OPINION

Ahead of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring this weekend, think back to 1964, when Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Four years later Colin Chapman, the English engineer and owner of Team Lotus, convinced Imperial Tobacco to part ways with £85,000. With the deal secured, Chapman prior to the Monaco Grand Prix painted his Formula 1 car’s liveries to resemble a packet of the company’s Gold Leaf cigarettes. It was a fitting starting point for corporate exposure through motorsport and proof, then as now, of McLuhan’s spot-on insight. Six decades later, the world of auto racing—specifically the niche realm of professional sports car racing—finds itself at an inflection point. New rules are on the horizon, and the ...

Virtual CES 2021 sucked as much as Virtual Everything Else did, but compelling news broke regarding lidar and autonomous driving. I’m not dialed in enough to sort lidar hype from heroics, so I connected with Tom Jellicoe, an optics expert at the Technology Partnership, a U.K.-based consultancy. Jellicoe was kind enough to Cambridge-mastersplain these latest “third-generation” lidar sensors and their VCSEL array semiconductor lasers to me. For the newbies: Today’s lidar works by emitting pulsed laser light into the surrounding area, which then bounces back to the sensor, allowing the unit to detect its surroundings multiple times per second. This is key to any autonomous vehicle driving and adjusting to everything around it. (Tesla is the lone notable holdout to inco...

When Donald Trump was elected president four years ago, MotorTrend wrote a critical analysis of what the Trump administration would mean for our way of transport. Republican-leaning readers dared me to deliberate this issue in a similarly critical manner the next time a Democrat resided in the Oval Office. I shall not disappoint. “Corvette Joe” Biden is president of the United States, and like all new CEOs of America, he has a list of goals, including how he wants Americans to get around the country. But just like George H.W. Bush being mystified by a supermarket scanner, Biden’s four-decade Beltway residency and Amtrak commute has made him ill-equipped to navigate the realities of transportation’s future. And progressive Democrats are riding shotgun, one gaudy init...

This concept, developed by Tula Technologies and which we covered in depth a few years back, intriguingly can be applied to electric motors—which use neither spark plugs nor valves—and could unlock the potential of cheaper, more sustainable rare-earth-free motors. The concept for both DFM and Tula’s new Dynamic Motor Drive is that whenever a powertrain operates at lower overall efficiency (say, eight cylinders doing the work of two while loafing along), you’re better off making two cylinders work harder and giving the rest a break. With two cylinders at wide-open throttle and the rest bouncing along as air springs, the engine needn’t struggle to suck two cylinders’ worth of air past a closed throttle plate, and it also loses less energy to the exhaust and coolant. S...

Michael Faraday discovered solid electrolytes in the 1830s, and the solid-state battery has promised to be the Next Big Electrical Thing almost ever since. The idea frequently makes news that I resist reporting because, to borrow a baseball metaphor, these battery “batters” too often start their home run trot before realizing it’s just a fly ball to the warning track. But noted scientist Paul Albertus says that 10-year-old Stanford University battery startup QuantumScape appears to have hit a “homerun in terms of their solid-state battery performance data.” Here’s the deal with solid-state: These batteries have long promised to solve the thorniest issues preventing widespread battery-electric vehicle adoption while providing better performance on many me...