Five cars enter, one car leaves. Well, actually all five cars get to leave, but only one with the title.
(Credit: CNET)Every year, for the past four years, Green Car Journal picks its Green Car of the Year at the LA Auto Show. Well, the LA Show will be here before you know it, so it's time to start thinking about this year's contestants, which have been narrowed down to five finalists.
The finalists include the Audi A3 TDI, the Honda Insight, the Mercury Milan Hybrid, the Toyota Prius, and the Volkswagen Golf TDI. That's two VW turbodiesels and a trio of hybrids; or four small hatchbacks and a small sedan. No matter how you look at it, there's not too much variation this year. However, three of the vehicles have taken our Editors' Choice award at different times this year and two of them have already done battle in a CNET Prizefight, so it will be interesting to see which is chosen as the overall winner.
A panel of jurors (which includes notables such as Jay Leno, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Carroll Shelby, Matt Petersen of Global Green USA and the Sierra Club's Carl Pope) will have to pick one of these vehicles to be crowned the fifth annual Green Car of the Year--which, by the way, is a very different thing from Greenest Car of the Year. There's apparently a bit more that goes into the choosing than just raw fuel economy and emissions numbers.
Last year, it was the Volkswagen Jetta TDI that walked rolled off with the 2009 crown by winning over the judges with its real-world performance and relatively low price. The year before that, it was the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid which was a really big hybrid that didn't return really big mpgs, but still managed to improve fuel economy by a massive 25-percent over the conventional model. Looking way back to the 2007 and 2006 winners, we can see that the Toyota Camry Hybrid and the Mercury Mariner Hybrid have also seen time in the winners' circle.
Editor's note: Polling is closed, the judges have voted, and the results are in. The 2010 Green Car of the Year award has gone to...
(Credit:
Akihabara News)
Open memo to our bosses: Crave needs to schedule an expense-account trip to Milan.
Last week we wrote of a Fujitsu laptop made of cedar that was showing at the Salone Internazionale Del Mobile exhibition (that's "International Furniture Fair" to you Philistines out there). And now we learn that Samsung and Armani--which have already collaborated to produced the designer's exclusive phone, of course--have debuted a jointly marketed HDTV at the event yesterday.
The LCD features 1080p resolution, 100Hz technology, and "a special 4-mode lighted power switch that customizes the display of the two companies' logos on the front of the television," according to Akihabara News. (Which is of paramount importance, after all, because this kind of thing is all about the branding.)
The set, which was displayed with 46- and 52-inch screens, will be available in Europe and South Korea this summer. But if you need an overcompensating designer TV before then, there are always models from other makers festooned with diamonds and rubies.
Microsoft shows off its Surface computer in May
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)DENVER--On Thursday, Microsoft plans to show its partners the Surface computer that it introduced in May. But it will be a little while longer before most partners get a chance to do more than look at the tabletop computer.
Allison Watson, the head of Microsoft's partner efforts, plans to show off the touch-based device as part of a talk she is giving on Microsoft's innovation pipeline. Watson also plans to announce the company is forming a partner advisory council to help the company decide how it should open up the product to outside developers.
"Starting in April, I think the hope is we can launch an actual (software development kit) for partners," Watson said in an interview at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference here. "Before we do that, we thought we'd bring in real partners to help us."
For now, Microsoft is focusing the device, which costs around $10,000, on the hospitality and gaming and retail markets. Software development is limited to a few handpicked partners.
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