It's only taken about a million years, but someone has finally decided that improvements are possible in automobile braking lights. Students from Virginia Tech have developed a new system that can show not just whether you're stopping, but if you're slowing down, when you're about to stop, and how quickly you're pressing the pedal. The concept uses an array of horizontally arranged LED lights -- when you begin to slow, lights in the center glow orange, after a certain threshold side lights turn to red, and if you're slamming on the brake, they'll all flash red. The team, led by mechanical engineering Professor Mehdi Ahmadian, has plans for the system beyond the lab, though they speculate that it will be easier to add them as additional indicators on commercial vehicles at first. If this pans out, someday soon we may all be tailgating a totally psychedelic light show.

Mitsubishi is taking the rear-view mirror into the 21st century, with its new CM-7200 7-inch screen. The screen displays the rear-mounted camera in your truck, which according to Mitsubishi's press release, have been available in Japan since 1970. The CM-7200 ships on November 1 for ¥65,100 ($553) -- even at that somewhat elevated price, we're willing to bet that before the end of the year someone will figure out how to hook up a computer, DVD player, or console to the monitor. So Japan, when truck drivers start causing road accidents because they're putting or batting in Wii Sports, don't say we didn't warn you.

[Via I4U News]