Car Tech

Aston Martin Racing is collaborating with Chinese solar-panel maker Hanergy on a green air-conditioning system.

Seven years ago, dozens of professional stunt drivers in identical Ford Tauruses drove for hours through a ghostly and abandoned suburban California subdivision of one-story stucco homes, curving roads, and cul-de-sacs. On the roads with them were 11 self-driving vehicles, from a battered...

Light weight will soon be big business at Ford. The company's F-150 truck, going aluminum for the first time with the 2015 model, sheds 700 lbs over its predecessor, thanks to its new construction. Ford sells over half a million F-Series every year--big business indeed. This technology and other...

Parking is one of those maneuvers that we all screw up now and then, no matter how experienced we are at driving. And there's nothing worse than having an audience just as you're trying to squeeze into a space. Even professional athletes can't experience that much pressure, surely? But what if your...

Could your car seats become large, comfortable batteries? If experiments by scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai, China become reality, perhaps they could--as the group has developed battery technology that can be woven into fabrics. According to Phys.org, researcher Wei Weng and his...

If you're reading this in North America, the vehicle sitting on your driveway probably has an automatic transmission. So do around 95 percent of other new vehicles on the U.S. market right now, though the Canadian figure is slightly lower. The numbers don't lie: Drivers just aren't buying cars with...

This is probably not the car you'll be whisked around cities in, in the future. Which is either a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like cars that look like koala bears on a substance recently legalized in Colorado. But it is Google's latest, dedicated test vehicle for its autonomous car...

Bamboo is light and strong, but also renewable and more environmentally-friendly than carbon fiber.

Stop-Start systems are the low-hanging fruit of city gas mileage, but like many fruits, they can be an acquired taste. General Motors has attached such a system to its 2015 Chevrolet Impala with the base 2.5-liter Ecotec engine, and has worked hard to ensure it's actually a system drivers will want...

BMW answers criticism of its carbon-fiber commitment.

Toyota has revealed it's developing a new design of semiconductor that could improve the fuel efficiency of its hybrid vehicles by up to ten percent. Developed with in-house technology partner Denso, it plans to test the semiconductor's real-world gains in road trials within the year. The pursuit...

Tougher fuel economy standards may make mild hybrids and small turbocharged engines more common in China.

BMW plans to produce up to 9,000 tons of material per year at its Washington-state plant.

In the search for better electric-car batteries, lots of lab research has to happen before anything can be announced. Today, a company called Power Japan Plus came out of stealth mode to unveil a new battery chemistry, with both electrodes--anode and cathode--made of carbon. The new cell, known as...

The Dodge Dart compact sedan launched as a 2013 model hasn't sold as well as hoped. One thing that hurt its debut was the unfamiliar feel of its dual-clutch automatic gear gearbox, brought over from Europe to boost the fuel economy of versions fitted with the 160-horsepower turbocharged 1.4-liter...

Despite the recent advent of usable, talented electric vehicles, combustion engines are likely to persist for quite some time, often as a component in plug-in hybrid and range-extended electric vehicles. The onus then is on refining combustion power to work harmoniously with increasingly...

The Juno Power Jumpr uses lithium-ion batteries for a more-compact power source.

Most internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient at turning fuel burned into usable energy. The efficiency by which they do so is measured in terms of "thermal efficiency", and most gasoline combustion engines average around 20 percent thermal efficiency. Diesels are typically...

So, you've done the right thing: You've decided your next car will be considerably more fuel-efficient than the one you drive now. That's great news. But, have you considered how it's built--and more to the point, what it's built out of? A new peer-reviewed paper from the Oak Ridge National...

Leaking air-conditioner refrigerant may be increasingly contributing to global warming.