Click on the image for more shots of RCA's Eco-Cars of the future

To celebrate forty years in business, the Royal College of Art's fourteen graduates this year have undertaken the challenge of designing a future eco-friendly car for the 2008 Pilkington Automotive Vehicle Design award. Of course, some of the concepts are pretty far "out there," though others, like Sergio Loureiro Da Silva's Phoenix concept actually seem plausible. The Phoenix is a bit of a mixture of a motorcycle with sidecar and a normal four-wheeled automobile; it looks awfully futuristic. Pierre Sabas won the competition with his Airflow concept, which features electric motors directly integrated into the wheels. This technique is currently being explored by multiple companies for production cars, so the design doesn't seem to stray too far from reality.

The Nereus concept by Ceri Yorath, on the other hand, strays a bit from normality with its fuel cell powertrain and transformable body panels, which shape themselves based on how you are driving. Still, Jung Hoon Rhee's Noah concept seems the furthest from reality, as its "wave seats" were meant to "duplicate the lightness of being immersed in water." Right. Take a look at all of the concepts in our gallery below. Thanks for the tip, Mike!


[Source: Inhabitat, Wallpaper.com]

Click on the image to enlarge

Tomorrow usually just means tomorrow... as in the next day that you wake up. Sometimes, though, the word tomorrow takes on a slightly different meaning, as it does for the 2008 Peugeot Design Competition. Think of a time in the not-too-distant future. What does the city look like? How do people move around? If you're thinking of something that looks similar to today, maybe you're not quite right for this particular contest. According to Peugeot, a company with a history of quirky designs, judges will be looking for "a concept car to be designed for use in the centre of the great urban cities of the future, while embracing the key values of the 21st century and at the same time, bearing all of Peugeot's recognized styling clues. Submitted entries must integrate all the four dimensions specific to this design competition: environmental friendliness, social harmony, interactive mobility and economic efficiency."

Today's urban settings hardly look like what Peugeot describes, so we're looking forward to seeing what young designers have in store for the future. FYI: 2007's winner is pictured above. Full press release after the jump.

We have shown you the air-car before, and you may have seen it on TV if you watched the Discovery Channel series, Future Car. If you did, you witnessed them erroneously refer to the possibility of perpetual motion in reference to the air-car. While there is no perpetual motion at work here, there may be production plans in the works. An agreement between Tata Motors and MDI, creators and patent-holders for the air-car and it's powertrain may just bring the air-car to market.

Details of the air-car peg the top-speed at 68 mph, and a range of 200-300 kilometers (up to 186 miles). The tanks containing the compressed air can be refilled at special stations, or using the on-board electric compressor in 3-4 hours. The vehicle is expected to see use primarily in urban environments. Will it ever hit U.S. shores? We'll see, right?

[Source: Business Week via Hugg]

I was pretty excited about the show "Future Cars" on Discovery show when I found out about it. And, thankfully, I have not been disappointed. I wrote about the show before it actually started, and we are now three weeks into the series. The last episode, number three, is of particular interest to us at AutoblogGreen, because it covered the types of fuels that we are likely to see in the coming years. All of the usual suspects were included: ethanol, biodiesel, hybrids, pure electrics, hydrogen, solar and even compressed air were all considered, and got roughly equal coverage. Left off the list were biobutanol or any of the other bioalcohol-based fuels.

Linton, a frequent poster on Hugg, has posted his summary of each episode, and here is a link to his coverage of the third. I also noticed that the show incorrectly referred to the air-powered car as perpetual motion. The official website of the show, which can be found here, has more information on the interns at GM that we originally posted about.

As the banner at the top of this posting shows, the last part of this four-part series will be shown next Wednesday, the 28th of February, at 8pm on Discovery Channel. The show will be replayed later that night as well.

EDIT: After rewatching the episodes of Future Car, I was a bit alarmed at the inaccuracies of their depictions of ethanol, biodiesel and air. Ethanol was presented as merely a form of fuel derived from corn. As we all know, corn is one of the worst foodstocks to use for ethanol production. Also, biodiesel was almost completely describes as vegetable oil. In fact, that point was hammered! "ON VEGETABLE OIL" was shown on title screens something like three times. I already mentioned the fact that they described the compressed air car as perpetual power, which is not the case. Anyway, what damage will be done to each industry? Probably not too much... but miseducation is never a good thing.

Related:

• Starting Feb. 7th - Future Cars on Discovery Channel
• GM and Discovery Channel offer design process of fuel-cell vehicles in new show
• Futurecar report on the GM "Skateboard" car on YouTube

[Source: Discovery Channel]