Enlarge / The Tourbillon is recognizable as a modern Bugatti, but it's very different under the skin. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Since the launch of the hypercar-defining Veyron back in 2005, modern Bugattis have served as benchmarks for straight-line performance and no-expense-spared automotive engineering. At a time when a 300 horsepower Mustang GT was something to crow about, the quad-turbocharged, W16-powered Veyron offered more than a thousand, metric (987 hp/736 kW).

Perhaps more importantly, and in contrast to most other world-beating performance cars, the Veyron wasn't presented as some skunkworks project that had been pushed to the ragged edge. Instead, it was a wholly realized ultra-luxury performance machine, replete with the sort of grand touring appointments you'd expect to find in a Bentley rather than a top-speed record holder.

Still, it was the numbers that instantly captivated enthusiasts and casual onlookers alike, and Bugatti would go on to reset the bar with the introduction of the 1,479 hp (1,102 kW) Chiron in 2016.

Enlarge / No one's entirely sure if driverless racing will be any good to watch, but before we find that out, people have to actually develop driverless race cars. A2RL in Abu Dhabi is the latest step down that path. (credit: A2RL)

ABU DHABI—We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That's why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.

Enlarge (credit: SEAN GLADWELL)

Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

Enlarge / First revealed in 2017, the current Aston Martin Vantage has just had a styling and engineering overhaul. (credit: Aston Martin)

It's high time Aston Martin had a winner on its hands. Last year it updated the DB12 with smart new face, plenty of power, and the sort of infotainment you'd hope for from a luxury GT. The Vantage, the firm's 'entry-level' car, has been given similar treatment in the hopes that it can peel a few more people away from Porsche dealerships.

Aston's looking not only to make better cars, but to shift its image—it's aiming to be seen as more luxurious than before, as well as throwing as much power at the cars as possible. At first glance, it looks like Aston's cooked up something truly delightful.

The new car is more than 150 hp (112 kW) more powerful than the one it replaces, with 656 hp (490 kW) and 590 lb-ft (800 Nm) from a wonderfully appointed turbocharged 4.0 L V8. 0-60 mph is quoted at 3.4 seconds, and Aston reckons that if you have enough space (and no speed limits) you'll see the far side of 200 mph (321 km/h). It is not slow.

Enlarge / Sony Honda Mobility will start taking orders for its AFEELA EV next year. (credit: Peter Nelson)

We're living through a period of radically shifting automotive technology. Companies are working on increasing electric vehicle range and redefining our concept of reenergizing. They're also gradually refining driver assistance technology and figuring out how to make vehicles an extension of their drivers.

Sony Honda Mobility's (SHM) main aim with its AFEELA luxury-tier sedan concept is to put the emphasis on the latter. The dynamic duo's website is filled with marketing buzzwords, but what is the concept actually like in person?

Recently, I was invited by SHM to check out AFEELA firsthand. It's still very much a prototype, so certain key information like price, range, and charging times weren't disclosed. But it was still worthwhile to see how these two Japanese institutions put their know-how into this spacious sedan.

Enlarge / For the previous EcoCar 3 competition, student teams turned Camaro sportscars into hybrids. For the EcoCar EV challenge, their job is to improve on the Cadillac Lyriq. (credit: EcoCar)

Across the country, teams of students at 15 different universities are in the middle of a four-year project, dissecting an electric vehicle and figuring out ways to make it even better. The program, called the EcoCar EV Challenge, was founded more than three decades ago by the US Department of Energy and is run by the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

Over the last 35 years, more than 30,000 students from 95 universities have participated in the EcoCar Challenge, part of the DOE's Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. Each segment spans four years, with the most recent cycle beginning in 2023 with a new Cadillac Lyriq donated by the General Motors automaker.

The students take this competition very seriously, as participation alone brings a lot of benefits, including the potential for a lifelong career path.

Enlarge / I wouldn't blame you if you lost track of all the different variations on the Porsche 911. This is the latest, and currently, the most desirable. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Although Porsche is in the midst of taking its BEV technology mainstream, the company hasn't lost sight of the fact that its high-performance reputation was built on the 911.

Over the past few years, the automaker has developed a myriad of different versions of the iconic sports car, resulting in offerings that currently range from plush open-top cruisers to hardcore track monsters, along with special edition models like the off-road-tuned Dakar and heritage-inspired Sport Classic. You might be wondering, then, if there's really an opportunity for a new performance-focused model to stand out in the 911 lineup.

On the surface, the S/T seems to tread much of the same ground already occupied by the GT3 Touring, an iteration of the track-ready GT3 that ditches the large fixed rear wing for the smaller, aesthetically subtler active rear spoiler found on Carrera models. But as lovely to drive as the GT3 Touring is, it feels like a conceptual afterthought.