And NASCAR surprisingly continued its momentum from last season, partly because of the freak crash in which Juan Pablo Montoya’s car hit a truck loaded with jet fuel, injuring no one but scorching the track and forcing a two-hour delay.

If there was any doubt NASCAR successfully reached a mainstream audience, sports talk radio personality Jim Rome dispelled it Tuesday afternoon when he said the race was more entertaining than any Monday night NFL game last season.

Read more here.

This year, the online magazine is looking at five finalists including the new Ford Focus Electric, Honda Civic Natural Gas, Mitsubishi i, Toyota Prius v and Volkswagen Passat TDI. That includes two all-electrics, a CNG vehicle, one hybrid and a diesel-powered car.

Read the full article here.

The first mass-market electric vehicles are about to go on sale in selected cities, kicking off the beginning of a wave of new green vehicles hitting showrooms over the coming year.

The Chevrolet Volt, from General Motors, and the Leaf, from Nissan, both launching in December, are just the beginning of the electrification trend. At least eight hybrids and 12 plug-in electric cars in every price range are planned for 2011, with another batch of electric vehicles (EVs) expected in 2012.

The rollout of these vehicles will be regional, starting with California and a handful of other states, including New York, Texas, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Tennessee, among others. It could be several years before EVs are readily available across America. Each employs different powertrain technologies, so it pays to do your research at sites like www.hybridcars.com or pluginamerica.org.

But here are the basics:

A hybrid, as the name suggests, uses both a gasoline engine and electric motor to power the car, switching back and forth as necessary. A plug-in hybrid is similar, but comes with a larger battery that allows the vehicle to travel solely on electric power for short hops, but not for long stretches. An extended-range electric vehicle, like the Volt, can go up to 40 or so miles on electricity, after which a small gasoline motor kicks in to recharge the battery and keep driving. A pure EV, like the Leaf, runs solely on electricity and needs to be recharged every 100 miles or so.

When it comes to hybrids, Toyota’s Prius is the only one anyone ever really talks about, so it might surprise you that there are 27 other hybrid models already on the market today, including hybrid versions of the BMW 7-series, Mercedes S-class and Lexus LS.

Many more are coming. They include luxury cars like the recently introduced Porsche Cayenne S hybrid SUV, which, at $67,700, sells for about $4,000 more than the gasoline version of Porsche’s bestselling vehicle, and the Lexus CT 200h compact, due in early 2011, which is aimed at a younger, Gen-X crowd, and will likely be priced under $32,000.

Read the full article here.

Looks like a motorcycle?

It is a tow truck?  Wonder how it has the power and stability to pull a big car, but I guess Japan has mostly small sized cars.

A contraption created by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Buckfield using a bike and a trailer is powered by piston mechanism using hundreds of pieces of Mentos candy and Coke Zero.

On a video posted online Tuesday, the machine traveled more than 220 feet.

The video was directed by Rob Cohen of “The Fast and the Furious.” Grobe joked that the crew is calling it “The Fizzy and the Furious.”

The geyser experiment used Diet Coke. This time, the crew used Coke Zero. Afterward, they toasted their success by sipping Coke Zero from champagne glasses.