Hasta La Gadget!

With Honda’s third iteration of the minivan (four if you count a late-’90s tall wagon bearing the name), the new 2011 Honda Odyssey combines a fuel-efficient drivetrain with enough cockpit infotainment wizardry to satisfy all eight passengers, four of whom can be adults riding in supreme comfort. The V6 engine further improves its variable cylinder shutdown technology, the transmission finally has six gears (upper range models), and the Odyssey gets up to 28 mpg on the highway. Active noise cancellation continues from the previous generation to cut back some of the road noise. Can your SUV do that?

Design a new car to use four-cylinder engines only and you don’t need the heavier, economy-saping metal reinforcements of a car built to support V6 engines as well. Make the MP3 and Bluetooth adapters standard because who doesn’t have one or both these days? Make it affordable, reliable, leading-edge on crash safety, and don’t forget good looking, and you’ve got a winner in the 2011 Hyundai Sonata. Buy the gasoline model Sonata (see review) for its $20,000 starting price, the 274-hp 2.0T (turbo; review) for performance and handling better than last year’s Sonata six-cylinder, and the Sonata Hybrid (review) for best mileage (40 mpg highway).This is also our choice as the Bang for the Buck Digital Drive Car of the Year.

If you rack up the highway miles, a diesel-engine car is the way to go, since most hybrids are optimized for city driving. If total cost of ownership is as important as fuel economy, your best choice is the diesel-powered 2011 Volkswagen Golf TDI, rated at 42 mpg highway, 30 mpg city. The TDI, unlike gas-engine Golfs, comes standard with Bluetooth and iPod adapters that ease those long trips.

In four years, Ford has gone from worst to first in providing affordable, useful infotainment and cockpit technology. First, Ford Sync put two vital safety and convenience features into cars cheaply or in the base price: Bluetooth and a USB jack for iPod, music key, and other MP3 players. Now, our 2010 Digital Drive Technology of the Year, MyFord Touch (and MyLincoln Touch) extends the multimedia interface, integrating infotainment and climate control functions onto color LCD touchscreens.

File this one in the making lemons out of lemonade category. Remember all of those booms used to help curb the flow of oil during this year’s massive Gulf Coast spill? There were 100 miles of them in all. Yeah, well, General Motors will be collecting them up to make parts for the latest version of the Chevy Volt.

The car maker plans to collect 100,000 pounds of booms in all, turning the plastic resin into air deflectors, which will go into the vehicle’s radiator. The deflectors will be made up entirely of recycled parts–a quarter will come from the booms, another quarter from recycled tires, and the rest from other assorted recycled parts.

Says GM’s manager of waste reduction, John Bradburn,

This was purely a matter of helping out. If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.