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Local Motors 'Design Our Car' competition opens

Local Motors has opened its first-ever ‘Design Our Car' competition, which encourages collaboration within the manufacturing community. The open-source automaker is providing two of its Rally Fighter cars, one of which will be built at the company's micro-factory in Arizona while the other will be built live in the Emerging Technology Center at September's International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago. Ideas from the design and engineering community are being sought to help design and select a skin for the Rally Fighter that will be built by the Local Motors team this spring.

White is the most popular car color

White is the most popular vehicle color in the world, followed by black and silver, according to car-paint supplier PPG Industries. In North America, white was first, making up 20 percent of the 2011-model-year cars. Silver was second at 19 percent, then black at 18 percent, gray at 15 percent, red and blue tied at 9 percent, naturals such as brown, tan and gold at 7 percent, green at 2 percent and other colors at 1 percent.

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.