Cars

Unlike pretty much every other supercar in the history of supercars, the Savage Rivale Roadyacht GTS has four doors and four seats. While at first glance this might not sound all that super, a look at the car's spec sheet reveals that the Netherlands automaker may have just built a vehicle that earns this epithet. The car is powered by a 6.2-liter V-8 tuned as high 670 bhp, weighs just 2,820 lbs (1,280 kg) at the curb and while it may still be the most unlikely vehicle we've seen all year, this supersized-supercar is real and it's soon to be here. Read More

Near Field Communication (NFC) was initially promoted as a mobile payments method, but the technology has since been applied to a broader range of applications - and the list is still growing. One of these is a new system allowing for NFC implementation in a car key, which has been launched by the Dutch company NXP Semiconductors. The system is a production-ready single-chip solution dubbed KEyLink Lite (codenamed NCF2970) that enables a connection between a "smart" car key and external NFC-compliant devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops. Read More

While the metal bodywork of cars certainly can be melted down and recycled, the process requires a lot of energy, and therefore isn't entirely eco-friendly. Making cars out of easier-to-recycle materials is certainly one approach to the problem, but designers Kenneth Cobonpue and Albrecht Birkner have another idea – cars with sustainably-sourced, biodegradable bodies. To that end, they have created the Phoenix, a full-sized rolling chassis made from rattan and bamboo. Read More

Last December at the Future of Electric Vehicles conference in San Jose, a representative from The Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology presented research that his institution had been doing into a novel type of electromagnetic vehicle suspension. Now that a test car equipped with the suspension is about to appear at the AutoRAI exhibition in Amsterdam, the university has released some more details about the technology. For starters, it is claimed to improve the overall ride quality of cars by 60 percent. Read More

Vehicles used to be predominantly made of steel, but to reduce weight and cost today’s vehicles are now built from a mixture of materials including steels, aluminum and fiber-reinforced plastics. Highly stressed load-bearing structures and crash components constructed from composites are designed to buckle on impact to help reinforce the body and protect the vehicle‘s occupants in the event of a collision. But these materials tend to chip into sharp-edged splinters on impact. Researchers have now found a way for the automotive industry to mass-produce a particularly safe class of materials that can absorb the enormous forces generated in a collision without splintering. Read More

There’s a stretch of highway in Utah, where over 300 carcasses of car-struck deer were found in a single year. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) has chosen part of that area to try out the DeerDeter Wildlife Crossing Guard. As you might have guessed from its name, the roadside device is designed to keep deer from wandering out onto nighttime roads as cars are approaching. When it detects oncoming headlights, the DeerDeter’s strobe lights and audio alarm system are activated, causing deer and other animals in its vicinity to keep their distance. Read More

Well, it’s hard to believe the day is finally here, but the on-track testing phase of the Automotive X PRIZE Finals stage is finally over. Of 136 vehicles representing 111 teams that originally entered the competition, just 9 vehicles representing 7 teams remain. All that the cars need to do now is pass the Validation stage, then the winners will be announced in September. Here’s a quick look at what happened over the past few days, at the Michigan International Speedway. Read More

The Orochi sports car first appeared as a concept vehicle based on the Honda NSX platform at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2001 before undergoing some updates and revisions and finally being put into production and offered for sale in late 2006. The company now unveiled the Orochi Gold Premium model. Read More

To celebrate the success of its V12 Vantage Aston Martin has debuted a Carbon Black Edition at this year’s Geneva Auto Show. Additionally, to commemorate Dr. Ulrich Bez’s 10th year as Chief Executive of the company, a DBS UB-2010 edition was unveiled along with a new Works Service Tailored service. The new service offers customers of both new and existing Aston Martins personal tailored options focusing on customizing color and materials to customer’s personal tastes. Read More