Car Tech

General Motors has announced more shuffling of its future-tech facilities. Back in October, the automaker shut down a fuel cell center in Honeoye Falls, New York and shifted operations (along with 220 jobs) to Pontiac, Michigan. Outposts in Torrance, California, Castleton, Indiana, and Warren...

Plug-in electric cars get a lot of press, perhaps more than their current sales might warrant. It's clear to industry analysts that the proportion of plug-ins among new cars produced will grow, slowly, over the coming years and decades. But don't count the gasoline engine out just yet. The rate of...

In order to improve the aerodynamics of new vehicles—and boost their highway gas mileage—automotive engineers have looked to a new series of seemingly minor features that add up to meaningful gains in EPA ratings. One of them is the active grille shutters that have become increasingly...

Technology developed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University has set a new record for energy storage in a lithium-ion battery. Using ingenious egg-like sulfur nanoparticles in the cathode, the battery can store five times more energy than is possible with today's...

It's quite easy to forget that cars have been using batteries for years before hybrids and electric vehicles arrived. The humble lead-acid battery, the planet's most recycled product, has been starting engines and providing power for car electrics ever since such a thing was required. Now, battery...

There are three main paths to improving batteries for future electric vehicles. One is the development of entirely new technology replacing today's batteries entirely with something lighter, more powerful and more energy dense. The next is the greening of batteries--reducing their environmental...

However you choose to enjoy herbal products, the last place you'd expect to find them is in your electric car battery. Thanks to a new discovery though, the Madder plant, also known as Rubia, could prove useful as a natural cathode in batteries. Madder has long been used as a source of purpurin, an...

Concept cars used to be flights of fancy, vehicles designed solely to grab attention when a carmaker's regular products were lacking visual verve. In more recent times, they've been so much more than that. They still look extreme and showcase blue-sky technology, but concepts now give us a much...

If you want to know how advanced cars might be in the next hundred years, just take a look at how far the car has come along in the last hundred. Unfortunately, electric cars missed out on decades of development over the last century. Battery technology in particular still suffers many of the...

Mazda is pushing ahead with its plans to offer a clean-diesel four-cylinder engine that could prove to be a strong rival to the TDI four in some Volkswagen and Audi products. While the 2014 Mazda6 will arrive in its lower-priced form with a 184-horsepower, 2.5-liter version of the four-cylinder...

It isn't mentioned anywhere in the press release, but it isn't hard to tell what Visteon's latest technology concept car is based on--the Nissan Leaf electric car. However, the electric drivetrain is only one part of the Visteon e-Bee concept. Instead, it's designed to showcase technology we could...

Like it or not, the majority of the world's vehicles are still powered by internal combustion engines, rather than batteries, hydrogen and other alternatives. The good news is that carmakers are still finding ways to improve the good old reciprocating piston engine. Even in the last few years...

Volkswagen's line of TDI diesel cars has passionate fans. Now that the company is launching the 2013 VW Jetta Hybrid, it will likely gain some hybrid advocates too. But diesel and hybrid fans are very different groups, as the company's marketing surveys show. So why couldn't Volkswagen simply add a...

Good technology, they say, is technology that improves your life without intruding upon it. If that's the case, then the ability of hybrid cars to shut off their engines at speed to save gas can be judged a success. And it's a technology that could even be seen in regular cars soon, says Wards...

Sitting under the hood of the next-generation 2014 Chevrolet Corvette, is a next-generation V-8 engine, both more powerful and more efficient than ever. It's said that the biggest gains in fuel efficiency can come from the least-efficient vehicles. As such, the new Corvette should be a huge...

If you drive a hybrid or plug-in vehicle, chances are you're already familiar with 'green tires'. Also known as low rolling resistance tires, they're becoming an increasingly popular way of improving the fuel efficiency of cars, both in dedicated green vehicles and even regular cars. That...

Clatter, grumble, shudder, belch. Sound familiar? Not if you drive one of the modern breed of diesel-engined cars, which have virtually banished all sign of their clattery, tractor-like forebears. A modern Volkswagen TDI, for example, isn't just efficient and quiet--it even approaches fun, if you...

One thing common to many hybrid cars is the twin-pronged benefit of refinement and silence. Just a brief drive in a hybrid is usually enough to confirm that, at low engine speeds at least, they don't produce a lot of noise. Even less when running in electric mode. Still, there are always...

Graphene is described as a "wonder material" within the scientific community, winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. It's incredibly light, incredibly strong and very simple. Made up from sheets of carbon only a single atom thick, it's the material's potential use in batteries that has us...

New battery charge estimation algorithms developed by engineers at the University of California (UC), San Diego, are on the verge of vastly improve the capabilities of current lithium-ion batteries. The changes center around improving charging times, potentially allowing for batteries that charge...