There's a game called the Waiting Game that works like this: you sit on the sidelines, waiting for everyone else to go first. And then you skip a turn. Or a hundred turns. And before you know it, the game's over. Everyone else is moving ahead and getting to the finish line, and you're still waiting. Wait a minute, this game kind of sucks now that I think about it.

The collapse of the auto industry has done a number on Detroit. Laid-off workers seem to continuously multiply. Abandoned houses line many city blocks. But with the destruction of one industry comes the opportunity for another one to grow in its ashes: farming.

The XR3 vehicle has been in development for years, but it's now ready to go into mainstream production. And almost as important as its 200 mpg hybrid drive system, the trike boasts sleek design lines. It is, in fact, the shape the Aptera should've been.

Plenty of respected car companies--Tesla, Aptera, and Tata Motors among them--have announced their intentions to compete for the Automotive X PRIZE,  but the Spira foam car may beat them all in the creativity department.

Tesla, Aptera, and Tata Motors announced their intentions to compete for the Automotive X PRIZE long ago, but now the Foundation that awards the prize has released the full list of 111 registrants (pdf, right click to save) for the competition. Read More »

During a visit to the Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center in California yesterday, President Obama addressed how the $2.4 billion outlined in the stimulus fund to get more electric vehicles on the road is going to be spent. Will his idea actually work?

Now we can all look forward to a near future where sidewalks are replaced with conveyor belts and robot maids bring us nicely chilled cocktails as we relax after work and all that sci-fi like stuff...because someone's gone and built a successful flying car. It's called the Terrafugia Transition, and it completed a successful first flight on March 5.

It's not quite as advanced as, say, the flying Delorean from Back to the Future, but Terrafugia's (roughly meaning "flees the Earth") invention is nevertheless a carbon-fiber framed full road-going vehicle that automatically transforms between light aircraft and car in around 30 seconds, complete with fold-away flight controls inside the cabin. Its styling is odd, as you may expect from such a strange hybrid, but perhaps in a world where the not-so-dissimilar looking Aptera electric car is on the road it's not too shocking. Maybe that's why Terrafugia's calling it by the slightly clumsy title "roadable aircraft" instead of "flying car."

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Electric cars have gotta be the way of the future with their clean emission-free engines...but are they all going to look as strange as the tricycle-wheeled Aptera? The first pre-production vehicles rolled out recently, and the company has now revealed more data on how its sleek vision of the future car will perform on the road.