2004-2006 Pontiac Gto Power Window Switch Console Carbon Fiber 04-06 Gray New! on 2040-parts.com

Tomorrow's world: lightweight carbon composites

Once all the dust settles on The Great Battery Farce (the idea that the world's ills will be taken care of by sticking a battery in everything that moves and charging it up) we may eventually face up to the fact that the best way to move something around more economically, is to move less of it. That means making things lighter, a lot lighter. Car makers are working on it and manufacturers like Audi and Jaguar have already become masters in bringing aluminium to the mass production.

Concept Car of the Week: Ghia Streamline X 'Gilda' (1955)

In 1954 Virgil Exner, director of styling at Chrysler, created a scale clay-model to communicate to his team his vision of futuristic and aerodynamic shapes. The sculpture was then painted black and was left on display in Exner's Office. There it caught the eye of Luigi Segre, director of Ghia who expressed his intentions to create a car inspired by the forms of the model.

How will you get to work in the year 2030?

Imagine a future where New Jersey adopts mass public transit and on-demand jitneys; Boston becomes hyper-dense and walking becomes the primary means of transport; Atlanta disperses even further and relies on solar power, electric cars and Google connected technologies to manage mobility; and Los Angeles tries autonomous cars, but finds the transition difficult, and its gridlock even worse. These are the scenarios proposed in a new study by New York University's Rudin Center for Transport Policy and Management. The report, which proposes scenarios rather than making predictions about the future of transportation in the US, repeatedly points to connected car technologies, autonomous cars and logistics networks as driving forces in regional mobility solutions.