These days when we think of wireless charging we think about using an accessory for our cell phones. Not long from now we may be using the same tech to power our electric vehicles. According to CNET, Toyota has invested in a company called WiTricity that, until now, has developed wireless charging solutions specifically for portable electronics. In a recent statement Toyota said that it “believes that resonance wireless charging is suitable for automobiles and aims for its early practical use.” Using magnetic near-field, WiTricity could potentially offer a wireless charging solution for cars, too. We’re imagining a future where, instead of pulling up to the pump, or plugging your electric car into an outlet, you simply need to drive into your garage to begin charging. “WiTricity power sources and capture devices are specially designed magnetic resonators that efficiently transfer power over large distances via the magnetic near-field. These proprietary source and device designs and the electronic systems that control them support efficient energy transfer over distances that are many times the size of the sources/devices themselves,” the firm said. Other companies, like HaloIPT, also offer wireless car-charging solutions, but this is the first we’ve heard of a major car manufacturer getting on board. Read

Mercedes-Benz is on an environmentally conscious tear as of late, launching two hybrid vehicles last year, and now an entirely zero emission fuel cell car this December. We were given an opportunity to test drive the new F-Cell vehicle in Manhattan and learn more about the car. For starters, when thinking about what Mercedes has done with this specific vehicle, it’s mind blowing in itself. A non-combustion engine car that is powered off of hydrogen with zero emissions. Did you ever think you’d see the day? As a car lover, just hopping into the driver’s seat of the F-Cell was an experience. Zipping around downtown New York City in the car was… just like driving a gas-powered vehicle, except, there was no noise. I’ve driven dual-mode hybrid cars before, and I have gotten used to not hearing an engine at some times, but no engine sound at all? Borderline ghostly. While the B-Class-based F-Cell has an all electric motor rated at 136 horsepower and 214 pounds of torque, it definitely didn’t feel underpowered. Plus, once we got over the sound of no sound from the engine, there wasn’t much to complain about. It’s the first fuel-cell car from Mercedes, and while it’s not exactly the most luxurious or stylish model in their lineup, neither is a Prius. Being powered 100% by hydrogen lends itself to one main issue: finding a hydrogen refueling station. Now, there are a couple around the NYC area (White Plains, NY, Wallingford, CT, Bronx, NY), but when the F-Cell touches down in December for consumer leasing, it’s going to be heading to the state of California — mostly Los Angeles and San Francisco where there are plenty of hydrogen stations. You might notice how we said leasing and not purchasing, and that’s because the car will only be offered by way of a lease, and while Mercedes wouldn’t confirm pricing information to us, we’ve heard it will run around $550-$750/month. Definitely on the higher end of the spectrum, but for a car that literally emits water instead of toxic sludge — representing the future of the automotive industry — all we can say is, sign us up.

Click on over to our Mercedes-Benz F-Cell vehicle gallery!

I couldn’t pass up taking a photo of this Tesla Roadster’s license plate just now. Can you come up with a better one?

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Mobile giant Nokia and car-systems specialists Clarion have announced a partnership to push a technology they are calling Terminal Mode. As the press release reads, “Terminal Mode, [is] a technology that will enable a totally new way of mobile devices and car infotainment systems to seamlessly work together.” This is a technology that Nokia and Clarion plan on supplementing with content from Nokia’s Ovi Store, and one hopes will be and “industry standard.” The idea is to create a back-end system, and front-end interface, that will become the standard for car manufactures, allowing both OEMs and consumers to customize and tailor their in-car experience. We’ve got the full release for you after the bounce.

Clarion and Nokia Team Up on Connected Car Technology

TOKYO, June 22 /PRNewswire/ — Clarion Co., Ltd., a global leader in car audio and electronics, and Nokia Corporation, the world’s leading mobile device producer today announced that they are collaborating on Terminal Mode, a technology that will enable a totally new way of mobile devices and car infotainment systems to seamlessly work together. Both companies say this collaboration will further boost the development of next-generation smart car infotainment systems.

Through this partnership Clarion aims to develop the smartphone interface that Nokia and Consumer Electronics for Automotive, CE4A are proposing as industry standard, as well as to build an application service business for in-car devices utilizing the Ovi Store application service by Nokia. Clarion is also targeting accelerated development and greater commercial dominance of in-car information systems for the Europe and North America markets where Nokia has a strong presence, as well as China and other emerging markets.

“By integrating the Terminal Mode technology into in-car information systems such as car navigation developed by Clarion, we will be able to bring to customers the vast array of applications and services available to smartphones on in-car devices. The integration of in-car devices with smartphones will provide better user experiences for consumers and lead to radical changes in in-car information systems,” says Tatsuhiko Izumi, president of Clarion.

