OPINION

I admit that writing about this month’s subject makes me feel a bit like Charlie Brown running toward Lucy and her football. This particular football, as a general concept, is just so alluring: Take a problem (excessive atmospheric CO2) and turn it directly into a solution that lets us keep driving the vehicles we love—via carbon-neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. This latest scheme solves many of the problems that have yanked the ball on my previous runs, giving me the courage to barrel toward it one more time. My three prior columns explaining ways of converting atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuels ran in July 2008, June 2012, and Oct 2018. The early ideas started by scrubbing CO2 from the air with an absorbent compound such as sodium hydroxide in water, isolating the CO2, cracking it ...

Imagine yourself perched atop a steep, snowy hill. If you’re rocking snow pants and a parka, and there’s a sled beneath your snow-insulated cheeks, you want to slide down that slope with as much speed and as little friction as possible. It’ll be fun! As fun as that might be, if you find yourself atop a hill in an SUV packed with three rows of beloved family members, you’ll likely have a different goal in mind. A slow, safe, controlled descent is what we’re after, which can be rather tricky and unnerving to accomplish with brake-pedal modulation alone. Hence, hill-descent control. How Does Hill-Descent Control Work? Land Rover introduced hill-descent control on the compact first-gen Freelander, which reached American dealers in late 2002. The Freelander didn...

As cars get packed with more technology, the way information is delivered changes, too. Analog gauges are disappearing, and screens are taking over, showing everything from your speed to a full map right in front of you. Adding to the sea of change is the head-up display; once a tech feature exclusive to luxury brands, mainstream vehicles now have them, as well. The Two Types of Head-Up Displays The most common type of head-up display projects info onto the vehicle’s windshield. Depending on the automaker, the system can show everything from your speed and navigation directions to what the infotainment system is currently playing. In performance cars or models with manual transmissions, head-up displays have shift indicators that suggest when to upshift. Brands like Mazda, for exampl...

When a tire slides relative to the road surface, whether skidding or spinning, bad things can happen—like accidents and riveting dash-cam videos. The engineering community first tackled the skidding problem, with an initial antilock braking (ABS) patent being awarded to German engineer Karl Waessel in 1928. The 1966 Jensen FF premiered automotive ABS technology, but the computerized four-wheel automotive antilock braking system as we know it today first arrived on the 1971 Imperial and became mandatory on all passenger vehicles as of 2004 (EU) and 2013 (USA). It didn’t take the engineering community long to recognize that the sensors, computers, and actuators needed to detect and prevent a tire from skidding could, with modification, be trained to prevent it from spinning—and thus wa...