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Helpful Car The Nissan Leaf interior. Nissan announced Wednesday its next-generation cars will come with vitamin C-dispensing air conditioners, helpful speedometers and NASA-engineered bucket seats. Nissan

Cars will dispense vitamins and helpful reminders

Never mind running on electricity -- cars of the future will be so helpful, they'll spray us with vitamins and make sure we never forget another anniversary.

That's the future envisioned by the people at Nissan, who announced today that their next-generation cars will be designed to make drivers feel they are better off staying in their cars instead of stepping outside.

Within the next two to three years, new Nissans will come with anti-collision radar technology; comfy "easy chair" seats designed by NASA, which are intended to improve blood flow; and air conditioners that spritz passengers with vitamin C, which helps prevent skin damage and wrinkles.

They will also have air purifiers designed by Sharp and smart speedometers that will remind drivers of upcoming anniversaries and birthdays, lest the driver forget.

Nissan hopes to capitalize on growing driver desire for value-added technology, the carmaker says. Cars are more than modes of transport, Nissan engineer Kenichi Tanaka explains: "The emotional aspect of a car has become increasingly important as customer needs diversify," he told AFP.

The anti-collision system is similar to radar systems used in airplanes and ships, AFP reports. It monitors the distance from a vehicle in front and can prevent forward crashes at speeds up to 40 mph. It works by telling the driver to decelerate, then slowing the car by automatically raising the accelerator and pressing the brake.

Nissan has plenty on its plate with the impending launch of the electric Leaf later this year, but a focus on comfort suggests the carmaker is not counting on the Leaf alone to get drivers' attention.

[PhysOrg]

When the Chevy Volt concept first materialized a few years back, there were a lot of questions surrounding America's first mass-market electric car. While answers to most of those questions dribbled out over the last few years, GM remained mum on one critical aspect: price. But today it's official: the Chevy Volt will cost $41,000 before a $7,500 federal tax credit, and the cars will arrive in driveways later this year.

Only 600 dealerships in Chevy's "launch markets" - California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan and Washington, D.C. - will start taking orders for the Volt today, thought the first cars won't roll off the lot until November. But that hasn't stopped the GM PR machine from swinging into action, calling this a "historic day." We'll see. The Volt has competition arriving later this year in the form of Nissan's Leaf, a full-blown EV that gets 100 miles to the charge and costs just $25,280 after the tax credit, compared with $33,500 for the Volt.

But Volt has its selling points. Though it only gets 40 miles from a single charge on its 16-kilowatt-hour Li-ion battery, GM boasts that the Volt performs beyond the competition because it contains a gasoline engine that can assist the battery for another 300 miles, arguably a very clutch feature to include on a car that is supposed to bridge the technological gap between the carbon fuels of the present and the all-electric future.

Considering most Americans keep their daily driving under the 40-mile mark, that might not make such a huge difference. The price, however, probably will. Even after the tax credit the Volt is one of Chevy's more expensive offerings, not too far shy of an entry-level luxury car. As the NYT points out today, while there are 52,464 people across the globe signed up for an unofficial waiting list at the non-GM-affiliated gm-volt.com, those people on average are looking to pay about $31, 400 for the car. Hopefully cost won't end up as the Achilles heel of a seemingly good idea.

GM plans to roll 10,000 Volts off its Detroit production lines by the end of next year, with 30,000 following in 2012. For those not interested in buying a car in that time frame, the Volt will lease for $350 per month with $2,500 cash down.

[Autopia, NY Times]

The GM EV1

Electric cars are nothing new: From lever-powered hybrids to generator-towing luxury cars, we've tracked their progress for nearly a century

It's shaping up to be a big year for electric cars, with Chevrolet's Volt and Nissan's Leaf due before 2010 draws to a close.

Which makes it as good a time as ever to remind ourselves that the idea of an electric car is far from novel; in fact, it's been a persistent, tantalizing puzzle for automotive engineers hoping to eliminate gasoline from the equation for over a century. And there's no better place to track the history of the electric car than in the complete archives.