“Through a stronger collaboration with Nokia and NAVTEQ, which supplies map information for our car navigation systems in overseas markets, it will be possible to utilize smartphone functions and services for in-car information system functions and support services such as intelligent transport systems (ITS), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and navigation coordination.

“Nokia believes that Terminal Mode is an ideal base for industry innovation, allowing existing and new kinds of services to be extended into the car,” says Vesa Luiro, Automotive Director at Nokia. “We are already committed to collaboration with the automotive industry and this alliance with Clarion will further improve the user experience in the car and enable consumers to access their favorite internet services and smartphone applications, wherever they are.”

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We’ve always wanted to hit the NY Auto Show and this year, Buick sponsored our trip. There weren’t many brand new announcements (we actually can’t think of a single one that we can remember), but we did spend some quick time going over some of the cars that caught our eyes. Don’t judge us. Check out the brief video we put together after the jump!

This post is part of our “Live Like A Genius” content series sponsored by Buick and the all-new 2010 LaCrosse.

We wanted to do something fun with car technology for the 2010 New York Auto Show… a little change of pace for BGR. This year, we’re doing some segments on all the different technology that goes into the latest and greatest vehicles currently available, and those that are about to hit the market. Buick has graciously sponsored our New York Auto Show coverage this year — they’ve even dropped off a Buick LaCrosse so we could see what kind of tech it’s pushin’. Look for our Auto Show coverage segments coming real soon, but for now, here’s a quick look at the 2010 Buick LaCrosse from a technology perspective.

This post is part of our “Live Like A Genius” content series sponsored by Buick and the all-new 2010 LaCrosse.

We won’t actually comment on how the car drives since that’s not what we’re really interested in, but as far as the interior goes, it ranges from pretty boring and bland, to pretty amazing. We’ll keep this really short, but here’s some of the stuff we’ve loved after playing with the car for over a week:

• The car has a 40GB built-in hard drive and can rip your MP3s right from the CD and store it in the car.
• What’s even cooler though, is that the same hard drive is used for caching the radio stations you’re listening to. That means you can literally rewind live radio up to 20 minutes in case you missed a song you wanted to hear, a contest — whatever.
• The LaCrosse is the first car we’ve seen to show a full visual weather forecast, and damn does it look nice.
• Bluetooth is a breeze to pair your phones with, and our iPhone connected perfectly to the built in USB port.
• The car features some great advancements like an air quality filter which continuously monitors the quality of the outside air and will automatically switch your A/C to recirculation, a great rear camera back up system with visual guidance, and a really solid and straight forward user interface.

Some of the stuff we weren’t too happy about?

• The car has this weird wrap around console that literally goes from the rear doors, all the way up the front, and continues onto the dash. It’s kind of futuristic looking, and makes you feel like you’re about to lift off. Cool at first, but the blue lighting kind of gets old quick. Plus it doesn’t really match with the Buick brand all too much, but maybe that’s just us…
• While the Bluetooth pairing of our phones went oh-so-smoothly, unfortunately, we couldn’t find a way to sync our address book with the car. Worse than that, there was no recently called, missed, or most frequently contacted lists anywhere we could see.
• Is it bad we’re hoping for capacitive navigation screens in cars? The screen on the Buick was probably just as good as any other, but we had a couple mis-fires and it was a little bit frustrating when trying to get the weather or enter in a navigation point.

Click on over to our Buick LaCrosse technology gallery!

A lot of people loved our tech-focused segment on the all-new 2010 Mercedes E-Class and we’re following up with a nice video overview of the vehicle. We were lucky enough to meet with Bart Herring who is product manager for the E-Class series, and in addition to giving us a great presentation on the car, took some time to help put this video together.

Recently I visited Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters in Montvale, NJ to see their all-new 2010 E-Class vehicles. You might be thinking we’re pulling an Autoblog, but we’re not. If you knew the amount of technology and engineering in the new E-Class… well, you’re actually about to.

When you begin to look at how much effort, planning, design, testing, and money goes into creating a line of cars, you realize it’s not an easy task. Forget about competition from other manufacturers, just hearing and seeing the process of how it’s done was an incredible experience for me. We’re going to focus on just some of the technological features in the E-Class which is more than we could ever imagine, so once you add that in with every other component in a car, it’s really amazing. I was lucky enough to get a whole sense of how the process works and how it’s executed. I also test drove two 2010 E-Class vehicles, the E550 Coupe and the E63 AMG Sedan. Read on for my experience and an overview of some of the amazing stuff in the E-Class.

Disclosure: Mercedes-Benz North America is a past and present advertiser on BGR.

