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Tech powers of the new Discovery

By Phil McNamara First Official Pictures 16 April 2014 17:37 SUVs that can be driven remotely like a Tamiya toy car, with cockpit functions controlled via gestures or freeform speech, and glass that relays images from external cameras to provide genuine 360-degree vision – Land Rover has given a glimpse inside its R&D lab to reveal exciting technology under development. Think it's all pie in the sky stuff, decades from production? There's a remote control, current-shape Discovery out there testing right now, which can be driven from the outside using a touchscreen tablet.

Like it or not, autonomous cars are here -- almost

One of the odder things about living in "the future" is that things develop so gradually, hardly any of the really amazing things we're exposed to every day seem amazing or futuristic. If the iPhone had just appeared from nowhere in 2007, there would have been riots, demonstrations and legislation. But since we had a Blackberry first, and dedicated cellphones before that, the iPhone and its progeny were never quite shocking.

Ram truck gets new V6, eight-speed transmission

The Ram pickup scheduled to be introduced in April will offer both the Pentastar 3.6-liter V6 and an eight-speed transmission, according to a Chrysler Group filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The voluntary annual filing--which appeared Tuesday on the automaker's corporate Web site, chryslergroupllc.com--laid out many new features of the upcoming version of the automaker's top-selling vehicle. The new eight-speed transmission "reduces fuel consumption by up to 12 percent over our current five-speed transmissions," such as the one now in the Ram, the filing said.