Tag Archives: Automotive

This $99 Water Jet Remotely Cleans Your Car’s Backup Camera Without You Leaving Your Seat

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Reverse driving accounts for just 1% of all driving time, yet it’s responsible for roughly 25% of all accidents. A dirty backup camera in winter, mud season, or on dusty country roads is not a hypothetical inconvenience but a genuine safety liability, one that most drivers have resigned themselves to either living with or solving by stepping out of the car every time. Mike Klein, a Vermont-based tinkerer with a characteristically no-nonsense approach to annoying problems, got fed up enough to build a solution in his garage. What started as a Ziploc-bag-and-zip-tie prototype strapped to his license plate has turned into the Lens Lizard, a compact, self-contained, remote-controlled backup camera washer that just hit Kickstarter and has absolutely run away with its funding goal.

The concept is beautifully blunt. Lens Lizard mounts behind your license plate, sandwiched discreetly between the plate and the bumper using your car’s existing screw holes. No drilling, no wiring, no running tubing through door gaps or under trim panels. The whole install takes under five minutes with a standard screwdriver, and once it’s on, it’s invisible. The unit itself houses a fluid reservoir, a battery pack, and a high-pressure nozzle that you aim at your camera once during setup and then never have to touch again. When your backup camera gets caked in snow/ice or road salt on a grey January morning, or buried under a slush splatter from the truck overtaking you on a Vermont highway, you press a wireless remote button from inside the car and a jet of washer fluid blasts the lens clean. Sort of like a lizard or a chameleon striking its prey with a sharp, swift flick of its tongue. Except this time, it’s a concentrated jet of soapy water. Maybe a Pokémon reference would work better but I don’t want Nintendo’s lawyers sending me a cease and desist.

Designer: Mike Klein

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.

The engineering philosophy here is aggressively practical. Klein explicitly designed the Lens Lizard for Vermont winters, which means sub-zero temperatures, aggressive road salting, heavy snow, and the kind of freeze-thaw cycling that destroys lesser materials. The housing is sealed and built from automotive-grade materials, and the battery and fluid reservoir are sized to last four-plus months between refills and recharges, meaning you top everything up roughly once per season.

Maintenance is a non-event: open the latch, refill with washer fluid, charge via USB-C, close it back up. Klein’s origin story is worth noting too, because it gives the product a satisfying internal logic. He tried hydrophobic lens covers (they peeled), ceramic coatings (they did essentially nothing), and eventually decided to just build a scaled-down windshield washer system for his license plate. The first prototype was, by his own admission, ridiculous. But it worked, and that was enough to tell him the idea had legs.

Lens Lizard works with any vehicle where the backup camera sits above the license plate, which covers 99% of cars on the road, pickup trucks very much included. The product ships with assorted license plate screws to handle different fastener sizes, and the adjustable nozzle lets you dial in the spray angle for your specific camera position during initial setup. After that, the unit lives its entire life tucked behind the plate, completely out of sight. The wireless remote is puck-shaped and lives wherever you keep it in the cabin, a glove box, a cupholder, the center console.

The Lens Lizard starts at just $99 for the entire kit as an early bird discount off its $149 price tag. A dual bundle costs $189 if you’ve got two cars, and all bundles include the Lens Lizard unit, a wireless remote, a battery pack, and an assortment of screws to help you install the gizmo on your car. Given its specific design (and that every nation has a different license plate), the Lens Lizard only ships to the US and Canada for now, although I’m sure a more universal version is in the works. Production is slated to begin in April 2026, with shipping to backers planned for May. For drivers in cold-weather states, high-dust regions, or anywhere that sees serious road grime, it’s a hard value proposition to argue with. Certain premium vehicles have had integrated camera washers for years, quietly tucked into the bumper plumbing. Klein has simply figured out how to give everyone else the same result for under a hundred bucks, no dealer visit required.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.

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Rivian Just Launched Its Own Version of BMW M, and It’s Called RAD (Rivian Adventure Department)

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Meet RAD, short for Rivian Adventure Department, which is either a very clever name or a very brave one. In practical terms, it is Rivian’s newly formalized performance and development group. The team takes its trucks and SUVs into demanding events, learns what breaks, what grips, what flies, and channels those lessons into future products and features. It has been operating inside Rivian for years without a formal name. Think of it as Rivian’s version of BMW M or Toyota GR, except its proving ground is desert rallies and frozen lakes rather than the Nurburgring.

Rivian unveiled RAD at the 2026 FAT Ice Race in Big Sky, Montana, which feels like the correct setting for a division built around speed, control, and chaos management. FAT stands for Fahren auf Eis, German for “driving on ice,” and the event mixes vintage cars, modern performance machines, and now, 1,025-horsepower electric SUVs. The quad-motor R1S came in second on RAD’s debut, a solid first result. The bigger story is what RAD signals about where Rivian is heading. The company had the adventure image locked down already, and it now wants a firm grip on performance too, seemingly content to make that argument sideways on ice.

Designer: Rivian

RAD’s first deliverable for actual owners is the RAD Tuner, and it is more substantive than a typical software feature drop. It gives quad-motor R1S and R1T owners on Gen 2 hardware touch sliders to build custom drive modes across more than 10 powertrain and suspension variables, including power output, torque bias, stability control intervention, and brake regeneration. Two presets come built in: Desert Rally, developed from Rebelle Rally data, and Hill Climb, shaped by Pikes Peak runs. Both modes came from a team driving a 1,025-horsepower EV through punishing terrain and noting what actually worked. That feedback loop between competition and production software is what separates a real performance division from a badge on a brochure.

Speculation around RAD-badged production models is already building, and Rivian is doing nothing to quiet it. The R2, Rivian’s more compact SUV arriving in the second half of 2026, showed up at the FAT Ice Race dressed in full RAD livery, which is not a styling accident. The Drive has laid out the theory that quad-motor R1 models get rebranded R1 RAD, with a tri-motor R2 in the R2 RAD slot. When Rivian’s spokesperson was asked about the conspicuously missing R2 tri-motor from the launch lineup, the reply was “so much more to come” with an actual winking emoji. If RAD graduates to a production badge, Rivian enters the same conversation as the Ford Raptor, the Ram TRX, and every performance sub-brand that has figured out how to charge a premium for pushing factory hardware past its polite defaults.

The EV industry has spent years anchored to range figures and charging infrastructure debates, both necessary conversations, but ones that leave genuine enthusiasm largely unaddressed. Rivian is making the argument loudly that electric trucks can be athletic, competition-tested, and interesting to the crowd that wakes up on a Saturday morning wanting to do something dumb and fast. The RAD Tuner is a modest first chapter, but the direction is unambiguous. Performance divisions grounded in real competition data take years to build and are hard to fake from scratch. Rivian has that foundation in place.

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BYD Could Become Formula 1’s First Ever Chinese Team By 2027

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BYD sold 4.6 million new energy vehicles last year. It operates in over 100 countries. It builds its own batteries, motors, semiconductors, and power electronics from the ground up. And yet, in the parts of the world where it most desperately wants to grow, a significant chunk of car buyers still see it as the affordable Chinese option. That perception gap between what BYD actually is and what consumers in Europe and North America think it is has become the company’s single biggest strategic problem. Formula 1, according to a Bloomberg report published this week, might be BYD’s proposed solution. The company is reportedly exploring an entry into the world championship, either by acquiring an existing team or by building its own from scratch.

It would not be the first automaker to use motorsport as a brand perception lever. Hyundai was a budget car punchline before its WRC campaigns rewired how people thought about its engineering. Honda’s F1 run in the late 80s and 90s turned sensible commuters into a byword for high revving precision. BYD has the technical chops to tell a similar story, and F1’s 2026 regulations actually play to its strengths. Roughly half the power unit’s output now comes from an electric motor, a huge jump from previous seasons. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has been openly courting a Chinese entry, confirming that talks with manufacturers have already happened. The financial hurdle is real, with annual costs pushing $500 million and Cadillac’s grid entry fee alone hitting $450 million, but BYD pulled in $86 billion in revenue last year. The money exists. The motive exists. And the regulatory window has never been more aligned.

Image Credits: @grandprix

The 2026 power unit regulations are what make BYD’s potential entry genuinely fascinating from an engineering standpoint. The MGU K now pumps out 350 kW, nearly triple the previous 120 kW figure, meaning the electric motor is responsible for roughly half of total power delivery to the rear wheels. The sport has also mandated advanced sustainable fuels and significantly increased battery capacity requirements. For context, most current F1 engine manufacturers outsource chunks of their electrical componentry or partner with specialist suppliers for battery cells and power electronics. BYD does none of that. It designs its own lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, manufactures its own electric motor architectures, and fabricates its own semiconductor chips in house. That vertical integration, the same thing that lets BYD undercut competitors on price in the road car market, could translate into a fundamentally different approach to building an F1 power unit.

Think about what that means in practice. Ferrari, Mercedes, and Red Bull Powertrains all develop their electrical systems with relatively traditional motorsport supplier chains. BYD would show up with an entirely self contained pipeline, from raw cell chemistry to finished power electronics, informed by producing millions of electric drivetrains a year at scale. Nobody in F1 has that kind of manufacturing feedback loop. Whether that actually produces a faster car is anyone’s guess, because high volume production efficiency and single lap bespoke performance are very different disciplines. But the potential for BYD to bring a novel engineering philosophy to the grid, one shaped by mass market EV development rather than wind tunnel obsession, is the kind of wildcard that makes the sport interesting. The last time someone brought a genuinely alien approach to F1 engine design was probably Honda’s split turbo concept in 2015, and that eventually won championships.

BYD also has something else that most F1 newcomers lack: a premium performance sub brand with an actual hypercar. The Yangwang U9 is a quad motor electric supercar that clocked a sub 7 minute Nurburgring Nordschleife lap, making it one of the fastest production cars to ever circle that track. It produces over 1,300 horsepower, uses BYD’s proprietary e4 platform with independent torque vectoring on all four wheels, and was reportedly tested at speeds north of 300 km/h. If BYD enters F1, Yangwang becomes the obvious brand to attach to the racing program, the same way Toyota runs its Le Mans effort under Gazoo Racing or Hyundai channels its WRC work through its N performance division. A Yangwang branded F1 entry would give BYD a clean separation between its mass market identity and its motorsport ambitions, while feeding technology back into its flagship performance car.

China’s track record in international single seater racing is worth acknowledging here, because it adds useful context to how hard this actually is. The team originally called China Racing joined Formula E in 2013 as the second team on the grid, won the inaugural Drivers’ Championship under the NIO banner with Nelson Piquet Jr. in 2015, and then proceeded to spend years stuck at the very back of the field. It got rebranded from NIO 333 to ERT, and was eventually sold to an American investment group that now runs it as Kiro Race Co. under a U.S. license. The one Chinese flagged team in electric motorsport lost its Chinese identity entirely. BYD entering F1 would carry the weight of that unfinished story, and the engineering credibility it brings to the table through its road car dominance would need to survive the brutal reality of competing against teams that have been doing this for decades.

Some AI generated concept renders have been making the rounds online, imagining a BYD liveried F1 car in a black, red, and white color scheme with the company’s angular logo across the sidepods. The renders are speculative, but one detail stands out: the Chinese flag painted onto the nose cone. That is a loaded visual choice, and a historically significant one in F1 terms. Alpine carries the French tricolore on its cars. Force India wore the Indian flag throughout its time on the grid. A BYD car flying the five starred red flag on its nose would frame this as a national arrival, a declaration that China’s biggest automaker is ready to compete at the highest level of global motorsport. BYD’s road car design language has been trending toward clean, sharp minimalism lately, so a livery built around deep red panels, exposed carbon weave, and restrained branding could actually cut through the visual clutter of an increasingly sponsor heavy grid. It would certainly look different from anything else out there.

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65 Hybrid catamaran depicts an evolutionary journey for VisionF Yachts

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We have a special affinity for catamarans, something you’ll recognize from our previous coverage. These marine beauties have an irresistible allure, whether it in a conceptualized rendering or a production-ready model like the 65 Hybrid unveiled by catamaran builder VisionF Yachts. The all-new model – chiefly designed by Tuzla, Istanbul-based builder, famous for its innovative power catamarans – is the company’s first foray into the sub-80-foot catamaran segment.

It’s an evolutionary journey for VisionF, which is particularly famous for its VisionF 80, VisionF 82, and VisionF 101 models. These are all 80-foot-plus power and fully electric catamarans offering a luxurious blend of comfort and performance. Scaling the same finesse to a smaller 62-foot form factor is not the only change heralding the proficiency of the 65 Hybrid, it’s also the new material used for its construction.

Designer: VisionF Yachts

Equipped with all the advanced technology and alternative power sources, the Vision 65 Hybrid catamaran is meticulously designed and crafted to provide an unparalleled experience at sea. With an overall length of 19m (62 feet), the catamaran features 30 feet beam, but sways from the usual aluminium construction reserved for VisionF cats. The model, instead, is built in GRP composite and is designed to provide efficiency and liveability of the highest order.

Despite the compactness, the 62-footer catamaran doesn’t compromise in the interiors department. The beam delivers space-defying standards. It allows a luxury accommodation for up to eight guests. This is arranged as four cabins with their own quarters for a crew of four. Designed for cruising, the living quarters also comprise a large salon, expansive glazing, and an interior flooded with natural lighting from all sides.

The 65 Hybrid, interestingly, is not only about style; it’s about substance as well. The catamaran is powered by 450 hp Volvo Penta D8-450 diesel engines and an electric powertrain. The latter comprises a pair of batteries, 101 kWh and 23 kWh capacities, charged primarily by 42 solar panels laid out on the rooftop, which helps run the electric catamaran silently.

Featuring an advanced energy management system, the 65 Hybrid hull has been created as a demo model for those willing to buy. It is a tangible idea of what the final product could be, even though the customers, VisionF says, have extensive flexibility. VisionF is open to exploring customization in technical configurations, layout, and finishes, if required. According to press information, 65 Hybrid catamaran is likely to go on sale in the months to come. If you’re interested, head over for a hands-on experience and order for your customized beauty now!

 

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Caterham Seven HWM Edition celebrates British racing heritage with a limited-run lightweight sports car

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Few sports cars have preserved the spirit of lightweight performance quite like the Caterham Seven. With its minimalist design and uncompromising focus on driving purity, the model has remained one of the most authentic expressions of classic British motoring. Now, the British manufacturer has introduced a special variant that celebrates a lesser-known but historically important racing story. Developed in collaboration with Hersham and Walton Motors (HWM), the Caterham Seven HWM Edition pays tribute to the small British team that once challenged Europe’s best on the Grand Prix stage.

HWM was founded in 1938 and built a reputation in the early post-war years as a determined independent racing constructor. Its most famous machine was the 1951 HWM-Alta single-seater, which achieved several international race victories and podium finishes during an era dominated by far larger teams. The car also played a role in motorsport history by giving legendary driver Sir Stirling Moss an early Formula 1 appearance. By creating the Seven HWM Edition, Caterham and HWM are celebrating that underdog spirit and the shared heritage of two British brands deeply rooted in racing culture.

Designer: Caterham and HWM

The limited-run model is inspired by the original HWM-Alta racer. Only 19 examples will be produced for the UK market, mirroring the exclusivity of historic racing specials and emphasizing the handcrafted nature of Caterham’s vehicles. Each car is finished in a distinctive HWM Green paint, a color digitally matched to the original 1951 race car. Exterior detailing reinforces the historical connection, with Alta-inspired side panel louvres, a bespoke nosecone grille, and suspension components such as the wishbones, anti-roll bar, and headlight brackets finished in Retro Grey. A centrally mounted chrome fuel filler cap and a special HWM Caterham nosecone badge further distinguish the model.

Inside the cockpit, the retro theme continues with a focus on craftsmanship and period-correct design cues. The dashboard features a hand-turned aluminum SuperSprint panel fitted with classic SMITHS chrome dials and a solid metal master cut-off switch. Drivers interact with the car through a polished wooden Moto-Lita quick-release steering wheel, while chrome-finished controls for the gear lever and handbrake add to the vintage racing aesthetic. The body-colored transmission tunnel enhances the bespoke feel, and buyers can choose between leather-trimmed seats or lightweight composite racing seats embroidered with the HWM logo. A numbered plaque on the passenger side of the dashboard marks each vehicle as “1 of 19,” underscoring its rarity.

Despite its historic inspiration, the Seven HWM Edition remains a thoroughly modern performance machine. The car is based on the Caterham Seven 420 platform and is powered by a naturally aspirated 2.0-liter Duratec four-cylinder engine producing around 210 horsepower. Paired with a five-speed manual gearbox and driving the rear wheels, the lightweight sports car delivers an impressive power-to-weight ratio of roughly 375 horsepower per ton. As a result, it can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in just 3.8 seconds and reach a top speed of approximately 136 miles per hour.

Prices for the Caterham Seven HWM Edition start at £57,990 (approximately $78,000), positioning it as an exclusive offering for enthusiasts who value both heritage and pure driving engagement.

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Alpine’s Wildest F1 Concept Car Concept Uses a Magnetic Levitation Cockpit to Protect Its Driver

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If Alpine’s 2026 season is about consolidation, about switching to Mercedes power units and clawing back from last place in the Constructors’ Championship, then HakHyeon Lee’s Alpine Horizon concept is the opposite impulse entirely. This is a designer throwing Alpine’s arrow logo onto a closed-cockpit hypercar with a magnetically levitating driver pod, wire-tethered to a chassis that borrows its DNA from Le Mans prototypes rather than anything on the F1 grid. Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto are busy trying to drag the real Alpine up the standings, but Lee’s concept lives in a universe where the brand already won everything and started experimenting with physics.

Alpine confirmed in February that it will withdraw from the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class after this season, ending a program that includes the A424’s maiden victory at Fuji in 2025. The historic Viry-Chatillon facility, home to Renault’s F1 engines for nearly 50 years, faces an uncertain future now that both the power unit program and the WEC effort are winding down. Lee’s Horizon arrives against that backdrop, a vision of Alpine as an endurance powerhouse while the real endurance team prepares for its final campaign with Charles Milesi, Ferdinand Habsburg, and Antonio Felix da Costa carrying the flag one last time.

Designer: HakHyeon Lee

The centerpiece of the Horizon is its magnetic levitation cockpit, and the idea is genuinely ambitious. Lee proposes using electromagnetic repulsion between rails on the chassis frame and magnetic devices in the cockpit pod to physically lift the driver compartment off the car’s body. The claimed benefit is a ride that absorbs sudden acceleration forces and jump sections in ways conventional suspension cannot, essentially decoupling the driver’s experience from the violence at the contact patches below. High-strength wire tethers prevent the cockpit from separating entirely, acting as a mechanical leash for what is otherwise a floating capsule.

From a safety perspective, the Horizon’s fully enclosed cockpit speaks to a debate that has followed Formula 1 since the Halo became mandatory in 2018. The FIA tested closed canopy designs before settling on the titanium Halo, and their reasoning came down to driver extraction: a closed cockpit with more structural complexity could trap a driver in a burning car. Romain Grosjean’s fiery 2020 Bahrain crash validated that thinking, with the Frenchman escaping largely unassisted while the Halo deflected the barrier from his head. But Lee’s Horizon sidesteps this entirely because closed cockpits are already standard in endurance racing, where LMDh and LMH cars run enclosed driver cells as a matter of course.

And that’s the critical distinction here. The Horizon shares almost nothing with a modern F1 car. Current F1 machines are narrow, open-wheeled, open-cockpit designs with exposed suspension and aggressive front wings dictated by FIA regulations. The Horizon sits low and wide with massive wheel arches that swallow the tires, a long rear overhang housing a substantial diffuser, and a front splitter that could double as a snowplow. Its silhouette reads as a Toyota GR010 or Porsche 963 cousin, filtered through Lee’s smooth, organic surfacing language where the canopy melts into the car’s spine without a single harsh panel gap.

