Those crafty kids at Hybrid Technologies aren’t just busy stuffing ridiculous amounts of power into teeny-tiny Mullen GT bodies, they’ve also set their sights on a more consumer friendly car: the Mini Cooper. Unfortunately, while electric Mini doesn’t reach the six figures range like its L1X-75 counterpart, it’ll still cost you $59,000 — a full $40k more than a base Mini costs in its native gas version. The car is rated at about 120-160 miles in range from its lithium polymer batteries, and takes five hours to charge. The desire to build electric cars “that don’t look like electric cars” is quite commendable, we just look forward to the day when it doesn’t cost so dang much.

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Believe us, the last thing we need is three more ho hum GPS units in the 3.5- to 4-inch range, but we’ve been waiting so long for LG’s renditions to hit the US market, we’ll give ‘em a pass. Just as previewed before CES, LG’s LN730, LN735 and LN740 portable navigators are finally hitting American soil, and are supposedly available as we speak at Circuit City and “other fine retailers.” The trio features touchscreen displays, SiRF Star III GPS receivers, maps covering the United States and Canada, turn-by-turn voice guidance, and “millions of POIs” to keep you entertained whilst crossing the country. The LN740 takes top honors, as its slightly larger screen and real-time traffic capabilities trump the lesser-spec’d siblings. So if you’ve been roaming around aimlessly waiting for these bad boys to get a pricetag with a currency you understand, we’d recommend locating your nearest gadget store and plopping down the $449.95 (LN740), $349.95 (LN735), or $299.95 (LN730) required to pick one up.

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The Garmin Nuvi 350 gets the best reviews for the most accurate directions, and testers say the Garmin Nüvi maintains a signal lock even on cloudy days and around obstructions like skyscrapers. Navigation on the 3.5-inch touchscreen is easy and intuitive. The 2GB flash memory leaves a full gigabyte available for photos, audio books or MP3 files, and you can listen to music or a book while navigating. You can plan multi-leg trips, and the Garmin GPS includes text-to-speech capability, so audio directions include actual street names instead of merely “turn left.”

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Although it has been quite some time since Blaupunkt made any substantial noise in the CE biz, the audio outfit is back in full force with the forthcoming Velocity 2Go lineup. The flashy (albeit ill-favored) boombox sports a carry-handle design for those throwback moments of atop-the-shoulder sidewalk strutting, and also features a car-docking solution with the bundled straps or QuickOut mounting kit. Specs wise, the unit operates on rechargeable AA cells, touts a “die-cast aluminum” enclosure, and sports 3.5-millimeter / RCA input jacks to play nice with just about any external audio source in the book. Dubbed the “world’s first mobile active speaker system,” the device also rocks a built-in active subwoofer to fill in the lows, and while the Velocity2Go 5 (£249.99; $499) will get things rockin’ with 80-watts of RMS power, the Velocity2Go 6 (£299.99; $599) purportedly ups the volume by four decibels in case you can tell the difference. Click on through for a shot of the rear.

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Shuttle just announced their new Car PC—or what looks to be a Mac Mini genetically enhanced with car audio badassness (known to some as a heat sink).
Internally, the Car PC will run an Intel Core Duo chipset (not the 2 Duo, apparently) and store information on a standard laptop hard drive. 7.1 sound and graphics are predictably integrated onboard.
But what’s so appealing about the Car PC is that it’s powered by your car battery and will automatically shut down with no lost data when you turn off the ignition. So that quarterly budget you finished on the way to work will stay safe even after you park your car outside the hospital.