Car Tech

You probably don't think about your car's wheels that much, but to state the exceedingly obvious they're an essential part of every car. They're also surprisingly heavy, as you'll know if you've ever rotated your tires or had to change to a spare at the side of the road. Heaviness is a quality...

There are many routes to improving fuel efficiency in modern cars, but one route in particular seems to be resonating with automakers, automotive engineers and designers: Shedding weight. A survey of 900 automotive engineers and designers conducted by Wards Auto and sponsored by DuPont showed that...

A Michigan-based startup called Sakti3 claims it has battery chemistry that doubles the energy density of today's best lithium-ion batteries. Speaking to Scientific American, Sakti3's co-founder and CEO Ann Marie Sastry says the firm's prototype solid-state lithium cells have reached 1,143...

Several manufacturers now offer gas-saving hybrid versions of their vehicles but it's surprisingly rare to find two companies who have gone about it in the same way. The early pioneers, Toyota and Honda, fielded completely different systems at launch--and well over a decade down the line Honda has...

Time was when mid-size sedans routinely came with V-6 engines of 3.0 to 3.6 liters. But these days, those are rare and expensive high-end options--if they're even offered at all. The 2015 Ford Fusion sedan now has a simplified lineup of engines, and all of them continue to have just four...

The term "hacker" conjures up images of shady individuals stealing your personal details through loop-holes in your internet security, but in the modern world a professional hacker can actually provide a valuable skill. Tesla Motors, for example, recently attended the Def Con security conference in...

In recent years we've finally seen a reversal of the trend towards heavier cars, but Jaguar will take that a step further when it launches the 2016 XE sedan. Long-awaited replacement for the unloved X-Type, the XE's body structure is 75 percent aluminum, the highest of any in its class. READ: Tesla...

At the Geneva Motor Show in March, German firm Quant revealed a car powered by what it called 'nanoFLOWCELL' technology. Now, the flow-cell vehicle will make its road-going debut, as the car has been approved for real-world testing by the TÜV or Technischer Überwachungsverein, Germany's...

Last month, electric car maker Tesla Motors took the unusual step of opening up its patents to other automakers. Automakers usually guard their patents very closely, ensuring them as much competitive advantage as they can get away with before someone builds something better. Open Tesla's patents...

The word "hack" is a little over-used in today's lexicon, but in the general sense it refers to the process of cracking the software system of a computer, a smartphone--or a car. Many electric cars roll those three categories into one, and now the organizers of a computer security conference have...

As anyone with a smartphone, laptop or indeed a whole electric car will know, lithium-ion batteries degrade over time. Each time you charge and discharge the batteries, they lose a little capacity. Day to day you don't really notice, but over a year, or two, it means being able to use your phone...

It's a statement of the obvious, but solar panels do their best work during the day, specifically noon and early afternoon when the sun is at its strongest. The trouble is, this rarely tallies with when energy use is at its highest--typically in the evening, when everyone gets home from work. The...

Audi's "e-boost" electric turbocharger could debut on the next Q7 SUV.

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...

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...

"Turbo" was the word to have on your car in the 1980s. Preferably in huge, bright script, completely out of correlation with the car's actual performance. Now, it's more often used as an indication of efficiency--take Ford's Ecoboost brand, for example. Audi has used them for many years on its...

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...