Car Tech

You know what variable valve timing is. You're quite familiar with Honda's VTEC system. Now Infiniti has something new for you dive into, and it's all about changing an engine's compression ratio. The Infiniti VC-T engine can change its compression ratio from a low of 8:1 to a high of 14:1. How...

Every new vehicle these days seems to have electric-assist power steering. This type of system saves weight, space, and a bit of fuel. It's not, however, always the most enjoyable setup from an enthusiast standpoint. EPS systems often lack steering feel. We're happy to report, then, that the new...

Your car's brakes are pretty darn important. If you have lousy pedal feel, you should do something about that, right? Stopping is at least as important as going. So when you're looking to fix or upgrade your brake system, should you go with rubber lines or jump up to steel brake lines? Engineering...

The organizers of Roborace, the world’s first race for autonomous cars, has revealed one of their early stage prototypes. It’s called the DevBot, and unlike the cars that will be competing in Roborace, known as Robocars, it has a seat and steering wheel. Part of the development of the...

Singapore on Thursday became the first country in the world with a fully autonomous ride-sharing service offered to the public. The service is being run on a trial basis by American startup nuTonomy, which was formed by researchers at MIT and beat much larger firms such as General Motors Company...

Buried somewhere between longer range and furious acceleration (and resulting "meh" by the collective automotive journalism brain trust), Tesla on Tuesday nudged up the price of its Autopilot feature. The fine folks over at Electrek were paying attention and noticed that Tesla's online configurator...

Buried deep within the 2017 Porsche 911 Turbo is an engineering "no-duh." Talk to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the widowmaker from Stuttgart and they'll say the old Turbo 911s required three feet in any given corner: one for the brake, one for the clutch, another to feed the throttle so...

Ford Motor Company’s [NYSE:F] Fusion has undergone a substantial update for the 2017 model year. Among the changes is a new performance-oriented model dubbed the Fusion V6 Sport. The car boasts a 2.7-liter twin-turbocharged V-6 that’s good for an impressive 325 horsepower and 380...

A patent filing has revealed that Honda is apparently hard at work on (or at least thinking about) a transmission that would pack an insane level of technology: 11 forward gears and three clutches all packaged together in one gearbox. AutoGuide stumbled across the filing posted to the Japanese...

Did you know each of the pistons in Agera RS weigh about 10 ounces? How about that its catalytic converter improves performance by about 300 horsepower? Impressive 0-60 mph times are fun on paper, but the stories behind how they get there are page-turners for enthusiasts and Koenigsegg just dropped...

Volvo and ride-sharing giant Uber have announced plans to join forces in the area of autonomous driving technology. Similar to the deal between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles [NYSE:FCAU] and Google, Volvo will supply Uber with cars fitted with autonomous driving systems for development and testing...

To start, let's talk about what it means to lug your engine. This is the term used to describe when you're puttering along in a higher gear than you need to be in and the engine is turning low RPMs. When you're cruising along in 6th but you should've downshifted into 4th about a half mile back, you...

Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] today announced plans to build a fully autonomous vehicle within five years. The car will have no steering wheel, gas pedal or brake pedal, and it will be used for ride-sharing or ride hailing services. Ford made no mention of when the public will be able to buy such a...

Audi is set to become the first automaker with vehicle-to-object (V2X) communication technology available in its cars. V2X enables cars to communicate with surrounding infrastructure and is a fundamental element towards the implementation of fully autonomous cars. In some Audi models going on sale...

We love horsepower. We love torque. We also need to embrace fuel economy, and that's a tricky line to toe for producers of automobiles with large engines that make loud noises for enthusiastic customers. We currently live in an era of tremendous horsepower availability, yet our vehicles have also...

Infiniti is destined to become the first major automaker with a variable compression engine. The engine, dubbed the VC-T (Variable Compression-Turbo), has the ability to alter the compression ratio, i.e. the volume of the combustion chamber when a piston is at the bottom of the stroke compared to...

The augmented-reality helmet seems to be today's great white whale of motorcycle technology. A number of companies claim to be close to bringing one to market, yet no one has actually delivered. One company that seemed close was, in reality, just blowing all of its crowd-sourced cash on strippers...

Mopar muscle cars bring mo money when it comes to the auction block, and they have for some time. Buying a clean example of a desirable Plymouth or Dodge muscle car will separate from a large sum of money. The barn finds are still out there, though, and the latest example is a 1970 Plymouth GTX...

It’s been a long and rocky road for the radical, arrow-shaped DeltaWing project. The project was born as a proposal for a new type of chassis for IndyCar and later morphed into a race car for the American Le Mans Series, the series founded by key DeltaWing backer Don Panoz. The benefits of...

Jason, the host of Engineering Explained, gets the first point that we were going to make right out of the way. His latest video tackles things you should or should not be doing in a vehicle equipped with a CVT. We'd say that step one is to avoid these vehicles, but as Jason points out, that is the...