Automotive

The large roof areas of factories and production plants are an obvious choice for the installation of solar cells and Audi has just announced it will install additional photovoltaic modules on a 7,500 square meter (80,729 sq. ft.) area of the roof of its main plant in Ingolstadt, Germany. The expanded solar capacity will be used to charge the batteries of Audi’s e-tron models using new electric car charging stations and will also be used to provide green electricity to the plants’ production facilities. Read More

Honda finally showed the smaller-than-small city car it has been developing for Asian markets - the Honda BRIO - today at the 27th Thailand International Motor Expo in Bangkok. It will be the smallest, lightest and cheapest car in the Honda range when it goes on sale in India and Thailand next year - around THB 400,000 (US$13,300). Read More

Get ready to have your concept of how a car is manufactured flipped upside-down and turned inside-out. Picture a production process that has plenty in common with agar jelly (used to culture organic materials in laboratories) and little in common with what we would normally think of as production-line automotive manufacturing. You are starting to get close to what the people at Mercedes-Benz have spawned with the BIOME – one of the most outlandish and ambitious concepts in this year's Los Angeles Design Challenge. Read More

With hybrid and electric vehicles appearing in more and more automobile showrooms around the world, the traditional fuel efficiency measure of miles per gallon (MPG) alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. With cars able to be powered by electric power alone or a combination of electric and gasoline, new measures are needed to better inform consumers when buying a new car. To this end, General Motors (GM) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have teamed up to design a new window label for the Chevrolet Volt that has more information than any EPA label before it. Read More

Electric vehicles are beginning to spread onto the mass market, but one of the limiting factors in these early days is a high-cost compared to their gas-burning equivalents. Electric scooters and motorcycles are considerably cheaper, but not everyone is comfortable on two wheels, or likes being exposed to the elements. Here's an alternative type of EV that costs less than six thousand dollars, is stable on the road and will protect you from wind and rain. It’s called the BugE, and there’s just one catch to it – you have to put the thing together yourself. Read More

The energy crisis has certainly catalyzed a great deal of thought about how we harvest all that energy we previously wasted. The petroleum-burning internal combustion engine has traditionally leaked energy from the exhaust system in the form of heat, but new ThermoElectric Generator (TEG) research at Purdue University aims to yield as much as a ten percent reduction in fuel consumption by converting heat from the exhaust into electricity. It is hoped that the thermoelectric research will eventually lead to other methods of turning waste heat into electricity in homes and power plants, new and more efficient solar cells and perhaps even a solid-state refrigerator. Read More

It doesn't take much analysis to reach the conclusion that truck rollovers are very dangerous. Studies have shown that over 6 percent of the heavy truck fatalities and incapacitating injuries on U.S roads alone are a result of rollover accidents. Modern trucks fitted with ESP (Electronic Stability Program) have a greater chance of avoiding the problem, but this retrofittable early warning tanker roll-over device developed by Bertocco Automotive Engineering of Italy and Shell Chemicals Europe provides added safety for older vehicles... and it's just been awarded top prize in the EuroTra Safety and Innovation Award 2010. Read More

The 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge – which asked designers to come up with an efficient 1,000lb (454kg), four-passenger vehicle that maintained comfort, safety, driving-performance and style – has finished in a tie between GM’s Cadillac Aera concept and the Smart 454 from Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design. Previously, the Design Challenge was restricted to major Southern California automotive design studios but this year saw the field widen to include studios from Germany and Japan, resulting in entries from Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Maybach. Read More

Not long ago, there was informed debate on whether a purpose-built computer would ever beat a chess master. Now mobile phones have achieved Grand Master status. Computers continue to get exponentially faster, not to mention considerably smarter through improved software, whereas humans are effectively nearing their limits. Hence, it’s arguably only a matter of time and R&D focus before computers (plus improved sensors and software) surpass any specific human capability. This week Audi revealed that its Autonomous TTS research car had completed the 12.42-mile Pike’s Peak mountain course in 27 minutes. An expert driver in the same car would take around 17 minutes – now we have a benchmark, the race is on, and it's almost inevitable that a computer will one day outdrive the best of our species, and it may be sooner than you think. Read More