a hybrid model with an electric motor powering the rear axle and a petrol engine on duty up front. We should mention that Volvo has used the same trick for the newly launched flagship T8 variant of XC90, but Kia and VW seem bullish about the off-road prowess of their respective concepts.

Where Kia has turned to its Soul urban crossover as a base for the Trail’ster, VW is working off the new Tiguan platform. The GTE shares much of the styling from the upcoming new model, adding more aggressive detailing and off-road specific cladding. Drivers will be able to select one of six programs: On-road (Comfort or Eco); Off-road (Rocks, Sludge & Sand, or Gravel); Sport; Snow; Charge (battery is charged while driving); and Battery Hold (maintains a constant battery charge).

All-wheel drive can be fully electric (there’s a small electric motor alongside the petrol engine), or hybrid-powered for all the car’s grunt at the same time. VW claims a 32 km range in full electric all-wheel drive, but the engine can be recruited to charge the batteries along with regenerative braking technology.

Although that limited range can be considered a nightmare scenario for overlanders, we need to be sensitive to the technological shortcomings of our current lithium-ion batteries. In the future, when we’re storing massive charge in snail slime or

At the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year, the American tyre giant’s showcase included the next two generations of the automobile tyre. That is to say, tyres for the semi-autonomous car, and fully autonomous car after that – the cars of tomorrow that will be integrated with infrastructure and the rest of modern society.

They’re essentially only prototypes, for now, but the Intelligrip Concept and Eagle 360 are also pioneering the way forward for one part of a vehicle that keeps us in contact with terra firma.

INTELLIGRIP AROUND THE CORNER

According to the JD Power 2015 US Tech Choice Study, consumers deemed collision protection technology the most important aspect of the changing automotive industry.

Goodyear believes that the Intelligrip, with its advanced sensor technology, which uses a microchip developed by telematics/locking/tyre pressure monitoring specialists Huf to relay information about the road and tyre conditions back to the vehicle’s ECU, provides optimum autonomous control. The technology used in the Intelligrip tyre means that manufacturers would do well to use it to their advantage – and supplement the ABS units, electronic stability control systems and adaptive suspension systems already in production. Not to mention the ongoing strides in active safety systems that will keep the vehicles of tomorrow collision-free.

Basically, the Intelligrip’s chip will send information about the road conditions to the vehicle’s ECU, which is in turn, monitoring the tyre’s wear and pressure monitoring and can adjust accordingly through special algorithms developed by Goodyear.

OF THE FUTURE

The Eagle-360 concept tyre looks nothing like the tyres that have been around since the first horseless carriage. That’s because it’s a sphere.

The Eagle-360 is connected to a vehicle’s body through magnetic levitation (yes, really), which greatly increases ride comfort by not being physically connected to anything on the vehicle. It keeps cabin noise to the bare minimum, too.

But what’s being touted as the main advantage of the spherical Eagle-360 is unprecedented manoeuvrability thanks to multiple orientation that allows the tyre to move in any direction, at any time. Active technology through the use of autonomous systems will also minimise sliding in hazardous situations, and overtaking slower-moving vehicles will be realised without changing the driving direction.

Another benefit: because 360-degree turns are possible, less space will be required to park a vehicle. And because it’s a sphere, the sensors in the Eagle-360 inform the vehicle about the wear and tear on the tyre – which will regulate the tyre accordingly and extend mileage.

The 3D-printed Eagle-360’s design is strongly influenced by biomimicry. It uses multidirectional blocks, tread and groove that act as a natural sponge to soften the contact patch when wet to adjust performance to adverse driving conditions, and harden to improve performance in optimal dry environment driving. PM

JOSHUA HERSH PHOTOGRAPH BY TRAVIS SHINN

resurrect the Jedburghs. Just over a year later, in the fall of 2014, the Army quietly opened a new division at Fort Bragg known as 1st Special Forces Command, which would ally five active-duty and two National Guard special-ops groups – about 16 000 troops total. Within the division would be small three-man teams of Green Berets, specially trained in both the art of combat and the science of social movements and terrorism. Between missions, they would spend years in the classroom studying languages, political theory and the history and culture of specific regions. And they would be called the Jedburghs. he strategy shift that Cleveland championed has become even more important as the threats facing the West have grown increasingly unpredictable, unorthodox and terrifying. ISIS is a foe unlike any other – nationless, leaderless, recruiting participants from around the world, staging and broadcasting beheadings, killing thousands of civilians. Vladimir Putin’s Russia first forcibly annexed Crimea and is now trying to do the same in other eastern regions of Ukraine, led by a proxy army of non-uniformed “little green men”. Borders or treaties have been rendered obsolete. This is the grey zone.

