cars

Look through the 2009 Carrera S's familiar skin, and you'll find the biggest redesign in years. The change starts with a dual-clutch transmission, taken straight from Porsche's racecars, that shifts gears in milliseconds. It's bolted to a redesigned six-cylinder engine that uses direct fuel injection (a first for Porsche) to churn out higher horsepower while actually getting more miles per gallon.

Ah winter, when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of Christmakwanza. This holiday season, we hit up the entire staff of PopSci to see what they're dreaming of, what they're expecting, and what they'd recommend to you and yours. Come for the robot butlers, Teslas and aura-capturing cameras; stay for the eminently affordable headphones, DIY kits and more. Check it out here.

For decades, we've fantasized about watching paper-thin TVs, soaring hundreds of feet with personal jetpacks, riding in cars that drive themselves, and re-growing organs.

The 21st annual Best of What's New celebrates all of those dreams coming true. Now we've collected them all into one single slideshow. Launch it here to learn about these achievements and 96 other breakthroughs that, whether long awaited or completely unexpected, are equally amazing.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Technology Under Review Now. Every week, the editors and writers of Popular Science will take their T.U.R.N. breaking down the tech behind the newest gadgets, autos, computers, cameras and more. Dying to see something specific in action? Drop us a suggestion in the comments section. And be sure to tune in to popsci.com/TURN each week.

Buell did not break the mold when it made the 1125CR racing bike. Instead, it washed the mold away—to create a sturdier body.

“Boss,” the brainchild of Tartan Racing (a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors), was the winner of the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, a competition of autonomous vehicles. The mission: execute tricky merging, passing and parking maneuvers as quickly as possible, while obeying California-state traffic laws.

The movement of the crowds at the semi-funereal 2008 Los Angeles Auto Show said it all. No one, it seemed, wanted to hang out with the most beleaguered of the Detroit automakers, Chrysler and GM. As plenty of attendees noticed, Chrysler’s large expanse of showroom floor was all but empty most hours of the day. Same across the room at the General Motors stand: Aside from a small group milling about the Chevy Volt, all was quiet.

Nudge forward out of a garage, and cameras mounted on the grille and under the passenger-side mirror on the 2008 Lexus LX57 see around the corners before you do, sparing pedestrians that cross your path. A second camera provides a view of the ground beside the vehicle, so you don’t scuff those new tires on the curb.

Highways filled with hydrogen cars are still decades away, but that doesn’t diminish the achievement of rolling the first fuel-cell car off a mass-production line. To open up interior space, Honda developed its own fuel cell, a 100-kilowatt stack that packs substantially more energy into a 65 percent smaller space than other designs and squeezes neatly into the tunnel between the front seats. And by working through several generations of concept cars, Honda has gotten the once-experimental FCX to look and drive just like a gas-powered car.

Highways filled with hydrogen cars are still decades away, but that doesn’t diminish the achievement of rolling the first fuel-cell car off a mass-production line. To open up interior space, Honda developed its own fuel cell, a 100-kilowatt stack that packs substantially more energy into a 65 percent smaller space than other designs and squeezes neatly into the tunnel between the front seats. And by working through several generations of concept cars, Honda has gotten the once-experimental FCX to look and drive just like a gas-powered car.

Regenerative braking, the process through which an electric car grabs otherwise wasted energy from the brakes as the car glides to a halt, is a brilliant bit of engineering for efficiency—take energy that's otherwise only good for burning up brake pads, and turn it into electricity that charges the battery.

It may also make the uninitiated driver want to vomit.

Recently I was watching the animated movie Cars with my automobile-obsessed four-year-old son, when an interesting and unexpected physics item made an appearance in one of the scenes.

Lightning McQueen, the arrogant young protagonist race car, is astonished when he can't make a left turn on a dirt track. When "Doc" explains that McQueen must turn right to go left, Lightning is annoyed and dumbfounded by the seemingly ridiculous logic of Doc's proposition. But Doc is right (no pun intended). What he is describing is the phenomenon known as "drifting."

Dear EarthTalk: I understand that Toyota is planning to sell a plug-in Prius that will greatly improve the car's already impressive fuel efficiency. Will I be able to convert my older (2006) Prius to make it a plug-in hybrid vehicle? -- Albert D. Rich, Kamuela, Hawaii

Toyota is readying a limited run of a plug-in Prius, which can average 100 miles per gallon, for use in government and commercial fleets starting in 2009. Toyota will monitor how these cars, which will have high-efficiency lithium-ion batteries that haven't been fully tested yet, will hold up under everyday use.

When the Apollo astronauts drove around on the moon, they had to settle for a little buggy. But if you want to tour the Sea of Tranquility in the family SUV or a Ferrari, well, you're looking at more than a few weekends under the hood.

It’s designed to seat two, take off and land vertically, fly 10 feet above the ground, and reach 75 miles an hour. It’s about the size of a car, but it’s round instead of boxy. Yup, it’s a flying saucer. Next year, California-based Moller International hopes to introduce the M200G personal recreation craft, the first of what the company expects to be a full line of “volanters”—vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. The design is 300 years in the making.