portfolio.com: by Dave Demerjian

A jet engine developed by Pratt & Whitney could revolutionize the aviation industry.

One of the biggest names in aviation has developed a jet engine that is more efficient, less polluting and cheaper to use than almost everything else in the sky, and it could revolutionize an industry facing skyrocketing fuel prices and mounting pressure to clean up its act.

Pratt & Whitney has spent the better part of two decades developing the geared turbofan engine that burns 12 to 15 percent less fuel than other jet engines and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 1,500 tons per plane per year. It’s being called one of the most exciting developments commercial aviation has seen in years, and it was a hot topic at the Eco-Aviation Conference, where the aviation industry spent two days charting the course to a greener future. [ read more ]

wired.com: By Chuck Squatriglia

Practicality is the last thing anyone considers when designing concept cars. A car made of glass? Windows like gun slits? An automakers’ lawyers would kill those ideas faster than General Motors is killing Hummer.

But practicality isn’t the point. Concept cars are flights of fantasy carrying auto design into the future. Since our future will be a place where a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of Scotch, the students at Royal College of Art designed their cars that run on things like electricity and algal fuel. [ read more ]

wired.com: By Chuck Squatriglia

All new cars will have some degree of hybridization by 2020, by which point battery technology will be ubiquitous and vehicles will communicate with one another and the road to make driving safer and easier.

That vision of the future is laid out in “Automotive 2020: Clarity Beyond the Chaos,” (.pdf) by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The report, based on interviews with 125 auto industry executives in 15 countries, says the industry is on the cusp of revolutionary changes that will see environmental sustainability and technological innovation become top priorities as automakers respond to consumer demands for more efficient cars that don’t sacrifice performance, comfort or reliability. [ read more ]

wired.com: By Chuck Squatriglia

Plug-in hybrids are a great way to ease our oil addiction and do something about global warming. But it’s taken 10 years for conventional hybrids like the iconic Toyota Prius to eke out almost 3 percent of the domestic market, and nothing suggests cars with cords will take hold any faster.

For that reason, plug-in advocates say, we’ve got to figure out how to start converting a sizable chunk of the nation’s 240 million cars into gas-electric hybrids you can plug into a wall socket. There’s a handful of companies venturing down this path, but they charge as much as 12 grand to do the job and the number of cars they’ve converted would fit inside a Toyota cargo ship with room to spare. [ read more ]

cnn.com: By Michael V. Copeland

Building the world’s first electric supercar was never going to be easy - even without the hubris, infighting, and mismanagement that nearly sent Tesla spinning off the road.

For Martin Eberhard, there were many obstacles on the path to building the ultimate electric sports car. There was the scientific challenge of creating a lithium ion battery pack stable enough to power a 2,650-pound vehicle. There was the belief that Americans would stick with their gas-guzzlers, no matter what the price of oil. And there was, of course, the considerable resistance in the venture capital community to funding heavy industry.

But for Eberhard, the ultimate indignity came in early June of this year. Just days before he was finally supposed to take possession of his Tesla Roadster, a gray beauty with orange racing stripes that he had devoted the past five years of his life to building, a technician who had been driving it on the 101 freeway relayed some bad news.

[ read more ]

cnn.com: by Spencer Washburn

Two engineers built a prototype of a very fuel-efficient car in their spare time.

[ read more ] (video)

blog.wired.com: By Alexander Lew

What do you get when you cross a bus with a train? A dual-mode vehicle that has the versatility of a bus, the speed of light rail and fuel economy vastly better than either.

Toyota and its truck-making subsidiary Hino Motors have signed on with Japan Rail Hokkaido to develop the vehicles, which carry 25 people and reportedly burn one-fourth the amount of diesel fuel required by conventional buses. Japan Rail started testing them about 18 months ago, and bringing Toyota aboard could speed up development and commercialization of what may be the mass transit vehicle of the future. [ read more ]

physorg.com: Chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process for converting plant sugars into hydrogen, which could be used to cheaply and efficiently power vehicles equipped with hydrogen fuel cells without producing any pollutants.

The process involves combining plant sugars, water, and a cocktail of powerful enzymes to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide under mild reaction conditions. They reported on the system, described as the world’s most efficient method for producing hydrogen, at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society. [ read more ]

theonion.com: In what the company is calling a “bold new leap” in comfort, convenience and overall quality of travel, Southwest Airlines announced Monday that it would be replacing its entire fleet of passenger jets and planes with daily shuttle buses.

The shuttle buses, which will depart from airport runways to over 200 destinations nationwide, represent a major breakthrough in commercial aviation. [ read more ]

spectrum.ieee.org: By Willie D. Jones

Driverless cars aim to give each passenger a customized ride

A snaking array of steel pillars outside the newly renovated Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport will, by the end of next year, hold up a guideway upon which little automated electric vehicles will shuttle passengers and airport workers back and forth between the terminal and a distant parking lot. In doing so, the pillars will also be supporting a transportation movement decades in the making. [ read more ]