Large chunks of steel passing through magnetic fields at 60mph. How are they keeping eddy currents from developing in every car body that passes through the magnetic field of these chargers? Might give quite a few people the old "hot foot".

Check your car HealthyBreeze. It may still have them. I haven't taken apart my current car but my 1999 Mitsubishi had "shock absorbers" that the bumper impact beam connected to.

"This is going to require switching regulators," added to the electric motors and you have such an RFI nightmare...I hope they use very good error correction and noise suppression techniques when communicating between sensors and the ECU. Stand a good chance of making police/ambulance/fire truck two-way radios have poor performance with all the noise. Hope they design such things so that the fundamental frequency, harmonics, and products are well away from the communications VHF and UHF bands. Hate to have the receivers desensed when they have an emergency call trying to come in. They'll need to do more than just comply with part 15 for FCC...it is atypical to design around radio systems and since the power would be low relative to a purpose built transmitter the receive problems may not be realized immediately until someone actually puts a spectrum analyzer in the cab of a vehicle to see what is going on when some of these systems activate (if problems arise). And no, cellular phones are not the answer.

Too late Engineer-Poet. Ninth Circuit Court already ruled that warrants aren't necessary for a federal agency to put GPS tracking devices on your vehicle even if it is in your driveway when they place the device. http://www.executivegov.com/2010/08/ninth-circuit-court-secret-gps-tracking-is-legal/

Many new cars with limited visibility are beginning to include blind spot sensors. My Focus has a little "blind spot" convex mirror in the upper outside corner of each side view mirror. Works well and doesn't require me to turn my head all the way around which is risky in high traffic situations.

Wow! A new Kia Optima already! oh, my bad - that's a Camry.

You are being sarcastic right Harvey? Hard to tell if your post is irreverence due to the typical posts that pop up here or not.

Hi Chad, I am expecting the proliferation of the equipment to bring the price down vastly over the coming years. Starts with luxury vehicles and propogates downwards with cost efficiencies from mass production of sensors and components. At some point, the government is likely to make some of the crash mitigation technologies mandatory (see Seatbelts, Airbags, Electronic Stability Control, Tire pressure monitoring systems). -Volvo XC60 already is equipped with low speed crash mitigation / avoidance equipment. -Audi and a couple Japanese automakers have vehicles which will stay in their lane without driver input. -Adaptive cruise control is available on nearly any luxury vehicle on the market today -Blindspot sensors are available on many vehicles (luxury and otherwise) -Many vehicles have "self parking" modes (even the compact Ford Focus)

"...and only 25% agreed that the CAFE target would not jeopardize the safety of future vehicles" So 75% of the respondents are overlooking the current state and development direction of crash avoidance technologies. By the time these CAFE standards are in place the ability of a vehicle to mitigate and avoid accidents is likely to make low speed accidents non-existent and high speed accidents unlikely to result in death.

"They kill up to 50,000 people every year in USA alone" You've inflated the number for last year by more than 50% (to include motorcyclists). http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811451.pdf 50,000 people have not died in a year in the USA due to motor vehicles for the past 16 years. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx Technology is helping to reduce fatalities.

HarveyD, We didn't put anyone on the moon 50 years ago. Closer to 40 years ago. The vast majority of calculations on those projects were done by hand and with slide rules. A vehicle with a moon budget to have top of the line processing power 50 years ago would have been the size of an 18-wheeler and cost as much as a Saturn V rocket. Reality does not agree with you. The processors they are using right now cost about $3 to $5 a piece and require hundreds of thousands of lines of software which takes a well organized embedded development team 18 months to properly develop & test. The sophisticated methods required did not exist. Have you ever seen punch cards and tape for computers of the 60s? Have you ever seen the "solid state" memory that they used to "program" computers of the time? They were like very large PCBs and trying to squeeze the 1 Megabyte of data in the current controllers onto those form factors would have been IMPOSSIBLE to debug.

ejj, HarveyD- Reread the last sentence of the article.

"It doesn't look like ingress / egress for the rear seats is going to improved - it actually looks worse vs. regular doors" With regular doors you would need a B-pillar (to attach the hinges to) and this would significantly reduce the accessibility. If we are talking about a 2-door, the doors would be much larger making tight parking very problematic. Suicide doors? maybe. The point with children is valid though. You wouldn't have to worry about the kids slamming the door into someone else's car (particularly in tight parking).

"A very well equipped large car @ 30 mpg is not that bad nor is it that good" That depends on whether or not they are talking about average fuel economy (city & highway) or highway only. If Highway only, then I am not impressed at all. If that is the average - I am impressed. That 3.0L motor is making close to the same power that everyone else makes out of 3.5L motors. Even their 2012 Accent is starting to have a full suite of electronics (ABS, EBD (brake force distribution), TCS (traction control), VSM & VDC) if I remember correctly.

I love some of the features. Pretty soon it will be very, very difficult for you to be the cause of an accident unless you are driving very erratically or intentionally trying to smash into someone. I know M-B already has had some of these features along with other select top-end luxury models from other makes but seeing them on a reasonably priced mass market vehicle is very encouraging. The price keeps coming down and soon rear-end collisions will be a thing of the past (or mitigated to a mostly slow speed bump at worst).

"So simple a solution." Yes a simple solution, but it is never a simple task to implement anything in an international way.

HarveyD and all others who are trying to compare fuel economy figures from other countries - the numbers don't compare. If you want to check against EPA figures, use EPA figures. Otherwise I could easily trump your numbers by using the Japanese 10-15 cycle results for the Cruze. Heck, the Malibu's numbers on the Japanese 10-15 cycle would likely beat the Sonata numbers you posted.

ai_vin, Where did you get the fuel economy numbers for the 1980 diesel rabbit? You can't do an EPA comparison of it to the Cruze unless you are using the revised EPA standard from 2007 (or 2008?). The earliest listing I saw for a VW Rabbit Diesel is 35mpg city / 43mpg highway for the 1.6L. This is besting the Cruze while getting very poor or 1/2 star ratings on modern crash & rollover tests through the NHTSA and IIHS. Additionally, it would put out more pollution than 100 Chevy Cruze vehicles.

The 2012 Focus is also expected to get 40mpg on the highway. MG - from briefly viewing a few of the listed cars it appears as if they compared the Cruze against the competitors with manual transmissions.

ejj said, "If you're thinking of spending that much money for a Regal, you can probably spend the same or little more for an Infiniti, Lexus, Acura, BMW, Mercedes," Uhhh okay - since when is the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima made by Infiniti, Lexus, Acura or BMW? Foot, mouth - proceed to remove. Don't be a smart ass when you can't remember what you previously typed.

ejj, the BMW 3 series starts at $33,000 in cheapest configuration. The entry level C series Mercedes starts at $34,000. The cheapest Lexus (IS series) starts at $32,000. The cheapest Infiniti (G Sedan) starts at $31,000. Seems that you are in need of a little reality check as your auto-bias is showing. $26,000 to $31,000 (nearly 20% greater cost) is not a "little more"...The only vehicle of the choices you gave that comes even remotely close is the $29,300 Acura TSX. And if you compare the $28,800 Regal you are in even worse shape since the upscale versions of the other luxury makers cars easily get much more expensive than the Buick's $2,500 increase.

Harvey, let's see if they keep the M56 much longer after this vehicle comes out. I'm actually surprised that they aren't using the 3.7L V-6 instead.

how many live in apartments and condos with no garage? Where I live the answer to that would be none. By law, every apartment or condo building must include parking spaces for each apartment/condo. You mind telling me how you made the logical leap from garage to parking space? "By law" surely only covers where you live and secondly parking spaces don't mean you have access to electricity. Go ahead and try calling an electrician to install an electrical outlet on the apartment owners property and see how far you get, let alone getting the owner to do so of their own volition. On the other hand, those with a garage will typically have access to electricity inside their garage (far different from a parking space). I know of few apartments in my neighborhood with garages and those tend to be the large multi-level structure type garages for towers where rents are around $1200/month for a 400sq ft studio and $3000/month for a 2 bdrm 1100 sq ft place.

Henrik, Of those "100+ million" households you speak of, how many live in apartments and condos with no garage? Unless you give the apartment owners money or a way to seriously gouge the apartment dwellers with a surcharge on energy very few will install outlets for people's cars out of the goodness of their hearts. Most of the land owners tend to be business oriented people interested in maximizing profit (where I live they just filled in the pool without any notice to the residents and I suspect this was simply to lower insurance and maintenance costs because there has never been any injury related to the pool at my apartments).

The popular mechanics interview they did indicated that they went with E85 simply because it gave the best chance of winning. They put winning as the top priority and something about the rules gave E85 a clear advantage in the way MPGe was calculated.