Kids, do not try this at home. Researchers at Temple University have been experimenting with what happens when an electric current is run through fuel. Big boom, right? Well, apparently not.

According to a paper the Temple team has published in "Energy & Fuels", done right, a small electric current applied to fuel just before it enters the combustion chamber, makes for much smaller droplets of fuel which burn cleaner and more efficiently. The team installed and tested their device on a diesel Mercedes where it showed a 20% decrease in fuel consumption in the lab.

Looks like Toyota is bringing the 56-mpg iQ microcar to America after all, but it's slapping a Scion badge on it first.

We first saw a production version of the lilliputian runabout at the Geneva Auto Show in March, at which point
Toyota told usthe car was designed for the Japanese and European markets and would not be coming to the states. But
Motor Trend, citing unidentified sources,
says the iQ is comingto America, albeit as a Scion, and we'll see it next month at the Los Angeles auto show.

Think you've gotta drive a boring econobox or a hybrid to get decent fuel economy? Nope. A British moto-journalist took top honors in a fuel-economy challenge behind the wheel of a -- get this -- Corvette Z06 with a monstrous 7-liter engine.

Journalist Richard Hammond (no, not
that Richard Hammond) took hypermiling to a new level during the two-day, 411-mile
MPG Marathon, achieving an impressive 30.96 miles per Imperial gallon (that's 25.77 U.S. mpg). Although that was well short of the 84.66 mpIg (70.48 U.S. mpg) reached by the guy in a Toyota Yaris, it was enough for a win.

Huh?

The VW Jetta TDI has proven to be quite popular in the short time it's been on sale here in the U.S.: it has put sales of the Tiguan in the cooler and the ones that are available are very hard to get. Now the fairest Jetta of them all has set a Guinness World Record by traversing the lower 48 U.S. states while returning 58.82 mpg thanks to John and Helen Taylor.

John and Helen Taylor are the two of the world's most fuel-efficient drivers, and to prove it they've set off on an 8,000-mile drive around the United States to set a new record for fuel economy.

If you're already stretched paper thin under the financial weight of a thirsty, expensive vehicle, getting out of it for something more fuel efficient might seem like an unattainable dream. Fear not, the smarties over at Consumer Reports have rightly pointed out that since depreciation accounts for nearly half of the cost of a car during its first five years of ownership, buying a used miser is the best way to save money and resources.

As if "shift lights" weren't annoying enough... Nissan's new "ECO pedal" has been engineered to encourage good fuel economy with a servo-actuated gas pedal that will push back on the driver's lead foot when on-board computers detect wasteful acceleration. According to Nissan, vehicles equipped with the ECO pedal, and real-time fuel consumption gauges in the instrument panel, have returned a 5-10 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The Japanese automaker says it has plans to begin installing the ECO pedal in models next year, although there is no word on what models, or markets, will get the system. We're betting it's an option unlikely to show up on the GT-R anytime in the near future.

[Source: Reuters]