Inside the cockpit, Lee imagines gimbal-mounted seats designed for what he calls “weightless racing,” working in concert with the floating pod to keep the driver’s body stable under extreme forces. It is a layered isolation system: the cockpit floats on magnets, the seat pivots on gimbals within it, and the driver theoretically experiences something closer to stillness while the car battles the track surface below. Batteries housed in the chassis power the entire magnetic levitation system, and cutaway views show them positioned low for center-of-gravity optimization.

Alpine’s real motorsport situation makes a concept like this hit differently. The F1 team finished dead last in the 2025 Constructors’ Championship, and Flavio Briatore’s stated ambition for 2026 is a modest climb to P6 on Mercedes customer power. The WEC team is running its farewell season before the Hypercar program shuts down permanently, with the Viry-Chatillon workforce of 300-plus employees facing reassignment or redundancy. Lee’s Horizon exists in none of that reality, and the gap between aspiration and circumstance is exactly what makes automotive concept design so compelling.

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This Custom BMW R 1300 R Superhooligan Pays Tribute To 50 Years Since Its First Daytona Victory

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Fifty years ago this month, a team of engineers and riders rolled three air-cooled German boxer twins into Daytona’s paddock and lined them up against a field of screaming Japanese inline-fours that everyone assumed would bury them. Butler & Smith, BMW’s US importer at the time, had hired an aerospace engineer named Udo Gietl to prepare the R 90 S race bikes, a man who had previously worked for NASA and on Polaris submarines before turning his attention to motorcycle tuning. Gietl shortened the boxer’s horizontal cylinders to buy lean angle clearance, fitted titanium connecting rods, and replaced the stock twin rear shocks with a custom Koni monoshock adapted from a Formula 1 car.

What the bikes lacked in horsepower against the Kawasakis and Ducatis, they more than recovered in stability and handling. On March 6, 1976, Butler & Smith rider Steve McLaughlin crossed the line first in the inaugural AMA Superbike Championship Series race, with teammate Reg Pridmore a photo finish behind him. A third Butler & Smith bike, ridden by Gary Fisher, had led for several laps before a gearbox failure ended what would have been a storybook 1-2-3 sweep. BMW won that race, Pridmore won the championship at season’s end, and the Teutonic touring machine that Cycle World had nicknamed a “stone axe” had beaten the field at its own game.

Designer: BMW Motorrad

BMW Motorrad has now built the R 1300 R Superhooligan to mark that half-century anniversary, and if there is a more appropriate way to honor a chapter of racing history, it is hard to imagine what it would be. The one-off custom was assembled by a small internal team from the BMW Motorrad Custom Speed Shop, including designer Andreas Martin and color designer Theresa Stukenbrock, working from a stock R 1300 R as the foundation. The orange over carbon livery on the finished bike is an unmistakable nod to McLaughlin’s #83 R 90 S, with the race number itself relocated to a front number board mounted in place of a headlamp, a detail that communicates the build’s intent without any ambiguity.

The Ilmberger carbon bodywork wraps the boxer’s cylinders so completely that the motor reads almost like a monoblock, dissolving the traditional visual separation between engine and frame that defines most naked bikes. Blue-anodized fork legs on the extended Wilbers USD front end and matching blue frame rails on the aluminum rear subframe pull the accent color directly from McLaughlin’s 1976 livery, with additional blue brake calipers sourced from the BMW M 1000 RR superbike reinforcing the connection across the front axle.

The R 1300 R is already a serious machine in standard form, producing 145 hp and 110 lb-ft of torque from its 1,300 cc twin-cylinder boxer, but the Superhooligan’s performance upgrades go further than cosmetics. The Wilbers fork has been lengthened by 30 mm to increase lean angle clearance, a modification that directly echoes the cylinder-shortening work Gietl did to the original R 90 S for the same purpose. The M 1000 RR carbon front wheel improves steering response and reduces unsprung weight, while the Akrapovic titanium exhaust system with its carbon end silencer saves mass at the rear and adds the kind of mechanical bark that a build like this demands. CNC footpegs and fully adjustable Advik levers complete the track-ready ergonomic package. With all of it together, BMW rates the Superhooligan at 171 mph. There is no headlamp, which makes it ineligible for road registration, and while that is a minor tragedy, the bike was always going to the track rather than the street.

McLaughlin’s legacy extends well beyond that single Daytona photo finish. As the AMA’s riders’ representative through the early 1970s, he was the primary force behind getting Superbike racing elevated to national championship status in the United States, working alongside promoters and publishers to build the infrastructure that made the 1976 series possible. He later became the central figure in creating the World Superbike Championship, which launched in 1988 and remains one of motorcycle racing’s premier international series today. The AMA inducted him into its Hall of Fame, noting that without McLaughlin’s organizational work, the racing landscape the Superhooligan now celebrates might not have existed at all.

BMW Motorrad brand ambassador Nate Kern is racing the Superhooligan in round one of the Mission Foods Super Hooligan National Championship at Daytona this year, putting a competition-spec descendant of McLaughlin’s race-winning machine back on the same circuit where it all started. During the Daytona 200 weekend, the Superhooligan was displayed in the paddock alongside the original 1976 Butler & Smith R 90 S race bikes, with McLaughlin, Pridmore, Gietl, and Fisher’s daughters Heidi and Kimberly all present for the occasion. Few anniversaries in motorsport get marked with this much honesty.

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Kia to soon roll out its first pop-up PV5 production camper van for ultimate future of EV adventure

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We definitely live in a world of adventure enthusiasts who demand more from their vans than meets the auto maker’s desire. Which is one of the primary reasons everyone from Volkswagen to Nissan and now Kia is reimagining their designs, so as to carter to the demand more appropriately. Speaking of which, the South Korean auto giant surprised us with the Kia PV5 WKNDR concept at Sema last year, and now, in collaboration with British converter Sussex Campervans, is working on the regular version of the PV5 to transform it into a pop-up roof camper van that gives the best in the industry a run for their efficiency and comfort.

When Kia revealed the PV5 WKNDR, it demonstrated the highly flexible and modular interior of an electric van, which could easily and efficiently be customized to maximize space and function. This idea is now translating – thanks for Sussex – into feasibility soon. We say soon, the conversion specialist is already accepting registrations for inquiries regarding the Kia PV5 pop-top camper van, indicating the conversion could be available for the adventurers in no time now.

Designer: Sussex Campervans

The conversion, in the works, is billed as the first pop-up PV5 production camper van that can be an EV capable of changing the game in Kia’s favor. How it will do that is really not revealed completely. The promo on the outfitter’s website shows the Kia PV5 with a pop-up roof and various interior customizations. Of course, the real footage of the possible configurations is missing at the time of writing, but we learn that the conversion package is strictly done in line with Kia’s ‘global sustainability goals.’

The zero-emission EV van from Kia may see some components go out to make the conversion feasible, but Sussex informs, what goes will be replaced and compensated for with parts and trim sourced from recycled materials, ensuring the sustainable quotient of the original vehicle remains intact. While we are short on information about what the actual conversion will look like, we can inform that the van, with the destined pop-top roof, offers reclining and foldable second-row seats along with a spacious cargo space that both facilitate comfort and flexibility.

The Kia PV5 passenger vehicle itself has a spacious interior designed with a cargo capacity of 1,330L, even with the second-row seats are available for commute. That’s more than enough to carry your camping gear or everything required for your business trip. With the second-row seats down, the space increases to 3,615L, which is enough for Sussex Campervan to play around during conversion. To make the van accessible to all types of adventurers (young and old), it comes with a low floor height of only 399mm. Kia PV5 is powered by a 120kW motor paired with a 71.2kWh battery, which delivers up to 412 km range on a single charge. Fast charging support allows the batteries onboard to charge up to 80 percent in less time than you’ll take to order and finish a cup of coffee. If you’re interested in the possibilities of the Kia PV5 camper van, you can reserve the all-electric conversion starting £68,995.

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This Self-Balancing Electric Bike Rolls on a Single Giant Ball and Moves in Any Direction

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James Bruton’s latest creation stands out even among his many engineering oddities and builds on the kind of inventive spirit that we saw in his earlier two-ball omnidirectional bike. The British engineer turned full-time YouTuber has now built an electric bike that balances on a single giant ball and can move in any direction based on how the rider leans and how its control systems respond.

The One-Ball Bike has a roughly 2-foot red spherical ball that supports the entire machine and the rider above it. Around this sphere sit three omnidirectional wheels, arranged in an equilateral triangle under the bike’s frame, each driven by a motor capable of pushing the ball forward, backward, or sideways. These omni-wheels have two rows of smaller passive rollers mounted around their circumference, giving the ball smooth omnidirectional movement while distributing the load across many contact points.

Designer: James Burton

Balancing on a single contact point with the ground is a technical challenge that goes far beyond traditional bicycles or even Segway-style scooters, which correct in one axis. The One-Ball Bike must remain stable front-to-back and side-to-side simultaneously, and this is managed by a central control system built around a microcontroller like the Teensy 4.1 and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The IMU tracks the bike’s orientation in real time, while a PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controller constantly adjusts the speed and direction of the motors to keep the frame upright.

Power comes from multiple lithium polymer battery packs configured to supply around 50 volts to the drive motors. The bike’s structure combines aluminum extrusion for strength with a range of custom-fabricated parts, many of which Bruton 3D-printed himself. This hybrid approach keeps the overall weight manageable while allowing rapid iteration during the build process.

Ride control looks very different from conventional bikes. There are twist grips mounted where handlebars would normally be, letting the rider influence forward and lateral motion by adjusting how they lean and where they apply torque. Steering, in particular, remains a work in progress because the single ball doesn’t behave like a wheel that naturally points in one direction. Bruton has experimented with air-resistance control surfaces and even a makeshift foam wing to bias the bike’s direction when simple wheel control isn’t enough.

Another quirky challenge has been static electricity. The friction between the plastic ball and the surface generates a charge that can disrupt electronics, occasionally causing unexpected shutdowns during testing. Bruton has been investigating shielding and grounding solutions to address this. Bruton’s open-source ethos means all code, CAD designs, and build documentation have been published online, giving other makers a foundation to experiment with and improve upon his design.

 

The post This Self-Balancing Electric Bike Rolls on a Single Giant Ball and Moves in Any Direction first appeared on Yanko Design.

Yanko Design’s Best of MWC 2026: When Engineering Gets Obsessive

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Every year, MWC arrives like a controlled flood of announcements, each one louder than the last. Cameras with more megapixels, batteries with bigger numbers, screens with higher refresh rates than the human eye can meaningfully appreciate. It’s easy to walk away from Barcelona with a head full of specs and no clear sense of what any of it actually felt like to hold, use, or live with. The products that matter don’t always win the spec sheet battle.

The ones worth paying attention to are the ones built around a specific, almost stubborn design conviction. A team that decided thinness wasn’t a compromise but the whole point. Engineers who spent years rethinking how a GPS antenna sits inside a running watch. Designers who asked what a laptop would look like if it finally adapted to the user instead of demanding the opposite. Those are the products that stopped people on the MWC 2026 show floor, and these are the design decisions that made them worth stopping for.

HUAWEI WATCH GT Runner 2 Smartwatch

GPS watches for runners have always played both sides of a strange contradiction: the more seriously you take running, the more you end up wearing a small computer that weighs down your wrist and distracts you with irrelevant notifications. Huawei’s answer to that tension is the Watch GT Runner 2, a dedicated running watch built around the single question of what a wrist-worn device actually needs to do well for someone logging serious miles.

Five years of development went into the GPS architecture, which tells you where Huawei’s engineering priorities landed. The 3D floating antenna design, paired with an intelligent converged positioning algorithm, claims 20% better accuracy than its predecessor, holding signal through tunnels and tree cover where most watches lose the thread. The body itself is nanomolded aerospace-grade titanium at just 34.5 grams, with a 10.7mm profile that doesn’t fight the wrist wearing it.

Designer: Huawei

The Intelligent Marathon Mode is where the Huawei Watch GT Runner 2 really shines. Developed alongside the dsm-firmenich Running Team, it functions as an on-wrist coach with customized training plans, real-time pace charts, a digital pacer showing how far ahead or behind your target you are, and a personalized fueling reminder so you don’t bonk at kilometer 30. Performance prediction uses your Running Ability Index and physical data to estimate finish times, which either motivates you or quietly humbles you.

Health monitoring goes beyond the usual heart rate and step counts. ECG analysis triggers 30 minutes post-exercise, HRV is tracked throughout the day, and the PPG sensor can flag potential atrial fibrillation risks. Battery life reaches 32 hours in outdoor workout mode with GPS active, backed by a cell with 68% higher energy density than the previous generation. Curve Pay integration also lets you leave your phone and wallet behind on long runs entirely.

The Huawei Watch GT Runner 2 covers both ends of the spectrum, from amateurs wanting a smart training companion to athletes chasing records with lactate threshold and power metrics. At 34.5 grams with a breathable AirDry woven strap, it’s built to disappear on your wrist. What remains to be seen is whether marathon coaching calibrated with elite runners translates meaningfully to the rest of us.

MemoMind One AI Glasses

Most AI glasses have made the same mistake: designing around the technology first and hoping the wearability sorts itself out later. The result is eyewear that signals to everyone around you that something unusual is happening on your face. MemoMind, a new AI hardware brand incubated by projector company XGIMI, took the opposite approach with its debut product, building from a decade of optical engineering experience to make glasses that simply look like glasses.

