car

Our own John Carnett's jet-powered ATV is not the first four wheeled vehicle to sport a turbine. The wheel-scorchingly awesome history of this idea goes back significantly further, to at least the Turbonique hot-rod hop up parts of the middle sixties. BangShift has uncovered videos of Turbonique turbine dragsters (Beetles, go-karts, you name it) in action.

Seems just about anyone can drive like Batman these days, if they have $1 million and 20,000 man-hours to spare. No doubt this Swedish man felt just like Bruce Wayne during those long three and a half years, except without the financial muscle of Wayne Enterprises or a wise-cracking Alfred to bring him tea during breaks.

The future of secure travel hinges on seamless, instant communication-and 24/7 autonomous surveillance. For a look at the technologies that will soon safeguard your travel plans, launch the photo gallery.

Click "View Photos" at left to come along on PopSci's test drive of the impossibly fast Bugatti Veyron 16.4.

Click here to launch the gallery.

Blinding rain. Careening traffic. Distracted drivers. There are lots of reasons why car crashes are America's leading cause of accidental death. And one way that most accidents could be prevented: with cars that predict a coming collision-and take action to stop it.

It's heresy to 911 worshippers to say so, but the new Cayman S is suddenly the most beautiful car in Porsche's lineup. It's a Boxster coupe, basically a midengine two-seater with a fair amount of new body metal and interior appointments. But in reverse engineering a coupe from a roadster, Porsche managed to avoid both the slightly lumpy engine butt of the 911 and the too-symmetrical stance of the Boxster. The Cayman's high roofline swoops back and down between the gorgeous haunches of the rear fenders, and a walkabout reveals that the whole car is a fugue of aggressive curving lines.

It sounds like something out of a Bond flick: a car with a hood that´s launched open by a pair of explosive charges. But Jaguar´s Pedestrian Deployable Bonnet System (PDBS) isn´t intended to thwart bad guys. Its purpose is to soften the impact on the unfortunate soul who gets hit by the European version of the 2007 Jaguar XK. PDBS is Jaguar´s response to new European Union legislation that requires automobiles to be gentler on pedestrians in the event of a collision (exploding hoods have not been greenlighted in the U.S.).

Certain parts of a car´s engine can reach temperatures in excess of 1,500�F. With this in mind, the engineers at BMW developed a way to boost efficiency: Transform that otherwise wasted heat into energy the engine can use. The resulting Turbo- steamer reclaims more than 80 percent of the heat lost from the engine´s exhaust and cooling systems. It uses this surplus heat to generate steam that helps drive the engine. It boosts power and torque by 10 percent and cuts fuel consumption by 15 percent without using a single additional drop of gasoline.

When Mercedes-Benz began to contemplate its next generation of high-efficiency small cars, it sought aquatic inspiration. But instead of considering obvious undersea hot rods like sharks, the Mercedes team turned to a fish that resembled a car: the tropical boxfish. A native of the Indo-Pacific region, the Ostracion cubicus is surprisingly slick. Wind-tunnel testing of a clay model revealed a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.06, startlingly close to the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet.

Car engines have been governed by computers for years, but Honda’s iGX440 (honda.com) is the first power-equipment engine with a microchip. The electronically regulated iGX440which will show up in lawn mowers, water pumps and pressure washers later this yearruns at a constant engine speed even under changing loads. Thick grass usually causes mower engines to slow, bogging down whomever's pushing the machine, but the iGX440 maintains speed, and thus power, by giving the engine more gas and manipulating ignition timing.