Click to launch the photo gallery

The story of the electric car and its relationship with the car-buying public is a fickle one. Whether for a hybrid or a pure electric, it remains a tough sell to get the majority of our drivers to give up their gas-guzzlers. This is especially evident in the sad and complicated story of the General Motors EV1--the first electric from a major manufacturer aimed squarely at consumers. The sad story of the EV1 has been well documented in the film "Who Killed the Electric Car", and as you'll see, we followed it from the very start, when it was just a concept.

Check out the gallery for a full look at a century of electric cars in the pages of Popular Science.

Get It Porsche 2011 Cayenne S Hybrid $67,700; porsche.com Courtesy Porsche

Clever engineering makes Porsche's hybrid genuinely efficient

Few vehicles flaunt their gas-chugging power as proudly as a Porsche Cayenne, so it's natural to be suspicious of the hybrid version. Can this racecar-like SUV really improve gas mileage and still be a Porsche?

Thanks to several technological tweaks, yes. First, a more-efficient supercharged 3.0-liter V6 replaces the V8. The gas engine is paired with a 47-horsepower electric motor, and the two are linked with a decoupling clutch, so either one can run the vehicle independently. The motor is capable of handling the load alone at up to 37 mph. Together the pair flings the SUV from 0 to 60 mph in 6.1 seconds. Yet the hybrid gets an estimated 20 mpg city and 25 mpg highway, a 25 and 14 percent gain over the non-hybrid version. It also does tricks: At up to 97 mph, when you take your foot off the accelerator, the engine disengages from the drivetrain and shuts down. Here's how this "sailing" mode lets you briefly zoom without any power at all.

How to Drive Gas-Free at High Speeds

Lift Off the Gas Pedal...
when coasting at high speeds, and the gas engine powers down. A decoupling clutch disconnects the gasoline engine from the electric motor and the rest of the drivetrain, freeing the drivetrain from the drag that the powered-down engine places on it and allowing you to coast farther, fuel-free.

Coast...
powered by unhindered momentum. In this mode, which Porsche calls "sailing," the electric motor runs in reverse, acting as a generator that harvests kinetic energy to recharge the hybrid system's nickel-metal-hydride rear battery.

Punch It...
to speed up again. A computer coordinates the transition back to gas power. The decoupling clutch reconnects the gas engine to the drivetrain within 300 milliseconds, and the electric motor provides an additional boost for highway acceleration without a perceptible lag.

VisLab's Driverless Auto VisLab

A team of Italian engineers is gearing up for a high-tech road rally that should impress even the outside-the-box dreamers over at DARPA: an 8,000-mile journey from Italy to China, with nobody behind the wheel. The three-month convoy will be the longest test of driverless vehicles ever conducted, taking the cars through twisting mountain passes, Moscow traffic, and harsh Siberian weather before ending up in the sprawling roadways of Shanghai in October.

Of course, when we say there's nobody behind the wheel, that's not entirely accurate. The project includes two electric-powered "driverless" vans, each of which will carry two technicians. One of them will always be in the driver seat ready to press the red "oh sh*t!" button and take control should the car's laser scanners, cameras, and software get into a situation that might turn dangerous.

Each van will work in tandem with a manned leader van that will drive ahead and give its driverless counterpart cues on where it's going next. But the driverless vehicle will be responsible for negotiating traffic and responding to the environment and obstacles around it. Only one driverless van and leader vehicle will operate at a time; the other pair will be hauled behind on a truck. The vans require an eight-hour charge after every few hours on the road, so even traveling at speeds between 30-37 miles per hour -- not very fast but not a crawl either -- the going will be very slow.

The transcontinental trek is more of a stress test for driverless technology than a demonstration, and the project leaders concede that the cars will likely need quite a bit of help from humans. But the 100 terabytes of information collected en route will go a long way toward helping the driverless technology maker, VisLab, improve its intelligent systems and artificial vision.

The idea is that someday 100 percent driverless technology could be used to freight cargo across continents autonomously or to reduce troop risk by running driverless military supply convoys, goals more or less congruent with those put forth by DARPA when it created the Urban Challenge several years ago. Of course, there's one more immediate challenge facing the team: Where, exactly, does one charge up a next-gen electric vehicle in the middle of Siberia?

[NPR]

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