The Roberts family minivan: Squint closely and you can see a Jedi with a light saber scratched on the side with rock.

Shortly after we got married almost 11 years ago, my wife and I bought a used 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan. We have been driving it ever since. We drove both of our kids home from the hospital in it. We picked up our puppy in it. It's been on every one of our road trips. I'm incredibly fond of it.

My wife, not so much. She does most of the day-to-day driving, so the nostalgia factor isn't enough to overcome her aversion to piloting a suburban land yacht. It's too big, too hard to maneuver and park on city streets, too fuel inefficient. She's over it.

Consequently, we're looking for a new car. We're nearing a decision, but I thought I'd ask for input from you, Grist's treasured readers. Cause y'all are smart.

Electric vehicles are great and all, but they’re not exactly practical for everyone. Like, how’s a farmer in rural China going to a) afford a pricey green car and b) get enough access to electrical outlets and vehicle charging stations?

Well, if he’s Tang Zhengping from Beijing’s Tangzhou Wanji Yongle Town, he’ll build his own -- and it’ll be AWESOME.

It goes 200 miles on a third as much battery power as an electric car. It has airbags and an enclosed cockpit. It's gyroscopically stabilized, like a Segway.

It could be the future of transportation.

Go to the Twitter feed of Smart Car of Argentina and hold down the J key. Go on. We'll wait here for you.

The Shell Eco-Marathon is sort of a weird contradiction. On the one hand, it's sponsored by Shell, but on the other hand, it's all about challenging high school and college students to make hyper-fuel-efficient cars, i.e. kind of the opposite of Shell's goals. It's like if the Intel high school science competition were sponsored by Rick Santorum.

At any rate, though, the kids really came through this year. Here are four of the winning vehicles, all built by high schoolers, all of which got more than 1,000 miles to the gallon in their competition trials.

Photo by Watson House.

Velomobiles are reclining bicycles with fiberglass shells on top, to make you super aerodynamic, weatherproof, and sort of whimsical.

For all the Republican blather about keeping gas prices down with domestic production, pretty soon the U.S.’s effect on the market price of oil will be totally swamped by demand from the developing world. As energy futurist Chris Nelder observes at Txchnologist, nowhere is this trend better exemplified than the fact that auto sales in China recently exceeded auto sales in the U.S.

Chart source: Feng An, Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, Beijing, 2010.

Photo by Jake Metcalf.

San Francisco’s hipsters are about to get motorized. Scoot Networks, an electric scooter rental system similar to Zipcar, recently launched in the Bay Area.

The system, which is being rolled out to San Francisco-based companies for private fleets, lets users locate nearby scooters with their smartphone and claim the one they want (as with Zipcar, each scooter lives at a certain location). After it’s docked into the scooter, the phone unlocks the vehicle and acts like a virtual dashboard, providing a map as well as information on speed and range.

“Flow” batteries, i.e. batteries filled with a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped out and replenished, have the potential to transform the process of charging an electric vehicle into something that more closely resembles filling it up with gas. This research is still at its earliest stages, but a battery from startup Eos Energy Storage could be drained and refilled with charged electrolyte in three minutes, the company's CEO told Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm.

Aw, look, they're trying to make jokes! I'm going to print this right out and hang it on the fridge in a frame that says My First Satire.