8 Big Ideas That Make Way for Tomorrow's Smarter Vehicles

• transportation
• cars
• infrastructure
• robotics
• FIRST Robotics
• submarine
• oceanography
• trains
• fuel economy
• wireless
• traffic
• Dean Kamen
• Bosch
• MPG
• energy

By 2012, manufacturing giant Bosch estimates, half the new vehicles in Europe will be able to shut down their engines whenever they begin to idle. Hybrids already work this way. Bosch says its own system, Smart Starter, can boost a conventional car’s city-driving fuel economy by 8 percent. Carmakers won’t say how much such technology will raise prices, but the bump should be a fraction of the premium that hybrid systems demand. The technology isn’t scheduled for introduction in the United States. It should be.


Road congestion gets worse every year, yet thousands of miles of highway—the medians, to be precise—go unused. According to bridge engineer Linda Figg, a gap just 6 feet across can support an elevated roadway three lanes wide. Figg’s Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway added three reversible lanes to a 15-mile stretch of median between Brandon, Fla., and downtown Tampa, cutting travel time from 45 minutes to as little as 20. Such bridges can also carry light rail—Figg’s AirTrain JFK project carries travelers above New York City’s Van Wyck Expressway to Kennedy Airport. The projects require little new grading and no seizures of property. “Look at data networks, the way they’ve been optimized,” Figg says. “They have higher speeds, they’re more efficient, but we’re using the same networks. This is the same—we’re optimizing our corridors by building at multiple levels.”

Watch: Take a ride on the AirTrain
Watch: Erik Sofge interviews Linda Figg about highway engineering



Quick, which is better: Replacing an 18 mpg car with a 28 mpg ride, or going from 34 mpg to 50 mpg? Researchers say that drivers find it easier to get the right answer when efficiency is expressed as gallons per 100 miles (g/100m). Eighteen mpg versus 28 mpg becomes 5.5 g/100m versus 3.6 g/100m, for a savings of 2 gallons every 100 miles. Going from 34 mpg to 50 mpg is the same as switching from 2.9 g/100m to 2 g/100m—only half as big a gain. Such ratings already are common in Europe.


Cars are becoming chatterboxes. They intone directions, pause music to announce incoming calls, and soon will start reading e-mails aloud. But now GM, Volkswagen and other automakers want cars to talk quietly among themselves. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems will enable cars to trade news of hazards such as black ice or a truck broken down on a blind curve. The information will be projected for drivers onto the windshield or shown on a dashboard display. V2V could also help steer drivers clear of traffic snarls. Tests have been run in California and Germany; the next step is to agree on an industry-wide protocol.

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