Crave

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: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

We were expecting a lot from the Mercury Milan Hybrid. After having briefly driven the Ford Fusion Hybrid, we had an idea iof what to expect from the power train, and we've also seen Ford's killer combination of Sync and Sirius Travel Link in a few cars over the last year. But we didn't realize what a car tech dream the Mercury Milan Hybrid would be.

The first clue it gives comes from the high-tech instrument panel, with a variety of virtual gauges that you can configure. Then there's the phone and MP3 player connectivity offered by Sync, along with its incredible voice command system. Sirius Travel Link mixes traffic, fuel prices, and weather into the navigation system. And finally, the driving experience, with its excellent fuel economy and seamless transition between electric and gas.

The Mercury Milan Hybrid is a remarkable car, and we've rated it appropriately.

Read our review of the 2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid.

Exactly five months after the introduction of the quad-interface, external 4x Blu-ray burner, Other World Computing on Tuesday announced its latest upgrade to the Mercury Pro Blu-ray, which will now burn Blu-ray Discs at up to 8x.

The new Mercury Pro BDR-203 Blu-ray burner can burn 2GB per minute.

(Credit: OWC)

This speed translates into about 2GB per minutes, meaning you can finish a double-sided disc (50GB) in about 25 minutes. Other than Blu-ray Discs, the new drive also writes DVDs (all formats) at up to 16x and CDs at up to 40x. Of course, like all burners, it can play back any of the formats it can record.

The new external drive also supports all four computer connections: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. So far, OWC is the only vendor that offers this quad interface in its external Blu-ray burners. Most other external burners lack the eSATA port.

The Mercury Pro Blu-ray burner comes with two 25GB BD-R discs, and a full retail version of Roxio Toast 10 Titanium for Mac. It also works with Windows, but you'll need to get a separate recording-software suite for it.

According to OWC, the drive has been tested to make sure it's compatible with a wide range of software applications, including iTunes, Apple Disc Burner, Apple iDVD 5, Apple DVD Studio Pro, EMC Retrospect Express, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero Burning ROM.

The drive is available now for $480.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

The days of keeping a library of tapes or CDs in your car are over. You walk around with an MP3 player, so why shouldn't you be able to use it in your car? Today's MP3 players can hold your entire music collection, so you don't have to decide which tunes to bring with you. Today's cars let you easily plug in an iPod or MP3 player and have full control over the device through voice command or the car's touch screen, and that's much safer than trying to manipulate the small controls on an MP3 player while barreling down the freeway. We've picked six cars that work particularly well with iPods and MP3 players.

See our six choices for MP3-friendly cars.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

Just a year after it got an update, the Mercury Mariner Hybrid gets yet another update for 2009, but this one counts for a lot. Ford fits it with the best cabin tech available, which includes the excellent Sync system for integrating MP3 players and cell phones, along with Sirius Travel Link, giving you traffic information and gas prices right in the car. The Mariner Hybrid also gets a bigger gas engine than the previous model, but it doesn't bring the EPA mileage numbers down. During our testing, it didn't seem to make much difference either way.

Read the review.

Ford's SmartGauge lets you view a variety of fuel economy information.

(Credit: Ford)

Earlier we reported on the 2010 Ford Fusion, with photos of the model update. Today we have news of the hybrid version of the Fusion and the 2010 Mercury Milan, due to hit dealers in the first quarter of 2009. Both cars get a new generation of the full hybrid system currently used in the Ford Escape Hybrid and Mercury Mariner Hybrid. Ford isn't giving out many details about this new hybrid system beyond the fact that it will get 5 mpg more than the Toyota Camry Hybrid. However, Ford has shown off the instrument cluster for the cars, a new concept in helping driver's learn about their cars and achieve maximum fuel economy.

We've long been fascinated by the power flow animations in current hybrid cars, which show when power is coming from the electric motor of gas engine. Ford takes this idea a step further, placing LCDs on either side of the speedometer. Similar to concept cars we've seen at many car shows, the LCDs can be configured to show different kinds of information. Ford breaks the different standard displays down like this:

• Inform: Fuel level and battery charge status
• Enlighten: Adds electric vehicle mode indicator and tachometer
• Engage: Adds engine output power and battery output power
• Empower: Adds power to wheels, engine pull-up threshold and accessory power consumption

The eSATA Mercury is equipped with a Hitachi internal hard drive that spins at 7200rpm.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

I asked for it a few blogs ago and now I've got it: the first pocket-size external hard drive that features an eSATA connection, the eSATA OWC Mercury On-The-Go. eSATA is the external interface for SATA, currently the most popular interface for internal hard drives.

A while ago, OWC introduced the world's largest small external had drive and has now become the first vendor to put eSATA on a compact external hard drive. The eSATA OWC Mercury On-The-Go also supports USB 2.0 and features a 320GB internal hard drive from Hitachi that spins at 7200rpm (as opposed to the 5400rpms in most external hard drives of this physical size). It is also the largest in capacity among high-speed, compact external hard drives.

The new OWC comes with an eSATA and a USB 2.0 connection.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

The drive is bus-powered when used with the USB 2.0 connection and requires the included adapter for the eSATA connection. This is because by nature, the eSATA connection doesn't (yet) support drawing juice from the computer to feed the external drive.

The eSATA OWC Mercury costs $250. You can get a USB 2.0-only version for less, or the triple FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB2.0 version if you're willing to pay little more money.

(Credit: CNET Networks/Corrine Schulze)

Driving the 2008 Mercury Sable around San Francisco, we considered painting it yellow, putting a light on top, and starting a career as a taxi driver. The Mercury Sable, brand engineered from the Ford Taurus, is a big sedan with a huge amount of trunk space. The car seems reasonably well-built, with good interior fit and finish, while its V-6 engine gives it enough power to get around. But the car offers a completely characterless driving experience, with poor powertrain response and loads of understeer. One of the key reasons we wanted to review the Mercury Sable, and its most redeeming quality, is that it came with the Sync system coupled with navigation. Previously we had tested the Sync system in the Ford Focus, and had to rely on a minimal radio display for information on our connected devices, but the navigation system's LCD in the Sable formed the basis for a more usable interface.

Read the review