Supercar!

As gas prices go up for the summer driving season, you must be feeling the increasing emptiness in your wallet, and regretting your decision to buy that extra low mileage Hummer with heated bucket seats and a refrigerator under each of the back seats and a speech recognition media system and a TV for every seat in the vehicle and automatic adjusting seats and a HAL 3000 and a steam engine that burns money.

California Poly thinks they have a solution to that with their improved version of their original high-mileage car, the Black Widow. The three-wheeled, 3 horsepower car travels up to 35 miles and gets an amazing 2750 miles per gallon. That's enough to get you from Seattle to Atlanta on one gallon of gas - with about 50 miles to spare!

Image courtesy Cal Poly Supermileage Team

Another story I found today which, coincidentally, is also about cars, is about the Intelligent Transportation System, or ITS. Now that we have smartphones with the technology to view real-time traffic from our cars over a 3G network, the general science population is researching effective ways to make those gadgets communicate with each other, giving even more accurate data on traffic and other cars.

This is what has me excited today. Soon, we will have cars that can go across the US five to ten times on one tank of gas, and is able to communicate with each other, and with us. You know what that means. Soon, we will have this:

I fully expect that we all will be driving KITTs in 10 to 20 years. On another note, any idea how to stop my car from killing me when it finally becomes intelligent to realize I'm not a good driver?

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