In January, in the military academic journal Joint Force Quarterly, Cleveland published a paper titled “Unconventional Warfare in the Grey Zone”. One of his co-authors was four-star Army General Joseph L Votel, the current head of US Special Operations Command who was recently nominated by President Obama to lead US Central Command. Their goal was to define combat in this new and unpredictable world. “It’s the sort of conflict that is below the threshold of traditional war,” says Cleveland. And because of a reluctance to commit forces, the need for special operators has skyrocketed.

Hence the 14 tours for men like Joshua Wheeler and the warnings of burnout by men like Jim Reese, and the uncertainty that hangs over the ability to sustain this kind of combat. And the joke special operators always make when someone mentions “boots on the ground” – their uniforms should include sneakers.

In early 2015, the Army put out a call for 5 000 new special-ops candidates. And the demand is only expected to rise in the coming years, due to everything from the continued spread of ISIS to melting ice in the Arctic, which will create tensions over newly accessible territory. (The Army’s Northern Warfare Training Centre in Black Rapids, Alaska,

Categories of people you can safely assume to be tough

Now, after two decades in the military and with a baby at home, Josh was ready for another change. He wanted to devote more time to his family. (His three sons from a previous marriage lived nearby.) He talked of getting into real estate, or maybe becoming a history teacher. He would have been great.

“He loved the Army,” Ashley says. “But I really felt this time he didn’t want to leave home. It was the first time I felt that.”

he five Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters swept low across the northern Iraq desert. It was a little after two in the morning on 22 October 2015 and the sky was black and still. On board were 48 counterterrorism commandos from Iraqi Kurdistan and 27 American elite operatives, including Joshua Wheeler. The rescue mission was both a direct-action strike and a perfect example of unconventional warfare – the first time the US commandos had teamed up with the Kurds for a combat operation since the Iraq War began in 2003. The Americans weren’t in charge. They were just there to advise and to assist only if absolutely necessary.

The call had come in only a few hours earlier. American surveillance drones had spotted figures outside a suspected Islamic State prison compound, near the Iraqi town of Hawija. The figures seemed to be digging trenches. Intelligence analysts believed there would be a mass execution in the morning.

The 70 prisoners – Iraqi soldiers and policemen, civilians from nearby towns – had already experienced months of brutal beatings and mock executions. They had seen cellmates taken away for interrogations, only to return broken and bloodied – or not at all. Rudaw, a Kurdish news outlet, interviewed some of the prisoners later. “They tortured us with electricity and put bags on our heads until we could not breathe,” said one, Mohamed Hassan Abdulla, a police official from Alkhan, a village in Kirkuk.

As the helicopters closed in, American fighter jets “prepared the battlefield”, dropping bombs on nearby roads and bridges, cutting off the path for any ISIS reinforcements. Then the commandos surged in, assault rifles ready.

According to a New York Times account, which anonymously cited a former Delta Force officer briefed on the mission, the plan was to detonate several holes in the compound walls and get inside. But a few of the Kurdish soldiers had trouble setting one of the explosives properly. Wheeler rushed over to help – this is what the Americans were here for. To guide, to assist, to step in when needed. They blasted the hole and Wheeler ran through it. On the other side, he was met with a spray of enemy bullets.

All of the prisoners were freed. “We were already dead,” one would later say. “Then God sent us a force from the sky.”

As many as 20 ISIS fighters were killed. The only casualty among the American and Kurdish forces was Joshua Wheeler.

He was the first American to die in combat in Iraq in nearly four years – the mission would likely have remained secret if not for that newsworthy fact. The next day, at a press conference in Washington, DC, Secretary of Defence Ash Carter faced a frenzy of questions from confused reporters. Why were American troops still in Iraq? Wasn’t the war over? Hadn’t the White House repeatedly insisted there were no boots on the ground?