»cars«

The EU commission published this week the awaited tightening of emissions limits for passenger cars. Two points are interesting: The limits have been tightened for a decade and the auto makers, obviously, have got enough technical innovations in the pocket to fulfil the higher demands.

diesel vehicles	particles [1]	NOx [2]
Euro 3 (2000-2004)	50	500
Euro 4 (since 2005)	25	250
Euro 5 (by 2008)	5	200
petrol vehicles	HC [3]	NOx [2]
Euro 3 (2000-2004)	200	150
Euro 4 (since 2005)	100	80
Euro 5 (by 2008)	75	60

caption: [1] particles in mg/km, [2] nitrous oxides in mg/km, [3] hydrocarbons in mg/km.

A nice new object in the nanotech showroom: A team lead by James Tour of Rice University, Houston, presented the first motorized, single-molecule nanocar. It's made out of exactly 169 atoms, he told me. The motor is propelled by ultraviolet light pulses and already tested in a liquid. The next step is to put it on a flat surface. (See also the report by Peter Spotts in the Christian Science Monitor, 20.4.2006.) The futuristic goal: The car shall mimic nature and transport and assemble tiny building blocks to larger structures. The image below (provided by Rice University) shows a computer simulation of the nanocar.



Here a brief description of the car.

• size: 4nm x 3nm (length x width)
• assembly method: self-assembling chemical reactions
• wheels: spherical molecules of C, H and B, called p-carborane
• chassis: chain of five benzene molecules
• axles: free spinning alkynes
• motor: light-activated, paddle-shaped molecule
• battery: none, activated by UV light
• in total: 169 atoms, for chemists C59H68B40S2
• manual: Organic Letters (Vol.8,p.1713)

The website ScienceDaily.com (11.3.2006) brings an overview on recently launched car safety projects by the European Commission. Central are the i2010 Intelligent Car Initiative and the PReVENT integrated project. Main target of the EU is to halve the death toll from road accidents to less than annually 25,000 by the year 2010 in Europe. All is about new sensors and intelligent data acquisition to decrease distraction of the driver, focus his attention and protect passengers inside the cars and pedestrians. Actually, the limiting factors is always the human being behind the steering wheel. Hopefully, he or she can cope with the many new safety features which are waiting being introduced into the market, like assistance for turning left, cross intersections, watch the blind spot, mitigate collisions, and more to come.

Paul Marks writes in New Scientist (6.1.2007) about a new navigation application for cars to drive the most fuel efficient way - not the fastest or shortest way as the general option for a vehicle's navigation system. The researchers of Lund university in Sweden assigned fuel consumption factors for 22 roads on a digital map. The test yields a 8 percent reduction in fuel consumption. 4 percent would be more realistic in a real day scenario, the researchers comment. Experts in the navigation industry say it might be to expensive to assign each road efficiency factors.