Top Ten Tech Cars: Carmaggedon
With these difficult economic conditions, automakers face what some gearheads call carmaggedon.
In IEEE Spectrum's annual survey of trends in car technology, experts predict there will soon be fewer car companies making fewer kinds of cars. For example Volkswagen's dozen separate models, totaling well over 1 million units a year, on the basic components of its Golf/Jetta/Rabbit line. Or the upstart Chinese automaker BYD, the offspring of a battery company that began making cars only five years ago, and has already launched production of the world's first plug-in hybrid.
Spectrum is predicting that the day of electric-drive cars seems to have come round at last, and they welcome this trend toward radical experimentation, new electronic goodies, and some high-tech mechanisms to supplement or even supplant the driver's judgment.