The MemoMind One is the flagship of the lineup, combining integrated speakers with a dual-eye air display that layers information over your field of view without demanding your full attention. The multi-LLM hybrid operating system handles real-time translation, voice summaries, transcription, and contextual reminders, all accessible through head-motion controls and a conversational interface. Since its CES 2026 debut, software updates have expanded navigation integration and refined how the AI delivers information without interrupting natural interaction.

Designer: XGIMI

Personalization sits at the center of the MemoMind design philosophy in a way most wearable tech ignores entirely. Frames are fully customizable, temples are interchangeable, and the glasses support prescription lenses, meaning you can actually wear them as your everyday eyewear rather than carrying a second pair of frames. That design decision alone separates MemoMind from most competitors, where the hardware dictates the look and the wearer adapts accordingly.

The broader MemoMind lineup shows how deliberately the brand has thought through different user needs. The MemoMind Air Display weighs just 28.9 grams and uses a single-eye monocular display for a lighter-touch AI presence, aimed at commuters and minimalists who want information without visual density. The MemoMind Air goes further still, dropping the display entirely for a microphone-only model that makes the AI presence nearly invisible, present when useful and undetectable when not.

MemoMind One is set for preorder in April 2026, with the Air Display and Air models following later in the year. What XGIMI has built here is a clear and considered answer to the question of how AI should sit on your face: quietly, comfortably, and without announcing itself to the room. The design conviction behind MemoMind is that the best wearable AI is the kind you stop noticing you’re wearing.

Honor Robot Phone Concept

Smartphones have been flat rectangles for so long that the design conversation around them has largely shifted to cameras, refresh rates, and how thin the bezels are. Honor arrived at MWC 2026 with a genuinely different question: what if the phone itself could move? The Robot Phone concept puts a 4DoF gimbal system inside a handheld device, built around what Honor calls the industry’s smallest micro motor, with the motor size reduced by 70% compared to existing solutions.

Designer: Honor

The gimbal does two distinct things, and they pull in interestingly different directions. On the imaging side, three-axis mechanical stabilization works alongside an AI stabilization engine to keep footage steady through complex, dynamic movement. A double-tap locks the AI onto any subject, tracking it even through sudden changes or brief obstructions. Honor also introduced an AI Spinshot mode, supporting 90-degree and 180-degree rotations, a move that borrows directly from cinema camera rigs and scales it down to one hand.

The second application is where the concept gets harder to categorize. Honor has designed the gimbal to express what it calls embodied AI interaction, meaning the phone physically responds to what’s happening around it. It nods during agreement in video calls, adjusts its orientation to keep you in frame automatically, and moves to the rhythm of music playing through its speakers. These are features that a spec sheet cannot really describe, and that makes the Robot Phone one of the more genuinely curious things shown at MWC 2026, even as a concept still working toward a commercial release.

Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo EV Concept

The Vision Gran Turismo program is where car brands go to design without consequences. No production targets, no crash tests, no accountants in the room. Ferrari has done it. Porsche has done it. Now Xiaomi, a company that started by selling smartphones and rice cookers, has become the 36th brand to join and the first technology company ever invited. Gran Turismo producer Kazunori Yamauchi extended the invitation personally at the GT World Series in London.

Designer: Xiaomi

The design problem Xiaomi decided to obsess over is one every hypercar team faces: low drag gives you straight-line speed, high downforce gives you corners, and optimizing hard for either one usually compromises the other. Xiaomi’s answer was to eliminate the trade-off entirely by building aerodynamics into the body itself. No bolted-on wings, no add-on splitters. A teardrop cockpit, airfoil-shaped structural members, and embedded channels that guide air from nose to tail. The Accretion Rims are the detail worth pausing on: magnetically held wheel covers that stay perfectly still while the wheels rotate beneath them, cooling the brakes through internal turbine fins while cutting drag from spinning surfaces.

Inside, Xiaomi replaced the usual carbon-and-leather tension of a hypercar cockpit with something it calls the Sofa Racer, a continuous loop of dashboard, doors, and seating upholstered in 3D-knitted fabric pulled from sportswear manufacturing. The Xiaomi Pulse system reads driver state through sensors and responds through light and sound rather than screens and alerts. It all connects to Xiaomi’s broader Human x Car x Home ecosystem, which is either a genuinely interesting idea about how cars fit into a connected life, or a lot of ecosystem language wrapped around a very beautiful virtual concept car.

TECNO Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology

The modular phone idea has been attempted before, most famously by Google’s Project Ara, which spent years promising a phone you could rebuild like Lego before quietly disappearing in 2016. The premise was compelling, and the execution proved stubborn. TECNO’s approach at MWC 2026 is different in one important way: rather than replacing the phone’s internal components, the Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology keeps the phone slim and complete on its own, then lets you snap additional hardware onto it magnetically when you actually need it.

Designer: TECNO

The concept arrives in two visual flavors, ATOM and MODA, but the underlying system is the same across both. Over a dozen modules compose the Customizable Modular Suite, covering stackable battery packs, action cameras, telephoto lenses, and more, each attaching and communicating through the magnetic interconnection system. The scale and visual coherence of the accessory ecosystem is genuinely striking. Everything shares a design language, sits flush when attached, and reads as a single object rather than a phone with things stuck to it.

The ATOM edition makes the clearest design statement of the two, with its white and red palette, ribbed surfaces, and a camera module that looks pulled straight from a mirrorless system. TECNO’s core argument is that keeping the phone genuinely slim in daily use, while letting the modules handle the heavier lifting on demand, sidesteps the trade-off that has defined smartphone design for years. Add what you need, remove what you don’t, and the phone adapts to the moment rather than trying to anticipate every one of them in advance.

T10 Bespoke Luxury Custom IEM

There are 150 of these made each year. That’s it. Each one starts as a conversation, not a product listing, where you sit down with the team and work through finishes, metals, and sculptural forms until the result is entirely yours. The chassis is ceramic zirconium, machined to roughly half the volume of an AirPod and assembled with micro-screws and gaskets the way a Swiss watchmaker approaches a movement. Some configurations arrive in mirror-polished obsidian black YTPZ ceramic with 24k rose-gold plating over solid bronze. Others wear navy-blue Cerakote over polished zirconia with hand-rubbed tung-oil burl wood inserts. The newest collection reaches into diamonds, amethysts, and fine metals, with one-of-a-kind builds priced past $115,000. These aren’t earbuds that happen to look expensive. They’re objects you’d keep in a case and hand down.

Designer: EAR Micro, Klipsch

What separates the T10 Bespoke from anything else isn’t just the materials. It’s what’s packed into that tiny chassis. An ARM primary processor runs alongside a dedicated co-processor, with twin Cadence Tensilica Hi-Fi DSPs handling the signal chain. You get selectable amplifier modes, Class D for efficiency, and Class A/B when you want the fuller analog character. The Sonion Balanced Armature driver, tuned with Klipsch from the X10 lineage, feeds from a signal path that supports Sony LDAC at 24-bit/96kHz. That resolution matters because the hardware can actually deliver it. The PCB inside spans less than 1.13 square centimeters, with folding wings to fit the geometry. It’s the kind of engineering that usually stays behind a rack somewhere. Here it’s in your ear.

