new-car-technology

Your next car will almost certainly perform better than your last car, offer more features, greater comfort and more gadgets. It'll also be safer, but we've become so complacent with the safety of modern cars that we barely give it a second thought any more. Carmakers do though, and Toyota has...

If your car is your pride and joy you'll know the annoyance of returning to it after a shopping trip to find that some imbecile has opened their door onto yours or carelessly parked and left a dent and a scrape. And let's face it, if they're careless enough to ding your door they're hardly going to...

We may spend the day writing about modern car technology, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the classic cars that helped form the industry we know today. Some might even suggest "they don't make 'em like they used to", and they'd be right. Unfortunately, they also lack all the safety...

If you're trusting your teenage son or daughter with the car for the night it's nice to know that their journey has gone safely - or that they're actually going where they said they would. For that extra piece of mind GM is testing a new OnStar service called 'Family Link' that allows subscribers...

Getting text messages from friends or loved ones is always welcome. Spam messages from companies can be a nuisance. Having someone unlock and start your car with a text message is much more concerning. Unfortunately, it's not impossible, and researchers from San Francisco security consulting firm...

GM has recently confirmed that from 2013 the Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan will be sold with a turbodiesel engine option, allowing an auto-equipped diesel Cruze to hit low to mid 40s miles per gallon on average. Even the regular gasoline version is fairly efficient by the standards of many cars...

Believe it or not, the 2012 Volvo C30 hatchback is essentially a 10 year old design. Several years before the C30 hit the streets, Volvo revealed a striking concept called the Safety Concept Car (SCC) to the motoring press in 2001, previewing several new technologies that would eventually be seen...

The only trouble with flashy new technology is that it tends to be expensive. Manufacturers spend millions developing the latest infotainment and safety kit and they have to recoup their costs somehow. So what can Billy Joe Average do if he hasn't got the money to get a car with the latest safety...

The OnStar vehicle infotainment, navigation and security system will be familar to owners of newer GM products, but soon you won't even need a GM vehicle to benefit from the technology. Revealed at CES back in March, OnStar FMV, "For My Vehicle", is an aftermarket mirror that features several of...

One minute it's freezing cold, the next you're battling with a hurricane, and then finally the sun comes out for tropical temperatures. No, it's not some futuristic vision of a world in the grips of rapid climate change, it's actually the conditions available in the new wind tunnels used by...

BMW is aiming to become of the first manufacturers to begin high-volume production of carbon fiber car parts. The first part-carbon cars could be seen as soon as 2013. The cost and production time of carbon fiber has been reduced considerably over the last few years. The all-carbon McLaren MP4-12C...

You might not think of the voice inside your sat-nav system or the sound of your blinkers as being particularly sonorous, but then you're probably not working with BMW to turn those sounds and more into a few minutes of music as the backdrop to production of the 2012 BMW 1-Series. The man behind...

Small cars are becoming big business. The smart fortwo, Scion iQ, Gordon Murray's upcoming T.25, the Renault Twizy... more and more carmakers are developing tiny vehicles to provide our city transportation of the future. General Motors has jumped on the bandwagon too. GM showed the cleverly named...

Carmakers love motor racing. The phrase "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" didn't come about for no reason - racing is a great way of raising the profile of your cars and the buying public love knowing that some of the technology in their cars has filtered down from the race track. That's the theory...

Going straight onto All Car Tech's list of things we want is a new electric camper van by design collective NAU, known as Ecco. Describing it as a camper van almost doesn't do it justice, though. The teardropped vehicle is more like a Transformer, changing from efficient and spacious vehicle into a...

A Californian start-up has just received an award of $100,000 as part of the "GE ecomagination Challenge" for an energy-saving idea that could change the way that buildings are constructed. Pythagoras Solar from San Mateo has created windows laced with solar cells and the potential benefits for...

Think turbocharger and you may think high performance, but the latest generation of cars are using turbochargers in order to maintain performance whilst engine capacity decreases in the push for improved fuel economy. Volkswagen is no stranger to forced induction, having used turbochargers on...

What's the most advanced computer in a modern car? The ECU controlling your car's fuelling, ignition, throttle and more? Or perhaps it's the in-car infotainment systems with satellite navigation and downloadable apps? None of the above, says Lexus. The most advanced computer in the modern car is...

As we're seeing with cars like the 2011 Ford Fiesta, small size no longer means a small specification list. The 2012 Toyota Yaris will be no different. The car has just been launched in Europe and more details have been revealed about what toys you can expect to have in Toyota's smallest model. The...

We've seen cars with lane departure warnings and collision detection, but MIT is pushing the envelope with tech that can predict human driving patterns. The computerized intelligent transportation system (ITS) uses an algorithm created from modeled human driving to predict where human drivers are...