Cars

How It Works

Digital Mapmaking

Those maps on GPS devices and Google don’t just appear. Here’s how a fleet of minivans is working to digitize every road, building and sign in the world

1. Shooting

The Netherlands-based Tele Atlas is one of two companies that build and update street maps to feed to GPS-device makers and Web sites such as Google Maps. Its raw data: photographs captured by more than 300 drivers, who collectively covered 350,000 miles last year.

[ Read Full Story ]
The Sex Files

Return of the Bodacious 'Bots

Our Sex Files columnist details how sci-fi writers, artists and engineers represent women. Final verdict? "I, for one, welcome our new fembot overlords!"

It's the ultimate geek fantasy: a metal-and-plastic woman of your own, brought alive by technology (the geek's own stock-in-trade), who somehow becomes hopelessly devoted to you. In both science and science fiction, the creation of female robots has tended to revolve around a housekeeper-whore dichotomy: the fembot is either a docile domestic helper, or a sexually uncontrolled, well, sex machine. Historically, she has simultaneously embodied men’s deep desire for idealized domestic companionship and their fears of being destroyed by unbridled female sexuality.

[ Read Full Story ]

More Than Skin Deep

Inside, Porsche's 911 is a whole new car

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.

[ Read Full Story ]

Charging Ahead

Popular Science talks to dot-com billionaire Elon Musk about why he's banking on American-made electric cars

If there's a gene for entrepreneurship, Elon Musk has it. From his first project at age 12 creating and selling a videogame called Blastar for $500, to his $1-billion-plus sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, the 37-year-old South African is every bit the born mogul. These days he's chairman of Solar City, the largest residential solar-power provider in California. He's also the founder and CEO of Space X, a space-exploration company that made headlines last September when it launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit. But lately it's Musk's newly minted role as CEO of the San Carlos, California-based start-up Tesla Motors that is drawing the most attention.

[ Read Full Story ]

Mercedes-Benz Splitview: Clever LCD Screen Keeps Driver Informed, Passenger Entertained

A single LCD monitor on the dashboard lets a driver view the nav screen while a passenger catches a movie

Picture this: You're motoring down the highway, following route guidance on the navigation screen, when the guy in the passenger seat decides he wants to watch Raising Arizona on DVD. Mercedes-Benz and Bosch jointly devised a novel gizmo can satisfy both viewing requests, without a sword and the smarts of Solomon. It's a dual-view LCD monitor system called, elegantly enough, Splitview.

[ Read Full Story ]

Overachievers We Love

An autonomous dump truck, a cheaper maglev train and a globe-trotting solar-powered car

Popular Science celebrates the eternal human urge to go bigger! Better! Farther! Inside, a look at three vehicles with the need to exceed.

[ Read Full Story ]

A Lighter Frame for a Stronger Bike

Buell's new casting technique produces a stronger, lighter motorcycle

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.

[ Read Full Story ]

Meet the New Boss

The robot car arrives

“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. [ Read Full Story ]

Hard Times at the LA Auto Show

At the height of the automotive industry crisis, carmakers tried to smile through the pain

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.

[ Read Full Story ]

No More Blind Corners

Lexus wide-view cameras, making car windows obsolete

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. [ Read Full Story ]

Hydrogen on the Road

Honda introduces the first hydrogen production 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. [ Read Full Story ]

Test Drive: The Electric Mini

The pricey, small-batch lithium-ion powered Mini E has arrived. And it looks and drives like, well, a really quiet Mini Cooper

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.

[ Read Full Story ]
The Breakdown

Getting the Drift

The physics of losing traction

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."

[ Read Full Story ]
READ MORE ABOUT > , ,

Chemical-Powered Cars Square Off

A hydrogen fuel cell powers the winner of the 10th annual Chem-e-Car race

[ Read Full Story ]
READ MORE ABOUT > , , ,

The Parajet Skycar: From London to Timbuktu on Biofuel

A 3,700-mile intercontinental journey in a high-tech swamp boat? Bring it on

If you were wondering, Timbuktu isn't some mythical city with a skyline of emerald buildings housing a race of unicorn-men. It's a real place, situated in the west African country of Mali, a city historians cite as an intellectual and spiritual center of the 15th and 16th centuries. It's also some 3,700 miles from London. Keep that in mind when you consider a scheme to cover those miles in a car that looks like an Everglades airboat designed by Luigi Colani.

[ Read Full Story ]
READ MORE ABOUT > , , , ,
Page 1 of 28 12345678910next ›last »

Flickr Block Header

Share your photos in the Pop Sci pool at www.flickr.com!
Current theme: Spooky Science
Our latest winner

Subscribe for 2 free issues!

POP_embeddedForm_cover_Dec08.jpg