The E-Class has a feature called ATTENTION ASSIST which is amazingly cool and incredibly brilliant. Mercedes told us that people who drive when they are tired and drowsy get into car accidents roughly 100,000 times a year, almost as much as driving while intoxicated. What Attention Assist does is monitor around 70 different parameters to get a baseline of your habits and then compare it in real-time to your current driving habit. So, you turn on your car and go off for a drive on the highway. For the first 20 minutes, the intuitive system automatically is monitoring different things that you do. Stuff like how aggressive you are with the steering wheel, braking patterns, and much more. Once that baseline is measured, the system then can decide if your patterns changed for the worse and it wants to alert you. There’s an audible alert as well as a visual one in the instrument cluster.

Mercedes told us that in testing, Mercedes drivers typically have a heart-rate that’s reduced by 5% compared to other drivers of other brand vehicles. The reason they said is because of how much attention they pay to the cabin and the entire experience of making the driver feel like a driver, and a driver that’s driving comfortably.

Something else intelligent the new E-Class does is called Adaptive High Beam Assist. It uses a camera that sees oncoming headlights and taillights of cars in front of you. It then automatically softens the headlights as cars pass by you to ease the lighting and not blind them. It will even switch between high-beams and low-beams automatically. But the best part is that it’s all automatic and will auto-adjust your headlights to compensate for 1,000ft of road (including vehicles) in front of you.

The E-Class cars we saw were equipped with a bag load of safety features and it’s really great to see these things start to get implemented faster and faster on different cars from all sorts of manufacturers. PRE-SAFE Brake is another one of these technological achievements that you might wonder why it isn’t available until now. It makes use of something called DISTRONIC PLUS feature (basically think of it as adaptive cruise control that uses radar to see if another vehicle in front of you has stopped while you’re cruising at 75MPH), and what it does is actually stop the car for you in emergency conditions. We’re not talking about just slowing it down and slightly breaking, we’re talking 100% braking power. It works by sensing an impending rear collision (you about to hit another car in front of yours) and will sound about three warning tones.

If you’re listening to Bubba Sparxx too loud on your iPod and don’t hear those tones, and you don’t see the visual alerts because you’re emailing BGR a tip (not smart), the car will be able to detect that you’re a moron and apply around 40% partial braking to the car to slow you down 1.6 seconds prior to impact. But if all the aforementioned things fail, besides the fact you probably shouldn’t be operating a moving vehicle, the car will apply 100% full braking power 0.6 seconds before impact which will create an “electronic crumple zone,” dramatically reducing the impact for you. It doesn’t mean you won’t crash, but it’s an amazing safety enhancement that Mercedes is confident will reduce serious accidents on the road.

What about night vision? Well, Mercedes said they’re one of the only manufacturers to use an actual camera for their night vision implementation, and instead of detecting heat, it works as does a regular night vision product; it shoots out IR light and the IR camera captures it. We were told it enables you to see more or less 500ft in front of you which is unbelievable if you think about it. There’s also a person detection feature that will put people in boxes so you can accurately view them.

If you know me personally (funny guy, aren’t I?) or even follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I absolutely love cars. So mix that love of tech, gadgets, mobile devices, and everything else with cars and you can get an idea of why the E-Class is so interesting and incredible to me. It’s the most advanced vehicle I’ve ever driven and one of the most exciting just from the technology aspect itself. But, who are we kidding. The E63 would have had me excited if there was a rotary phone strapped to it. Just look at it.

The car can also pair up to 5 mobile phones via Bluetooth and will give you much-loved signal strength indicator in the COMAND display as well as load in your entire phone address book if you’d please. The navigation system actually shows a lot of POI data as icons now, so you’ll literally see a Sunoco sign if there’s one close to you, or a McDonalds, or what have you. Completely unnecessary yet surprisingly enjoyable. Something else interesting is that DVD-based navigation is no longer necessary in this vehicle as it uses a built in hard drive to store everything. There is also around 4GB of free space for you to copy MP3 files to and play back at your leisure.

Another great feature for us phone freaks is that pretty much all Mercedes have dedicated phone number pads.

What about suspension? Isn’t there some tech in there, too? Definitely. There are two different suspension options on the E-Class. One is a spring-suspension system and the other is AIRMATIC suspension which lets the driver select either comfort or spots mode at the touch of a button to fine turn their driving experience. We would have preferred even more control on the suspension, maybe four modes, like some other cars offer, but oh well.

