Autonomous vehicles are already successful but you are unlikely to meet one because the successes are in the upper atmosphere, open cast mines, nuclear power stations, underwater and in other relatively inaccessible places.

Hybrid vehicles are already big business from hybrid cars, buses and trucks to outdoor forklifts, even hybrid tugboats.

To benchmark new technology for electric vehicles it is vital to look at all of the off-road, on-road, water and airborne e-vehicles.

Launches of fuel cell cars are reportedly planned by up to six carmakers from 2015 including Tata Motors of India, owners of Jaguar Land Rover.

A revolution is slicing through the car industry.

Thermoelectric harvesting will be on production hybrid electric on-road vehicles from 2018. It will be commonplace on hybrids in 2020 and almost entirely to charge the battery, or increasingly supercapacitor or supercabattery used for power.

Load bearing structures that are also electronic or electrical are called structural electronics. This two-for-the-price-of-one approach can be more reliable, attractive and long-lived and it always saves space.

The market for hybrid and pure electric cars homologated as such is set to be $188 billion in 2025 according to IDTechEx analysis.

Electric and hybrid vehicles for construction, agriculture and mining will be a $30 billion market in 2025.

Adds Experienced Manager to its Rapidly Growing Japan Team. Tokyo, Japan and Cambridge, UK - Oct. 20, 2014 - IDTechEx the leader in market research on emerging technologies today announced the expansion of its Japan office with the hiring of Mr. Yasuo Yamamoto as its head of business development in Japan.

The unique market research report "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Electric UAVs 2014-2024" examines what will be achieved and the enabling technologies that will make it possible.

The event Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Forum consisted a conference with about 70 delegates and a small display area for a few organisations. Here we give some details of the presentations that particularly caught our attention.

The Reed Exhibitions event last week consisting of PV Expo, Battery Osaka and Smart Grid Expo successfully extended an event that started with photovoltaics last year.

Graphene could radically improve batteries and supercapacitors as explained in the new IDTechEx report Functional Materials for Supercapacitors/Ultracapacitors/EDLC 2015-2025.

Water-borne electric vehicles are much more than 100 year old river boats, toy boats on ponds and tiny trolling outboards for leisure fishing. The rapidly increasing military, commercial and industrial applications now dwarf leisure applications in value and sophistication.

SiC devices will be widely designed into electric vehicles from 2014 and GaN from 2018. With manufacturers currently designing vehicles to be launched onto the market in 2018, it is predicted that by this date GaN semiconductors will attain price parity with silicon devices. This will make the technology attractive as a replacement for silicon for use in the power electronics in both pure electric and hybrid vehicles.

IDTechEx's Supercapacitor Europe 2014 conference is bringing the best of supercapacitor developments in the region and internationally to Berlin on 1-2 April.

The worldwide interest in waste heat recovery continues to grow, with a wide range of applications ranging from small harvesters integrated into wireless sensor networks all the way to larger harvesters such as the ones that can potentially be integrated into cars.

The new IDTechEx report, Electric Boats, Small Submarines and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) 2014-2024 reveals the market for electric water craft, including those on and under water, will increase from $2.6 billion to $7.3 billion in 2024.

The supercapacitor industry closed last year (2013) with a continued double-digit growth. According to Maxwell Technologies' executives, China has been the main source of growth. New announcements confirm what IDTechEx has stated in recent years: the supercapacitor and the battery industry are the same.