*By Christian Smith*
In a final push before bringing its collapsible, baseball cap-style helmets to market, Park & Diamond launched an Indiegogo campaign on Tuesday ー and hit its goal of $50,000 within an hour.
The company, which was founded in 2015, makes helmets shaped like baseball caps in a safety-first effort to encourage riders to wear protective gear while cycling or taking other modes of alternative transport, co-founder and CEO Jordan Klein said Tuesday in an interview on Cheddar.
"We really are going after people who traditionally would not be a helmet user," he said.
It's a cause that is especially important to David Hall, the company's other co-founder and president. Hall's sister went into a four-month-long coma after she was hit by a car while biking at the corner of Park and Diamond streets near Virginia Tech's campus. It was that very accident that led Hall and Klein, then both engineering students at the university, to create their company with the goal of reducing the 85,000 severe traumatic brain injuries that result each year from cycling accidents in the U.S.
"We interviewed thousands of people after Rachel's accident, and we found that people don't wear helmets because they're uncomfortable, they're ugly, and then most importantly they're not collapsible; you can't take them everywhere you need to go," Klein said.
While it may have been a biking accident that launched the idea for Park & Diamond, Klein said the company has other ambitions.
"We may have started around Dave's personal story ー around bike helmets ー but really we're passionate about alternative transportation and safe alternative transportation," Klein said.
Klein and Hall have been in contact with many mobility companies ー including Uber and Lime ー since Park & Diamond was founded. Ultimately, the co-founders want to forge partnerships to spread their mission of safety.
Park & Diamond's helmet is available for pre-order on the company's [website](https://www.park-and-diamond.com/) for $79.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/the-company-thats-making-helmets-cool-again).
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
Japanese automakers Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi are dropping their talks on business integration.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
