At the British Motor Show across the pond in London where gas is about $10 a gallon, The Lightning just unveiled their new electric sports car which uses the new lithium-titanate battery technology. Why is this important? Well the battery can be charged in minutes unlike Tesla’s production Roadster which takes a couple of hours to charge.

“Tesla have done a good job getting to production - the Roadster is an impressive car,” said Chris Dell, MD of the Lightning Car Co. “Why’s the Lightning better? Because we’ve got fast-charge technology. It’s future-proofed.”

At £120,000 or $239,400, the price is a bit steep for the early adapters. However, competition is what I love to see and hopefully more and more shops will spring up with better technology to out-do each other. Who knows, it may even wake the big three into doing better than the absolute minimum at some point.

Weighing just 660lbs (the current average car is around 3500lbs) and with a drag coefficient of .16 (current average of around .30), the VW One-Liter Concept Car takes just 1L of gasoline to move 100km. This converts into 235MPG.

The two passenger car has anti-lock brakes, stability control and airbags. According to the magazine Canadian Driver, “Volkswagen says the One-Liter Car is as safe as a GT sports car registered for racing. With the aid of computer crash simulations, the car was designed with built-in crash tubes, pressure sensors for airbag control and front crumple zones.”

The car will be sold in limited production as early as 2010. Originally slated for 2012, the dramatic cost drop of carbon fiber in the past few years has brought the car into economic feasibility (about $55,000) much sooner than anticipated. As a daily commuter car, I can’t think of something more reasonable and practical, yet still novel and pretty cool!

Source: Wired

The Ansari X-Prize is a privately sponsored contest centered around various technological tasks that could change the way we as humans live every day. The first, and largest prize, was a putting an aircraft into low earth orbit and bringing it back to Earth without any need for disposable parts that our current Space Shuttle uses. Burt Rattan (creator of the “Voyager” airplane that made it around the world on a tank of fuel) and his SpaceShipOne won the $10,000,000 prize.

Doug Pelmear is one of the few who have signed a letter of intent to compete and enter their car into the Automotive X-Prize. His 1987 Ford Mustang puts down over 400 horsepower and still gets over 80MPG. Though the prize shoots for creating a economically feasable car that gets over 100MPG, Doug is shooting for a car that meets the economical target and is still usable in the “real world”. I think everyone at EasyAutoSales.com would love a “real world” test of any car that can reach these levels of performance.

Doug, a 48-year old electronic engineer, has done minimal modification to the engine’s mechanics itself, depending upon gaining most of his efficiency through ECU programming. He says that traditional gas engines operate “at a very low efficiency, like 8 to 10 percent, and our engine is like at 38 percent efficiency.”

While his technology doesn’t get quite as much absolute mileage as some of the other entries in $10,000,000 X-Prize, his is by far the most user friendly and considering his base for the platform, perhaps the cheapest. We’ll be excited to see some of the other entries to this contest in the coming months!

Source: MustangRevolution

After 5 years of steadly increasing sales, Scion has steadily become one of the coolest brands for youth automotive enthusiasts. With a combination of funky looking cars like the xA and xB as well as unique commercials and marketing thrusts, this sub-brand of Toyota (ala Saturn) was created in order to subvert the stodgy apperance of Toyota, best known in recent years for cars like the Corolla and Camry. In the course of doing this, they’ve exposed America to cool cars that are fuel efficient and they’ve shown that conceptually, these American versions of Japanese “kei” cars, can make a huge impact in our society.

In the past 5 years, Scion has sold over 620,000 vehicles through over 900 Toyota-Scion dealerships. Despite only offering 3 car types through it’s lineup, people seem excited about the addition of a new vehicle every few years and the vast difference between cars like the xD and the tC. Though many criticize Scion for this move, I believe that it shows they are focused on doing what they do as well as they can and not trying to dilute their brand for “the bottom line.” Last year there was talk that Scion actually reduced it’s prodcution to keep the demand for the cars high by limiting the overall supply of cars.

Scion has proven that despite people’s criticisms, they are doing everything right and have been for the last 5 years. Here’s to you Scion and another 5 years of building quirky, yet great cars!

Source: TheCarConnection

For those of you who watch Top Gear (perhaps the single most watched TV show around the world), the seasons seem to sporadically come and go due to the creative nature of the television show and the fact that the producers and hosts don’t want to water the show down by “just getting episodes made and shipped out”. So, though it’s been quite a few months, the first episode of Season 11 aired yesterday on BBC television. If you don’t live where the BBC are all your primary channels, there are various sites on the internet (YouTube) to view the episodes.

As for a quick rundown of the episode, the most notable bits were filling up half a dozen super cars (Audi R8, Aston Vanquish, and a few others) with a gallon of gas and racing to see who was the most fuel efficient. Another race between a new BMW M3 and a Toyota Prius showed the M3 to be a more efficient vehicle when driven around a track at the same speeds. The 3 hosts were tasked with creating a “better, cheaper” police car for the average bobby and a few other standard bits rounded the episode out with a strong, albeit lacking first episode. The preview of this season did show some particularly exciting episodes which should be on par with previous seasons.

Source: FinalGear

As a local to the Atlanta area, stories like this make me take heed about which towns and cities I drive through when roving the city. In an inevitable turn, the city of Holly Springs, GA has instituted a fuel surcharge onto traffic citations, citing the increased cost of patrolling. Each ticket will see an additional $12 increase for the $3.99+ a gallon fuel costs.

Whereas I can’t fault them for trying to keep the police department cash neutral, I would hope that if fuel costs keep rising, police stations will use alternate, non-patrolling techniques to help keep drivers safer on the street. This does not include tricking us with speed cameras and other such nonsense, but increased driver education and better training at early ages. Another solution is to start using more fuel efficient cars for traffic patrolling and save the larger, more tricked out Crown Vics and Impalas for “real” crime stopping.

AOL Money - Cops Slap Speeders With Fuel Surcharge