There’s literally so much technology in this car — obviously why I jumped at the opportunity to do this article — that we could go on and on for a pretty long time. If the car senses an incoming collision the seats will move automatically to a more favorable crash position to try and protect the occupants, if the car is about to roll over, the sunroof and windows close automatically, there are up to 11 airbags in the car (9 standard) and a whole lot more. What’s great about all this technology though, is that it’s configurable. We often asked if you could disable almost every new feature they briefed us on, and the answer was always yes. We’ll be following up with a video post on the E-Class that will give you a more visual look at the car’s styling and design elements as well as a nice walk-through from our friend Bart Herring who is Product Manager for the E-Class series at Mercedes-Benz.

In-car video entertainment is hardly something uncommon these days. Any run-of-the-mill mini van or SUV can be fitted with a nice DVD / console entertainment system for a fraction of what it used to cost, typically directly from the dealer. If you want to give your front passenger something to focus on during those long trips however, it’s a slightly different story. Sure you can have your local shop slap a flat panel into your passenger-side visor but unless you’re a teenager you’re or prepping for an appearance on Cribs, you might get a few funny looks. Don’t sweat it though, Mercedes-Benz and Bosch might just have the cure for what ails you – assuming you can squeeze a new S-Class into your budget next year. The duo have developed a new display technology dubbed SPLITVIEW that will allow a single screen to display two different pictures depending on the viewing angle. Using a combination of clever pixel placement and a unique filter, SPLITVIEW will allow a centrally-located monitor in the dash to display navigation or control information to the driver while displaying a DVD or even TV channels to the passenger. The passenger will also have the option of using headphones, freeing up the car’s speakers for music or turn-by-turn navigation instructions. Pretty slick, eh? Expect SPLITVIEW to make its first appearance in production 2010 S-Class cars this summer.

Thanks, Robby!

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Saturn’s slogan is now “Rethink”, but it’s beginning to look like the GM-owned automaker is taking that sentiment in a completely different direction. After making an effort to rebrand the Saturn line and produce a variety of attractive vehicles, General Motors might pull the plug on the 23-year-old auto line. With rumors of bankruptcies and dealers going out of business (none of which were true), Saturn’s reputation has been taking some serious hits lately. It’s also no help that the US automotive industry is suffering and relying on the government for a bailout, so GM is going to strongly consider shutting down Saturn while it forms plans this week in terms of an impending reorg. We imagine it’s not going to be a tough decision since Saturn hasn’t been profitable for GM at all. Along with axing the celestial brand, the automotive giant is considering selling off the Saab line and turning Pontiac into a “niche” brand, much like Saturn is now. So, after several years of producing what seems to be like one or two models, Saturn now offers several decent vehicles: Astra, Outlook, Sky, Vue and Aura. Still, it has failed to gain any real popularity and is likely going to disappear forever. Is anyone actually going to miss it?

Thanks, Alex R!

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If you thought breaking up over a text message was in bad taste, try empathizing with the Tesla employees who were just laid off… via a blog post! That’s right, 90% of the Tesla team in Metro Detroit were let go, but someone assigned to break the news didn’t have the guts to tell them. Instead, the employees found out through their own site that they were finished. What’s to become of the remaining 10%? Those who aren’t notified of their termination today (via a bulletin board at the plant, mind you) have to relocate to San Jose, CA – at least it’s brighter and the weather is more temperate in Cali, right? The problem is getting there when your company won’t help with relocation, moving costs, selling your current home or apartment, or anything else for that matter. They’re essentially being told, “Be glad we didn’t can you. Now get moving!” The official word is as follows:

There will also be some headcount reduction due to consolidation of operations. In anticipation of moving vehicle engineering to our new HQ in San Jose, we are ramping down and will close our Rochester Hills office near Detroit. Good communication, tightly knit engineering and a common company culture are of paramount importance as Tesla grows.

Yes, “good communication” and a “common company culture” are of paramount importance. We’re wondering what the schmuck who wrote this piece was thinking when writing that there would be a “headcount reduction.” With tough times and an economy suffering at exponential rates, one would think that Tesla could have been just a tad more appropriate and tactful with letting their hard working employees go.

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If you’re a car fanatic, you can’t help but being intrigued by Rolls-Royce’s newest announcement; the RR4 due to start production in 2010. It’s the “baby” Rolls-Royce that’s been floating around in the rumor mill for the last couple years. And by baby, we mean smaller. Ever since BMW bought Rolls, their design and technology has slowly made it’s way into Rolls-Royce’s lineup. From the same 7-Series key, to iDrive, to the same driving controls, they’ve integrated a whole lot. Now, the RR4 is set to further expand that line by using the 7-Series framework. Expect it to be similarly sized, but pack that Rolls-Royce punch. Now, who else is getting one with us? Matching cars? Let’s go! We got first dibs on BGR Blue, though…Couple shots of the limited edition sketch and Rolls materials after the jump.