2005 Audi Tt on 2040-cars

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Audi creates new diesel fuel from carbon dioxide and water

What if you could power cars of the future with pollution created by the cars of the past? That's what German automaker Audi is hoping to achieve by creating a new synthetic fuel using renewable energy to turn water and carbon dioxide gas into a new kind of fuel they call "e-diesel." The new diesel is being produced at Audi's pilot plant Sunfire in Dresden, Germany. Only a few gallons were created, which the German Federal Minister of Education and Research Johanna Wanka put into her Audi A8 to prove the fuel's bonafides. The base fuel is known as "blue crude" and begins from a green source. Audi uses electricity from wind, water or solar power sources to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water. The hydrogen is then mixed with carbon dioxide which has been converted in carbon oxide. The blue crude is then further refined to create the e-diesel. The carbon dioxide is currently supplied by a biogas facilities, but some of that CO2 was captured from the air. "The engine runs quieter and fewer pollutants are being created," says Sunfire CTO Christian von Olshausen. The fuel can be combined with conventional diesel fuel, as biodiesel fuels already and would be competitively priced against regular diesel, according to Gizmag. Sunfire can produce about 42 gallons of e-diesel a day. That seems like barely a drop in the bucket in terms of Europe's energy use, but Audi is ready to commercialize the technology with plans to expand production with a bigger facility in the future.

Audi RS7 prototype is world's sportiest self-driving car [w/video]

Audi may not be the only automaker out there toying with self-driving automobile technology, but it is arguably the fastest of them. A few years back, it raced unleashed a driverless TTS on the Bonneville Salt Flats, then sent it up Pikes Peak and around Thunderhill. But now it's taking things a step further with the vehicle you see here.
This RS7 Sportback has been fitted with steering, brakes, throttle and transmission hooked up to a computer system that combines GPS, high-frequency radio signals and 3D imaging camera to drive the vehicle autonomously not just in slow-paced, stop-and-go traffic, but around the track at the same pace a professional racing driver would push it: full throttle on the straights, full braking before the corner and 1.1-g of cornering force.
As promised, Audi plans to unleash the self-driving RS7 - which it calls "the sportiest piloted driving car in the world" - at Hockenheim next weekend prior to the DTM season finale, where it is anticipated to pull a 2:10 lap time. The next stage will be to set it lose on the Nürburgring Nordschleife, all 154 turns and 13 miles of it, which ought to pose a heck of a challenge to the engineers from Ingolstadt. In the meantime you can scope it out in the high-res image gallery above and the second teaser video below.

Former Audi chief designer Wolfgang Egger leaves Italdesign

The latest word from the international community of automotive designers has it that Wolfgang Egger is leaving Italdesign, but just where the accomplished designer will land next and who will take his place remain big question marks. Egger is a designer who has bounced back and forth between Italy and Germany over the course of his career. He was born in Germany but studied in Milan. He began his career at Alfa Romeo in 1989 and was named its chief designer by 1993 before being head-hunted by the Volkswagen Group in 1998 to head up the design department at Seat. A few years later he went returned to Italy to run the Lancia design department, and was subsequently renamed to the same post at Alfa Romeo. In 2007 he went back to his native Germany to head up the Audi design office, over which he assumed complete responsibility by 2012, but left Audi in 2013 to run Italdesign. For those unfamiliar, Italdesign is the studio founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro (pictured at left next to Egger) back in 1968 but which, along with many other Italian design houses, fell on hard times in recent years. The Volkswagen Group swooped in to rescue the troubled studio in 2010, turning it into something of an in-house advanced design department to provide an alternative perspective on the direction in which the group and its various brands could take their respective designs moving forward. With Egger now leaving its helm, Italdesign and its German parent company will need to find his replacement, and we're sure they'll announce one in due course. The bigger question on our minds, however, is where Egger himself will head next. Given the path his career has taken to date, we wouldn't be surprised to see him land elsewhere in the Volkswagen Group or find a new role in the expanding Fiat Chrysler Automobiles empire. Then again, Egger could find it time to open an entirely new chapter. Watch this space. News Source: Car Design NewsImage Credit: Newspress Design/Style Hirings/Firings/Layoffs Audi Volkswagen designer italdesign giugiaro wolfgang egger