Hats off, then, to the students at the Electrical Vehicle Laboratory at Keio University's Fujisawa, Japan, campus. Their Eliica electric concept car, unveiled at the last Tokyo Motor Show, has a 60-kilowatt motor, including the reduction gear, wheel bearing, and brake, in each and every one of its wheels—all eight of them. The advantages of using eight small wheels rather than four larger ones, says the Keio team, include increased interior space, better road holding (owing to the greater tire contact area), and a more comfortable ride (because shock absorption is spread over twice as many wheels). It can supposedly go from zero to 100 km/h (62 mph) in four seconds. A version tuned for top speed is said to exceed the 368 km/h (229 mph) it has recorded in tests.

The 328-volt battery pack itself, along with the inverters and all control electronics, is sandwiched in a trough just 15 centimeters high in the vehicle's flat floor. A version tuned for fastest acceleration can generate torque of 100 newton-meters at each wheel motor and can accelerate the car at a G-force of 0.8. That version's range is approximately 320 km (200 miles); it requires up to 10 hours to recharge from full discharge.

The first two axles are mechanically steered, and the wheel angle on the rearmost one is varied electrically to assist in cornering. Shock absorbers on each wheel pair are hydraulically connected to spread the force of wheel movement. The driver can command the vehicle to park itself—in garage spaces or parallel—as well as to make U-turns.

The car was created in partnership with 38 companies. The drag coefficient of a model built to one-fifth scale is just 0.17, better than that of any current production vehicle, though no figures have been released for the full-size version. And there's no typo in that name: it's short for Electric Lithium Ion Car, of course.

2005 Land Rover Discovery/LR3 Switch-hitter Like all Land Rovers, the 2005 Discovery (called the LR3 in the United States) offers permanent all-wheel drive, with power distribution constantly adjusted among the wheels based on traction. By itself, that isn't a big deal—US $23 000 Subarus do the same. The advance comes in a new Land Rover system called Terrain Response, which adds a host of control features on top of the Dynamic Stability Control pioneered by Land Rover's Ford-family sibling Volvo in the XC90 sport utility vehicle.

A rotary switch on the Discovery's center console lets the driver select one of five terrain types: general on-road driving, mud and ruts, rock crawl, grass/gravel/snow, or sand. Based on this setting, Terrain Response alters key vehicle subsystems to optimize performance. Those subsystems are the engine management system, the air suspension on all four wheels, the six-speed automatic gearbox, and the center and rear differentials, which allocate power among the wheels, both back to front and side to side.

Depending on the conditions selected, the system alters the throttle's programmed responses to inputs within the engine management system, as well as parameters in the other subsystems. For example, if the driver has chosen the grass/gravel/snow, mud-and-ruts, or rock-crawl setting, the gearbox will reduce torque at the wheels (to prevent slip) by selecting a higher gear with early upshifts and late downshifts.

For grass/gravel/snow, the differentials respond with increased preloading and more aggressive responses to slip. This response is at its highest in rock-crawl mode, when torque locking—which prevents each wheel from spinning faster than its counterpart on the other side of the vehicle—is held for a given steering input. That prevents wheel spin, which helps keep the vehicle from sliding sideways.

The results have generated raves from normally skeptical reviewers. In a private message, one driver of the first LR3 to reach Northern California wrote, "It is unfazed by wet, grassy slopes either up or down, and the hill-descent control is pretty amazing—it used the braking system to keep the vehicle at a walking pace. On an unplowed side road, it just crawled up the steep hill like nothing at all....You barely knew the surface was slippery."