electric

Chevy Spark EV on the way, Cadillac CUE debuts, airbags for The Three Stooges, connect your Android phone to your iPod connector, and we drive the 2012 Ford Mustang Boss 302.

• CNET drives the 2012 Ford Mustang Boss 302

• Cadillac CUE looks like a winner in car tech interface design

• This *might* be a good way to connect your Android phone to an iPod dock

• Nissan envisions charging electric cars in 10 minutes

• Take a look at the new BMW 3 Series for 2012… Read more

Wayne gets a ride in Tesla's newest electric car, BMW comes up with a new hybrid, Antuan races in Forza Motorsport 4, and Hyundai preps a mad Veloster for SEMA.

• Tesla Model S Beta 1: A glimpse of the future from the passenger seat

• Kia plans to introduce small EV by year end

• BMW unveils the 5-series hybrid

• Forza Motorsport 4 is a digital playground for car lovers (hands-on)

• Nissan building Juke-R super crossover*

The airflow of a typical human breath travels at less than 2 meters per second. Instead of lamenting its weakness, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try to make a material that could react to this airflow in such a way as to convert it to electrical energy.

So they turned to polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a material in which an electrical charge can build up in response to applied mechanical stress. (There's even a name for this: the piezoelectric effect.) The trick, then, was to get this material thin enough to be sufficiently stressed by human breath.

"We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face," says Xudong Wang, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who reports on these findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Wang's team had go about thinning this material very carefully, so as to preserve its piezoelectric properties. They used an ion-etching process that, with some improvements, might eventually enable them to control thickness to the submicron level.

The obvious benefits of using respiration to power biomedical devices (think blood glucose monitors or pacemakers) are that the source is local and it is consistent.… Read more

At events over this last weekend and the following Monday, Tesla gave its customers and a group of journalists an opportunity to see the beta of its Model S, the new electric sedan it intends to put into production early next year.… Read more

The excitement surrounding Tesla's Model S sedan is palpable, and in an attempt to stir up even more demand for the vehicle, the company Saturday night flung open its doors to show off its upcoming car.

At the event, Tesla let those who preordered the vehicle take a tour of the company's facilities and ride around in a prototype. In addition, according to Reuters, which was at the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked attendees to promote the car to friends to help build more demand.

Tesla has a lot riding on the Model S. Unlike the Roadster, … Read more

Creating a new car can take years of development, but Gordon Murray Design put together a running prototype electric sports car in just nine months. The Teewave AR.1 was commissioned by Toray Industries to show off its carbon fiber production.

Toray says that its process can make carbon fiber components in just 10 minutes. The Teewave AR.1 uses Toray carbon fiber for its chassis, crash structures, body, and interior. Other Toray materials make up interior surfaces and components of the car. … Read more

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but it also happens to be the most rushed. Since the name of the game is to fuel up and get out of the house, it doesn't take much to see why not a lot of time is invested meditating on kitchen appliances in the morning. That ambivalence can extend to the design of our breakfast-makers--otherwise they would more often go beyond basic black. Yet sometimes the confluence of convenience, versatility, and design results in something that gives us what we need and looks good doing it.

Appliances that … Read more

The approval of the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act last year essentially mandated that electric vehicles or hybrids running only on electric power--devoid of the actual engine noise that makes pedestrians (particularly the visually impaired) aware that a vehicle is approaching--must now generate some sort of artificial proximity notification noise. However, although the Act mandated that EVs must make a sound, it didn't specify exactly what sound they should make. This means that every EV and hybrid manufacturer is free to make its cars sound like anything.

Toyota has released a video that explains the vehicle proximity notification sound designed … Read more

The Nostalgia Electrics RMO-400 Microwave Oven is part of a Retro Series collection and looks like it could easily belong in a kitchen of yesteryear--except that it is a microwave. The ubiquitous appliance came to prominence in the '70s and '80s, but to be fair, commercial models were available as far back as the '40s. It is doubtful, however, that any of them resembled this unit. But really, none of that matters--the microwave does look pretty cool.

In use, the 800-watt microwave supplies all modern features that consumers have come to expect, including a turntable and 12 preprogrammed settings. The … Read more