mit

One very unusual electric car has debuted in Brussels. The Hiriko EV uses a hub-mounted electric motor at each wheel, though that's not the most interesting aspect of the vehicle. According to The Telegraph, the Hiriko uses an interesting rear suspension design that allows the vehicle to fold up, ...

Math geeks seem to think that complex algorithms can fix just about everything, and when it comes to red light runners, the geeks might be right. The Los Angeles Times reports that MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that can determine whether a driver will run a red light within ...

In July, at the Association for Computing Machinery MobiSys conference, research teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University took home an award for a fuel-saving system in cars that relies on dash-mounted smartphones. MIT says the system saves fuel by ...

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students may have come up with the perfect solution to our electric vehicle charging woes. Instead of relying on lithium or nickel, the new battery design stores its electrons in semi-solid flow cells. Charged particles are suspended in an ...

Auto Observer recently sat down with researchers at the MIT AgeLab to learn more about a new study about distracted driving and how it changes as we age. By placing drivers of various ages into a simulator, researchers can collect data related to distraction. After studying conditions such as ...

If the idea of someone playing with their phone while driving sounds distracting, then wait until you see the latest navigation concept from MIT and Volkswagen. Called the AIDA Project, this technology joint venture between MIT's SENSEable City Lab and VW stands for Affective, Intelligent ...

At last week's Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA, General Motors and a team of tech elites crowned four students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the winners of the inaugural OnStar Student Developers Challenge. The competition tasked five universities to create the next ...

Just like every other automaker, Ford is looking into making its cars lighter, and thus more eco-friendly. Thanks to a bubble-infused plastic introduced at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology [MIT] called MuCell, Ford says it can step further toward its goal of lightening all its cars by ...

The lure of extracting hydrogen from water in a somewhat real-time fashion in sufficient quantities to power an automobile has so far been a complete dead-end pursuit. One of the biggest problems is that it takes more energy to release the hydrogen from its water-tight bonds than is actually ...

Once upon a time, in a history not that far removed from present day, automakers descended into design madness by equipping all of their vehicles with federally-mandated rubber bumpers wide enough for a Boeing to land. It was a dark time that eventually saw the svelte chrome bumpers of old ...

We don't know where carmakers got the idea that we want intelligent robots learning our behavior and then talking to us. Wherever it was, we don't want it any more than they thought we did 25 years ago in a talking Maxima. Nissan has its ...

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been researching where the bottlenecks are inside lithium-ion batteries that limit charging and discharging rates, and they've learned some interesting things. Lithium iron phosphate chemistry is particularly promising in terms of high ...

After the DARPA dust settled, only 40 minutes separated the first, second and third place contenders for this year's $2 million bounty. The Carnegie Mellon team, behind the virtual wheel of a tech'd-out Tahoe dubbed the "Boss," won the DARPA Urban Challenge, the first event held in a mock city ...

Ford is looking for ways to pack their automobiles with innovative technology that achieves the seemingly impossible goal of using smaller, more efficient engines while still delivering the performance wallop customers are demanding. Not only is the Blue Oval seeking more involvement from their ...

The Toyota Prius is a fairly high-tech piece of automotive equipment compared to the simple-engined vehicles of the not-too-distant past. Even so, like us, most of you gearheads can give at least an elementary explanation of how the fuel-efficient Prius works. Toyota takes specially grown ...

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. That can be re-interpreted, for automakers, as the more consumers want your car, the more money they’ll spend your way. And what consumers want right now is better gas mileage, as gas prices continue to climb towards that magical $3 a ...