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Video: GM's Clay Dean on the future of urban mobility

Clay Dean is the star of a new Faces of GM video, Anticipating the Driving Experience of the Future. The global design director for GM's Advanced Design Group, whose job also entails exploring future transportation design solutions, talks about the need to avoid short-term thinking on urban mobility, as by 2030 60 percent of the world's population will live in cities. As new challenges start to emerge, such as increasing congestion, Dean believes it is time to start thinking about transportation in a completely different way.

Spyker confirms new Saab 9-3 coming in 2012

Spyker, Saab’s new supercar-building owner, has outlined its plans for the brand – which include a new 9-3 range – ahead of an extraordinary general meeting on 12 February where it hopes its shareholders will ratify its purchase of the ailing Swedish car company. If it gets the green light, Spyker and Saab will be renamed as Saab Spyker Automobiles NV – though each company will operate separately – and Saab will be positioned as 'an independent performance-oriented niche car company with an industry-leading environmental strategy'.  Up first is the new 9-5 – which will be launched this summer – followed by an Estate version and an Audi Allroad-aping 9-5X. The new Cadillac SRX-based 9-4X SUV will arrive in early 2011, and Spyker is plotting the new 9-3 a year later.

Battery breakthrough set to accelerate electric-car development

A team of scientists working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are claiming a significant breakthrough in recharging times for lithium-ion batteries. According to findings published in the scientific journal Nature, MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder have unlocked the potential of lithium-ion batteries by patenting a unique process which is claimed to allow a typical laptop power pack to be fully recharged in less than a minute--an improvement in recharging performance of roughly 90 percent over existing lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries generate electric current via the flow of lithium ions across an electrolyte, from an electrode to a cathode.