Cars

We have reached an odd, maybe unique point in the history of technology, when the distant future is easier to imagine than the more proximate months and years ahead. Fifty years from now, most parties would agree, hydrogen fuel cell technology will power our world-everything from artificial organs to cruise ships and certainly our automobiles.

In India, rush hour can take all day. Lanes and red lights are only suggestions. The streets brim with pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, buses, garbage, ox-drawn carts, rickshaws, vendors and wandering cattle. Setting aside the teeming throngs, around half of the streets are also unpaved. In 2001 just over 80,000 people died in fatal auto accidents—an average of one death every 6.5 minutes. That year, the government in Delhi, where these hectic conditions are worst, issued a (mostly ignored) ban on cellphone use while driving. Not just anyone can brave the heaving avenues.

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there's only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.

In the 1970s, Americans had a love/hate relationship with diesel cars. Though more fuel-efficient than their gas cousins, the cars were noisy, underpowered, smog-belching reminders of just how badly the fuel crisis had crippled the nation. By the mid-’90s, lower gas prices all but banished them from U.S. showrooms.


Meanwhile European carmakers, spurred by diesel-friendly tax structures, kept at it. They traded sloppy mechanical fuel injection for high-pressure electronic systems that better atomize fuel.

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It was the friday before Father’s Day weekend, and we faced a long, hot drive from New York to D.C., fighting beach-bound traffic and swarms of commuters.


But we had a secret weapon: satellite-beamed, continually

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You have every right to think your car stereo is hot. After all, the dealer said it was the “upgraded” system, with speakers all over the place and a name you actually know on their grills. There’s probably even a screen in the dash.

My carefully wrapped Christmas present in 1998 was a $4.95 issue of Hemmings Motor News , the thick, pulp-paper monthly classified listing of collector cars. Even if it carries a 21st-century date, each issue still looks like something you'd find on the toilet tank of a 1950s Sinclair station restroom in Tucumcari, New Mexico. So was this a cheesy gift from my wife? Hardly.

In 1998, the Volkswagen Group bought Rolls-Royce and its subsidiary marque Bentley for $750 million, after a fierce bidding war with BMW. Months later, it was revealed that for $65 million, BMW had made an end run and snookered away the rights to the Rolls-Royce name—arguably the only valuable asset in the whole deal.


All VW ended up owning after spending so much was a Bronze Age Rolls/Bentley factory in Crewe, England, and the second-rate—in many eyes—Bentley brand (what were Bentleys, other than stealth Rollses with different grilles?).

When General Motors and Toyota yanked the plug on their electric-vehicle programs last year, citing high costs and weak demand, many proud owners of gas-guzzlers no doubt nodded smugly: Batteries are for flashlights, not family cars.

The outcome of the DARPA Grand Challenge was arguably disappointing: autonomous vehicles went farther than ever before, but the distance was considerably short of the goal--by about 200 miles. The pictures of the DARPA Grand Challenge, on the other hand, impress with the sheer variety of vehicles in the competition. Come behind the gates for a closer look at some of the DARPA Challengers in action (and, sometimes, out of action).

DARPA ultimately cares little about the fate of civilian robots in the Mojave Desert. Yet it cares very much about the development of new robot technology, technology that will enable unmanned vehicles to autonomously monitor their surroundings, avoid boulders and potholes, and race to targets. By those criteria, the race did have a winner: Digital Auto Drive of Morgan Hill, California, which developed an innovative new robot vision system that, team leaders claim, nearly won them the race.

When General Motors and Toyota yanked the plug on their electric-vehicle programs last year, citing high costs and weak demand, many proud owners of gas-guzzlers no doubt nodded smugly: Batteries are for flashlights, not family cars.

They sit on a spur of test track outside General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pennsylvania, panting and grumbling like two old lions half asleep. The ominous, muttering rumble is the sound of 8,800 horsepower at idle—24 cylinders with pistons big as buckets, turbochargers the size of washing machines, two V12 engines direct-driving alternators five feet in diameter.

Volvo's YCC concept car, designed entirely by a team of female engineers and stylists, met with snickers and smart-ass comments from the good-ol'-boys club when it debuted at the Geneva Motor Show in March. It's loaded with simplifying features ostensibly designed to attract a female audience. For instance, only mechanics can open the hood, on the assumption that women don't want to mess with what's under it. We got our macho going and confronted Lena Ekelund, a deputy manager of the design team. She did OK.


Popular Science: Why aim a car at women?