Car Tech

With final sales reports out from the whole auto industry, we built some context around Tesla's end-of-the-year sales numbers. The Model 3 is setting the pace among luxury cars. Volkswagen buys wireless tech from Volvo. Harley-Davidson announces pricing and a date for buyers interested in...

If you're going to develop a self-driving test vehicle, why not make it one that passengers would enjoy riding in? Perhaps that's the logic behind Toyota's choice of its new Lexus LS large luxury sedan as the basis for the P4, its latest automated-driving test vehicle—unveiled yesterday by...

Side-camera systems, replacing side mirrors, have been one of the de rigueur symbols of the future on auto-show concept cars for, well, pretty much this entire century so far. While we’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of such systems for nearly as long—they’re not allowed...

Turbocharging has mostly not lived up to its billing of being the savior of internal-combustion engine technology. Earlier this decade, facing increasing fuel economy requirements, automakers rushed to boost fuel economy by adding turbochargers to lots of small engines. The problem is, many of them...

Researchers claim their RCCI engine has hit 60 percent thermal efficiency on the test bench, which would represent about a 50 percent improvement over the best modern engines.

Cars with plugs may be the cleaner and greener future, but at the moment, they make up only about 1 percent of global sales approaching 100 million vehicles a year. That means that automakers continue to work ceaselessly on more efficient gasoline engines and lighter vehicles to put them in. Last...

If the U.S. is serious about reducing carbon emissions from road vehicles—under the current administration, the jury remains out—pickup trucks are key. More than half of the reduction in fuel consumption in pickup trucks projected under corporate average fuel economy rules comes from...

U.S. car buyers have increasingly ignored passenger sedans and hatchbacks and replaced them with utility vehicles of various sorts, and that's a trend that shows no sign of abating. One reason is that crossovers and SUVs now get better fuel economy than they did 10 years ago, when owning one...

It looks like GM's investment arm, GM Ventures, has borne some real-world, fuel-saving fruit. Sophisticated engine-control algorithms under the hood of the 2019 Chevrolet Silverado full-size pickup truck, which make the truck's V-8 engines more efficient, came from work done by a company in which...

The industry trade journal WardsAuto has been giving out "Best Engine" awards for 24 years now, and this year's list includes some interesting choices. For starters, there are no engines from German manufacturers on the list: The sole luxury recipients this year are Infiniti and Jaguar. But more...

General Motors officials made a bold announcement on a Thursday conference call with investors: the automaker plans to launch commercial autonomous fleet operations beginning in 2019. The Detroit-based automaker's vision for commercial, autonomous ride sharing will begin with self-driving Bolt EV...

Efforts by automakers to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions have intensified in recent years as emission rules have tightened and the effects of climate change are better analyzed. While electric cars and hybrids will grow in popularity, the internal-combustion engine remains the...

Although electric cars offer numerous benefits in engineering, design, and zero-emission operation, their overall weight remains a hurdle for automakers, especially as bigger batteries with longer ranges become more important. It now appears that Toyota may look to airless tires as a way to cut...

The very first working four-cycle internal-combustion engine was invented by Niklaus Otto in 1876, and in due course it changed the world. A quarter of a century later, gasoline engines, steam-powered vehicles, and electric drive competed on an equal basis, but by 1915, it was clear the gasoline...

It's not surprising that the powertrains of electric cars differ quite a bit from traditional internal-combustion engines. Although they have fewer moving parts, the rare-earth magnets that help power electric cars can be quite complex to fabricate. So, what is there to know about rare-earth...

Alkaline batteries have been a staple energy source for decades, but their potential has been capped by their chemical properties. Notably, alkaline batteries cannot be recharged, which means their application is often limited to single uses in small devices such as flashlights and remote controls...

Continental, a major supplier for automakers around the world, has come out with a bold prediction: internal-combustion engine development by German automakers will essentially end by the year 2025. The supplier, which makes exhaust-gas-cleaning systems for diesel cars and nitrogen oxide-measuring...

It's a technology that's been a sort of Holy Grail in the auto industry for at least a couple of decades. Now Mazda, one of the smallest global automakers, plans to introduce it in a radical new engine to be used in a future Mazda vehicle in 2019. It's called homogeneous charge compression...

The report that Toyota is planning an electric car with a solid-state battery for 2022 has led some fans and advocates to suggest huge new leaps in electric cars are imminent. The 2011 Nissan Leaf had an EPA-rated range of 75 miles combined; the comparable figure for a 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV is 238...

One of the greatest challenges faced by modern electric cars is the vehicle's range, which is largely proportional to the energy capacity of the battery. Range anxiety often keeps buyers out of electric cars and in their fossil-fuel powered counterparts. Most of the attention given to solving the...