This is great! Ben Wood designed a car made almost completely from food. That’s right, and he claims it can go up to 150mph! Here’s the recipe if you are interested:

Made from such ingredients as potatoes, pulped hemp, cashew nut shells, this car is almost completely biodegradable. The engine is made from steel naturally (steel is pretty recyclable), and there is some parts made from plastic but Ben claims even those can be replaced with parts made from plants. The whole car cost about 20000 pounds to build and it took about two months.

via: DailyMail.co.uk

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Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry is developing a plan for a joint effort of 10 Japanese car manufacturers, some of which have already begun working on their own, to develop an operating system for automotive electronics. European car manufacturers are also working on a similar project already. The ministry will commission the task to JasPar - Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture - a joint venture of automakers and auto-parts makers and, electronics firms, including Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Honda R&D Co., Denso Corp. and Toshiba Corp.

A prototype should be completed in 2009 and then marketed in the next 5 to 10 years.

Basically, all electronically induced processes on a car are controlled by a central computer, which is run by a built-in operating system. Functions controlled by the car operating system include breaking, airbag control, combustible mixture control, fuel injection, but also specific functions especially on more sophisticated luxury cars.

Bosch, the leading parts manufacturer in Europe, has introduced OSEK, which is basically an automotive version of the Windows operating system. OSEK hold about 70% of the world automotive operating system market share.

Europeans are already working on a new advanced and improved version of the car OS, expected to be released in 2008.

via: Yomiuri Shinbun

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This concept was introduced some years back by Mercedes-Benz, but they have finally followed-up with an actual engine that has been tested and some interesting data to show about its performance. Mercedes-Benz claims the 1.8 l engine to output 238 bhp and 295 pdft of torque. The engine has turbo-compression, direct fuel injection and “controlled auto ignition”. As some of you may know auto ignition is a process used in Diesel engines where the fuel self ignites under huge pressure. Gasoline has to be ignited with an outer heat source, such as spark plugs. Controlled auto ignition would then have to be a hybrid process of Diesel-like self ignition used on gasoline. Fuel consumption is about 6 l / 100 km, and Mercedes-Benz says the given data is for larger category cars, such as limos from the S-class. Pretty impressive.

Read full story here.

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