Future tech

Tesla Motors, the people who put the all-electric car on the map, are going to work with gas too.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based company will produce two basic types of its Whitestar sedan, due toward the end of 2009. One will run completely on batteries. The other will be a range-extended vehicle, or REV, CEO Ze'ev Drori said in an interview. In an REV, a small gas motor recharges the battery pack while the car is being driven. The battery pack on these types of cars only goes about 40 to 50 miles on a charge, but because … Read more

D-Wave Systems has received $17 million to see if it's possible to compute complex equations by studying the behavior of molecules.

International Investment and Underwriting of Dublin led the round, which was the third round of funding for the Vancouver-based company. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (which always seems to be involved in wacky sorts of companies), GrowthWorks Capital, BDC Venture Capital, Harris & Harris Group, and British Columbia Investment Management also participated. Previously, the company raised more than $30 million.

Quantum computers, which researchers have experimented with for years but which haven't yet existed outside of the laboratory, are … Read more

When you think of the words "hydrogen highway," your mind tends to conjure up images of silent cars whizzing down the road in an environmentally friendly manner.

You don't think about trying to squeeze into a seat between a 300-pound man and a woman with 18 grocery bags. But this scenario might be more realistic.

CalStart, an alternative-transportation advocacy group, has signed five contracts with bus companies to develop and study fuel cells, as well as other components for making hydrogen buses. The $24 million project is partly underwritten by federal grants.

The SunLine Transit Agency in … Read more

You can't buy cellulosic ethanol at the pump just yet, but Corvette Racing will use it on the track this year in the American LeMans circuit.

The Corvette team will put a version of E85 ethanol (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) made from cellulosic ethanol into its cars for the 2008 season. Unlike conventional ethanol, an alcohol made out of corn or sugar cane, cellulosic ethanol is made from sawdust, wood chips, and agricultural waste. Processing cellulosic ethanol is trickier, but advocates say it could result in a cheap form of transportation fuel someday because the feedstock (i.… Read more

For those of you who've lost hope that you'll ever have a robot butler or drive a hovercraft, here's a glimmer of possibility: a jet pack! Thunderbolt Aerosystems has developed the Thunderpack, a "rocket belt" that can propel you through the air at up to 75 miles per hour. Okay, so it will only fly for 45 seconds. And it'll cost you $100,00 to buy one. Then there's the fact that I'm sure a few safety-freakish representatives of Congress will do everything in their power to keep these out of the … Read more

Sugar or sunlight?

That's one of the fundamental questions for companies trying to transform algae into transportation fuel or dietary supplements. Solazyme says it will grow algae through fermentation--for instance, feeding the algae sugars in a heated, sealed environment.

"We're not growing it photosynthetically. We put it in stainless steel tanks similar to what you see in a brew pub," said Solazyme President Harrison Dillon.

By contrast, GreenFuel Technologies and LiveFuels will exploit the sun to grow the single-celled creatures. And here there is a divide, too. GreenFuel grows its algae in sealed, transparent tubes … Read more

In case you weren't up on your blogsphere knowledge, ultra suave rapper Kanye West has a blog that'll drop some knowledge on y'all (his words, not mine.) He occasionally posts one or two sentence posts about fashion, music and the latest in tech he finds appealing. That's where we find these two interesting watch concepts.

The first, from design firm Chocolate Agency, sports the "e-paper" technology we've all come to know and love, albeit in a futuristic form that isn't anywhere near ready for prime-time. (C'mon, you've seen the Kindle'… Read more

The engineers at Tesla Motors have designed a new single-speed transmission for its sports car that will let it hit the promised zero to 60 mph in four seconds.

The transmission won't come out on the first Tesla Roadsters coming off the line, the company said in a press release. Those early production cars will have a two-speed transmission that will only let the car get to 60 mph in 5.7 seconds. Problems with the transmission were part of the reason the company delayed the cars from the middle of last year until now. Some modifications to the … Read more

January is diesel engine month, it seems.

Following announcements from EcoMotors and Transonic Combustion, San Diego's Achates Power has said on its Web site that it's creating a clean, light, fuel-efficient diesel engine.

The company has also received investments from Sequoia Capital, a relative newcomer to energy investments, Rockport Capital Partners and Interwest Partners. (VentureWire has a brief interview with Achates CEO James Lemke.)

Achates has not said how its engine will work, the company has three patent applications on file with the U.S. Patent Office. Two of the patents describe what's known as an opposed … Read more