The interaction layer is equally thoughtful. Bragi OS powers the whole thing, supporting touch controls, voice commands, and head-motion gestures so you rarely have to reach for your phone. Battery life runs 8 to 9 hours per earbud, stretching past 30 hours with the case, and a 15-minute fast charge gets you to 85%. ANC is tuned in-house, and the founder calls it best in class, which is a claim that holds up in context, given the hardware underneath it. The deeper point is that this isn’t a product built to a price point or a roadmap. The chassis is replaceable. The battery is replaceable. The shell is replaceable. You’re not buying a device with a two-year lifespan. You’re buying something designed to stay with you, improve over time, and still be relevant long after everything else has been recycled.

Lenovo AI Workmate Concept

Most AI assistants live inside a screen, which means interacting with them still involves picking up a device, unlocking it, and navigating to something. Lenovo’s AI Workmate Concept takes a different position, literally: it sits on your desk as a physical object, a spherical head on an articulated arm mounted on a circular base, designed to be always present and always on without requiring you to go looking for it.

Designer: Lenovo

The design is built around natural interaction rather than typed commands or app interfaces. It responds to voice, gesture, and writing, with on-device AI processing inputs locally for privacy. The more distinctive capability is spatial output: the Workmate can project content directly onto a nearby surface, turning a desk or wall into a temporary display for documents, presentations, or notes. It also handles practical business tasks like scanning and summarizing documents and assisting with content creation, positioned as a desk companion rather than a novelty.

The physical form is what makes the concept worth paying attention to as a design argument. The spherical head, articulated arm, and glowing base ring give the device a clear presence and orientation, somewhere between a desk lamp and a friendly robot, without tipping into either. It acknowledges you spatially rather than waiting to be summoned from a notification panel. Whether a desk companion with animated eyes and a projector becomes something people actually want next to their laptops is the real design question Lenovo is exploring here, and MWC 2026 was its first public test of that answer.

Huawei Mate 80 Pro Max

Huawei’s Mate series has always been the line where the company makes its clearest design statements, and the Mate 80 Pro Max carries that further with a body that steps away from the fiber-reinforced plastic back of the standard Pro in favor of an aluminum alloy construction throughout. The result is a phone with more physical presence and a slightly larger footprint. Both share the same Dual Space Rings camera module design that has become the Mate family’s most recognizable feature, two concentric rings framing the rear cameras in a configuration that reads as intentional rather than incidental.

Designer: Huawei

The display on the Pro Max stretches farther to 6.9 inches while keeping the same LTPO OLED panel with 1440Hz PWM dimming and Kunlun Glass 2 protection. Powered by the same Kirin 9030 Pro chipset in their top configurations, the Max differentiates itself through physical scale and materials rather than raw internals. The battery also steps up to 6000mAh, though paired with the same 100W wired charging. The color options shift too: where the Pro comes in Black, White, Green, and Gold, the Max trades the softer tones for Black, Silver, Blue, and Gold.

What the Mate 80 Pro Max represents is a familiar kind of product logic: take the established design, make it bigger, make the materials more premium, and add the battery capacity to match the larger chassis. The Dual Space Rings identity carries across both models intact, so the design conversation between the two is less about direction and more about degree. With a significantly higher price tag, the Pro Max is considered step up for buyers who want the full physical expression of what the Mate 80 series is about.

Honor Magic V6 Foldable phone

Foldable phones have spent years promising the future while feeling fragile, bulky, and anxious about rain. Honor’s design obsession with the Magic V6 was to solve all three problems at once without letting any of them compromise the others. The result is an 8.75mm folded profile, putting it in iPhone-thin territory, paired with a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon battery, the largest ever fitted into a foldable at this thickness.

Designer: Honor

That battery figure is where the real engineering story lives. Silicon-carbon cells pack more energy into less space than conventional lithium-ion, but higher silicon content creates expansion stress that can crack cells over charge cycles. Honor’s fifth-generation silicon-carbon material, developed with ATL, reaches 25% silicon content. That’s what allows the capacity and the thinness to coexist without one compromising the other.

The Magic V6 also carries both IP68 and IP69 ratings, a first for any foldable. IP68 handles submersion; IP69 covers high-pressure, high-temperature water jets. Getting both on a device with a moving hinge, a crease depth reduced by 44% over the previous generation, and a display reflectivity as low as 1.5%, reflects how much structural engineering went into something that still opens and closes hundreds of times daily.

Lenovo ThinkBook Modular AI PC Concept

Laptops have been making the same basic promise for decades: here is one device that does everything, carry it everywhere. The trade-off has always been that “everything” means compromises, a screen too small for real work, a body too thick for a bag, a keyboard that disappears when you want a tablet. Lenovo’s ThinkBook Modular AI PC Concept at MWC 2026 takes a different position entirely, built around a “carry small, use big” philosophy that lets a single 14-inch base system reconfigure itself depending on where you are and what you’re doing.

Designer: Lenovo

The modularity here is practical rather than speculative. A secondary display attaches to the top cover for face-to-face sharing or closed-lid use, sits alongside the base on an integrated kickstand as a portable travel monitor in portrait or landscape, or swaps with the keyboard to create a dual-screen setup stretching the combined workspace to roughly 19 inches. The Bluetooth keyboard detaches entirely. IO ports, including USB Type-A, USB Type-C, and HDMI, are interchangeable depending on what a given day requires. Pogo-pin connectors handle power and data transfer between modules, keeping the system stable and self-contained throughout all the rearranging.

What makes the ThinkBook Modular concept worth paying attention to as a design argument is the restraint behind it. Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario inside one fixed chassis, Lenovo accepted that the device itself should be the smallest possible useful thing and let the user decide what gets added to it. A laptop that adapts to the workflow instead of the other way around is an old idea that has never quite landed in a form people actually use. This concept is still exactly that, a proof of concept with no confirmed release date, but the underlying logic is more considered than most modular hardware that has come before it.

Leica Leitzphone by Xiaomi

Xiaomi has made plenty of capable camera phones, but the Leica Leitzphone takes a different approach entirely, treating the smartphone less like a spec competition and more like an extension of Leica’s century-old obsession with optical craft. The silver aluminum frame carries tactile knurling, a rotatable camera ring, and the iconic Leica Red Dot, sitting against a black fiberglass back pulled directly from classic Leica rangefinder design language.

Designer: Xiaomi x Leica

That camera system is where the conviction becomes most legible. A 1-inch sensor with LOFIC HDR technology handles the main shooting duties, alongside a 200MP telephoto at 75 to 100mm and a 14mm ultra-wide. The rotatable physical camera ring, assignable to focal length, focus, or bokeh, gives the experience a tactile dimension that touchscreen sliders simply cannot replicate. Thirteen Leica color styles and a dedicated Essential Mode recreating the Leica M9 and M3 look complete the package.

The rest of the hardware keeps pace: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a 6.9-inch 3500-nit OLED display, and a 6000mAh battery with 90W wired charging. The Leica UX layer goes further than a cosmetic theme, reshaping system fonts, icons, and widgets into a coherent visual identity rooted in Leica’s design language. For anyone who has wanted smartphone photography to feel less like operating software and more like handling a real camera, this is the most direct answer yet.

TCL Tbot Smartwatch Desktop Companion for Kids

Kids’ smartwatches have gotten good at keeping children connected to parents while they’re out, but they go dark the moment they come off the wrist. That’s the gap TCL is trying to close with the Tbot, a magnetic desktop dock that pairs with TCL’s kids’ watches, like the MoveTime MT48, to keep the experience going at home during charging. Rather than letting the device sit idle on a nightstand, the Tbot turns that downtime into something more purposeful.

Designer: TCL

The companion functions as an AI assistant shaped around a child’s daily rhythm, setting wake-up alarms, bedtime reminders, and Pomodoro-style study timers through age-appropriate guidance. It also doubles as a learning partner for guided discovery, a sleep companion that tells bedtime stories, and a parental alert hub that sends configurable notifications when parents need to stay in the loop. The idea is continuity between the outdoors and the home, with the watch and dock working as two parts of the same connected experience.

TCL is positioning the Tbot as a concept for now, still in its development phase while the company works through applicable regulations around AI features for children. That measured approach actually makes sense given the audience, since parental permission and age-appropriate guardrails are built into its design from the start. Getting that balance right between a helpful AI companion and appropriate boundaries for kids is exactly the kind of design problem worth taking slowly.

Lenovo Yoga Book Pro 3D Concept

3D creation on a laptop has always involved a certain amount of peripheral management, between mice, styluses, and the occasional spacemouse bolted to the side of the desk. The Yoga Book Pro 3D Concept takes aim at that setup by building a glasses-free 3D display directly into a dual-screen laptop, letting creators view depth, form, and spatial relationships on screen without any additional equipment. Lenovo’s AI software handles 2D to 3D conversion on the upper PureSight Pro Tandem OLED display, and can even generate an environment around the converted object on command.

Designer: Lenovo

The dual-screen concept laptop also offers a rather interesting interaction feature. Zero-touch gestures read hand movements in front of the RGB camera, letting users zoom and rotate 3D objects without touching the screen at all. The lower display acts as a touch surface with snap-on physical pads that pop up adjustment controls, like lighting and viewing angle, wherever they’re placed. It’s a workflow designed to keep creators in the work rather than hunting through menus.

As a concept, the Yoga Book Pro 3D is still a proof of intent rather than a product you can buy, but it represents a genuinely specific design problem solved with unusual conviction. Glasses-free 3D displays have struggled to convince outside of niche applications, so how well the actual display holds up for extended professional use will be the real test when this moves closer to production.

Vivo X300 Ultra and Camera Cage

Most smartphone camera rigs are an afterthought, a collection of third-party mounts and adapters held together by optimism. Vivo is taking a different approach with the X300 Ultra’s dedicated Camera Cage, a pro-grade frame designed specifically around the phone rather than adapted from generic cinema accessories. Dual grip handles, cold shoe mounts, quick-release ports, and dedicated physical buttons for shutter and zoom come built into one coherent system.

Designer: vivo

The cage is also where the ZEISS Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra slots in, an APO-certified lens co-engineered with ZEISS that pushes the X300 Ultra to a 400mm equivalent focal length with full 200MP optical output. Gimbal-grade optical image stabilization and motion-tracking focus sit underneath all of that reach. An integrated multi-level cooling fan handles thermal load during extended video shoots, solving the problem that turns most “pro mobile video” sessions into a race against an overheating warning.

What makes the setup genuinely interesting is the conviction behind it. Vivo isn’t treating the cage as a novelty accessory but as the central argument for how a smartphone can function as a serious production tool. The phone alone is one thing; inside this cage, with the extender attached and physical controls in hand, it becomes a fundamentally different experience.

TECNO x Tonino Lamborghini TAURUS Mini Gaming PC

Gaming PCs have never been shy about their presence, big towers, aggressive angles, and enough RGB to illuminate a small runway. The Tonino Lamborghini TECNO TAURUS compresses all of that energy into a mini PC chassis, with an all-metal body, red-accented lighting, and see-through panels that put the water-cooling loop on full display. It’s unapologetically theatrical, and that’s clearly the entire point of the exercise.

Designer: TECNO

Under that showpiece exterior sits an Intel Core i9-13900HK with 14 cores running up to 5.4GHz, alongside an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 on the Blackwell architecture at 145W total graphics power. A roughly 10,000mm² pure copper water-cooled cold plate and triple-fan setup handle thermals in that compact body. A real-time performance monitor on the chassis lets you watch CPU and GPU loads without opening a single app, which feels very on-brand for a machine this self-aware.

TECNO’s first collaboration with Tonino Lamborghini positions this as a desktop you’d put on your desk rather than under it, treating the machine as a design object as much as a gaming rig. Fifteen ports and WiFi 6E keep the practical side well covered. What’s genuinely interesting is how much of the design budget went into making the cooling system the visual centerpiece, turning thermal engineering into the main aesthetic argument.

Unihertz Titan 2 Elite QWERTY Phone

Physical keyboard phones never really died; they just quietly retreated to a corner of the internet where people complained loudly about touchscreen autocorrect. Unihertz has been serving that corner for years with its Titan series, and the Titan 2 Elite is the most refined version yet. Gone is the chunky frame of its predecessor; in its place comes a slimmer 75mm-wide body, a 4.03-inch 120Hz AMOLED display with a punch-hole camera, and the same four-row QWERTY keyboard that the series built its following on.

Designer: Unihertz

The keyboard itself doubles as a touchpad, letting you scroll and navigate with a thumb swipe across the keys, a trick carried over from earlier Titans that still feels genuinely useful. Although nothing’s confirmed yet, it’s expected to run on a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which is a solidly capable mid-range setup for a phone that’s really selling you on input, not raw performance. More notable is the software commitment: Android 16 out of the box, updates promised through Android 20, and security patches running until 2031, a rare five-year horizon for a device in this price range.

The Titan 2 Elite arrives at an interesting moment, with the Clicks pulling attention toward keyboard accessories for iPhones and Unihertz countering with a dedicated standalone device instead. There’s a meaningful difference between treating the keyboard as an add-on and building an entire phone around it, and that’s the bet Unihertz is making here.

The post Yanko Design’s Best of MWC 2026: When Engineering Gets Obsessive first appeared on Yanko Design.