A user's guide to self-driving cars

You may remember the cute Google self-driving car. In 2014, the tech giant announced their brand-new prototype of what the future of transportation might one day look like. If you wish you could drive one today, you are out ...

Toyota three-wheeler does 80.3 mph on compressed air

(PhysOrg.com) -- Toyota Industries intends to apply for a Guiness World record for the fastest car driven by a compressed-air engine, after its Ku:Rin, as the vehicle is called, reached 129.2km/h (80.3 mph)on a test run earlier ...

Electromagnetic fields as cutting tools

(PhysOrg.com) -- The bodywork on motor vehicles must be sufficiently stable, but processing the high-strength steels involved -- for example punching holes in them -- can prove something of a challenge. A new steel-cutting ...

McAfee warns of hacker threat to autos

Cars made smarter with Internet technology are zooming into perilous hacker territory, according to a report by US computer security giant McAfee.

A high-tech propulsion system for the next 100 years

Environmentally friendly fuels are not just of interest for use in cars. The University of Birmingham has been operating a canal boat with a fuel cell drive for three years now. In the world of shipbuilding, however, different ...

page 1 from 12

Automobile

An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.

The term motorcar has also been used in the context of electrified rail systems to denote a car which functions as a small locomotive but also provides space for passengers and baggage. These locomotive cars were often used on suburban routes by both interurban and intercity railroad systems.

There are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide (roughly one car per eleven people). Around the world, there were about 806 million cars and light trucks on the road in 2007; the engines of these burn over a billion cubic meters (260 billion US gallons) of petrol/gasoline and diesel fuel yearly. The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China and India.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA