Tesla MotorsCan the greenest car on the planet go faster than a Ferrari? You bet. The first completely ready, highway-prepared, street-legal electric sports car got a big boost from a Bruin. <more> |
Leave the driving to HAL
Undergraduates get a crash course in research by building and racing robot cars – autonomous electronic miniature “smart” cars – in National Semiconductor’s NatCar competition. <more>
Rough, tough and real-life
The Mini Baja competition sends students careening over desert dunes or flying through twisty motocross tracks in self-designed and self-built off-road buggies.
Hydrogen highway
In 1972, UCLA students’ hydrogen powered car won the Urban Vehicle Design Competition. Today Professor Vasilios Manousiouthakis carries on the UCLA tradition of hydrogen fuel innovation, whether tooling around Westwood in a street-legal $750,000 hydrogen fuel-cell car or advising the student-run HercUCLAs racing team – who built a kart powered purely by hydrogen to compete in the Formula Zero (FZ) Championship in the Netherlands.
Beyond Premium
The search for alternative sources of fuel drives students’ work on Chem-E-Cars – shoebox-sized cars powered by chemical reactions. <more>
A new Mystery Machine?
A decade-old mystery stood between Vidvuds Ozolins’ team and their goal of making hydrogen fuel more viable for commercial use. Using molecular dynamics simulations, Ozolins’ team solved the mystery – meaning shopping for hydrogen vehicles at the local dealer could be just around the corner. <more>
Greening the pump
In his effort to make less volatile and corrosive biofuel for commercial use, James C. Liao did nothing less than push nature beyond its limits. <more>
Auto as cell phone tower
Today’s cars come standard with on-board computers. Now a UCLA professor is looking to extend those systems by turning every car into a node on a “mobile Internet.” Imagine commuters accessing real-time information about collisions on the road ahead of them, or rescue workers relying on a mobile vehicle network after a natural disaster topples regular communication networks. <more>
Put in a parking lot
We buy our cars to drive them, but mostly we don’t. Dr. Donald Shoup has spent his career focused on where our cars are when we’re not speeding around – parked. As he’s examined the social, environmental and economic impact of parking, he’s inspired federal parking reforms as well as a group of followers who call themselves “Shoupistas.” See what he has to say about parking in Westwood. <more>
