Technology

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox reunite to see how hydrogen fuel for the Toyota Mirai is made.

October 21, 2015 was going to be just another spring day. That was until November 1989 when Back to the Future Part II hit cinemas.

The death of a toddler run over in the driveway of his Oakden home has prompted calls for technology such as reversing cameras to be standard features on new cars.

Toyota's first mass produced hydrogen car has arrived in Australia, but don't rush to showrooms for a test drive just yet.

Rubber has been almost eliminated from the rubber that keeps your car on the road.These days it's all about special polymers and petrochemicals, according to one of the top men at Pirelli."Rubber is like wine. There are different regions, different vintages," says Paul Hembery, who also heads Pirelli's grand prix program."There is good wine and not-so-good wine. It's the same with rubber. So it's too unstable and variable."Apart from F1 and GT racing, Pirelli provides tyres for most of the world's supercars, including the LaFerrari and McLaren P1, where Hembery says racing experience helps to speed development and cope with the extraordinary demands of modern motoring.Developing a new tyre takes two to three years"Those cars are out of this world. They have 1000 horsepower, which is more than a Formula One car. But even relatively modest cars now require a lot more development on things like wet-weather grip and noise control," he says."Developing a new tyre takes two to three years. So that's a type of race in itself."Volkswagen Group is the biggest road-tyre customer for Pirelli, which did about 500 different new-tyre certifications last year for new models. Audi is the biggest individual buyer.Looking ahead, Hembery says Pirelli is working hard to develop a computer simulation that will allow shoppers to do a "virtual test" of potential tyre choices for their car."It's simple to test drive different cars you're thinking about buying. Tyres are much tougher. But we're working hard on a system that will give realistic feedback," he says."Right now, it's like buying a washing machine. You don't get the chance for a back-to-back test and so you have to rely on someone else's advice. You never know if you're getting what you want."We want to remove that uncertainty and help people make the right choice."

But if all cars had these tiny cameras behind the windscreen they could actually improve traffic flow because, as I discovered by accident (not literally, touch wood), they have another handy use.The system warns you if the car in front has driven off and you haven’t – because you’re day-dreaming, rummaging for something, or doing your make-up (not guilty).The screen in the instrument panel flashes and there’s a beep, usually before the car behind you blasts the horn.I know this because having discovered it by chance, I tried it out a few more times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.Imagine how much better the traffic would flow if more cars had a system like thisAnd...it works (apologies to those behind a dark blue Subaru Outback in peak hour last Tuesday night, in my defence we were only inching forward one car length at a time and, well, because research).The Subaru Eyesight system (their words, not ours) actually works better than any other lane keeping or forward collision warning system I’ve tested lately, including on German luxury cars. It’s also incredibly accurate at night, which can be a struggle for some systems.It got me thinking: car giant Toyota owns about 20 per cent of Subaru. I wonder if Toyota might dip into the basket and borrow this genius piece of Subaru-developed technology.Here’s hoping they do. Given that Toyota is the world’s biggest automotive brand, imagine how much better the traffic would flow if more cars had a system like this?

The car will become increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks as makers rush to improve the connectivity of their vehicles, a leading automotive supplier has warned.

"Racing improves the breed," is one of the oldest sayings in automotive engineering. As far back as the 1890s cars were being raced to show them off to the public, and to improve their design, speed a

A newspaper report says Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is tripling efforts that could result in an electric car design