At JavaOne 2007, Neil Young gave an impassioned talk about why BluRay matters to artists.  He ended the talk with a few comments about a project he was starting to take a classic Detroit monster and turn it into an X-Prize capable hybrid electric car.  Well, he did it.  And he brought it to Sun in Menlo Park to show it off.
  • Neil had some custom chrome lettering made for the LincVolt
  • Neil Young's fabulous Lincoln Continental convertible, converted to be a remarkably cool electric car
  • Neil Young was mobbed by a crowd of jazzed geeks. Neil is the fellow in the black baseball hat wearing sunglasses.
  • Under the front hood is the generator for charging the batteries - it doesn't run very often. The white boxes contain a pile of electronics. The beast runs Java Realtime and is continuously on the net where a huge amount of telemetry can be viewed - you can also do a lot of tuning across the internet. Paul Perrone, the guy who did a lot of the electronics, works on the beast from the other side of the country.
  • Under the back seat is the electric motor
  • The trunk is filled with batteries. Supposedly it's got about 80 miles range without needing to kick in the generator.
  • The controls appear stock, but there's an lcd screen under the dask and a keyboard that can be pulled out for local hacking.
  • Neil took me for a ride around Sun's Menlo Park campus. A really smooth quiet ride. For such a massive car, it has an astonishing amount of acceleration - that engine under the back seat is a big one.