MIT scientists are developing a tiny concept car that’ll make it easier to find a parking space in overpopulated urban centers. After you reach your destination, the "City Car," slightly smaller than a smart, uses robot technology to find others like itself and form a chain, parking by folding itself into the rear of another City Car like grocery carts at the cart return. (Nope, you won’t able to extract "your" City Car from the chain after they start stacking up; you just swipe your credit card and take the next available). It’s not expected to be a big hit with car enthusiasts, but hey, if enough commuters drive these it’ll probably be a lot easier for us to find spaces for our normal-sized cars. More at Reuters.

The mad geniuses at Rinspeed are either really handy with the GCI, or they’re seriously bringing a functional diving car to the Geneva Motor Show. In any case, their site has been restocked with a hilarious video and a lot of more detailed pictures that depict a well-dressed couple supposedly putting the Lotus-bodied submarine-car through its paces. And yes, as some of you complained the other day, the sQuba is in fact a convertible. Which means you have to wear diving gear to drive it. Don’t forget your tuxedo! See more astonishing pics after the jump, and the full gallery at Left Lane News.

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Okay, so it’s admittedly kind of weird that the magazine world’s wonky publishing timetable requires that Hot Rod be putting out its April Fool’s issue now—but then, this is one prank I didn’t want to have to wait for. The mag claims that American Motors is refurbishing its old plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and returning as "a full-line, full-service car company to do battle with the domestics and imports in the highly competitive North American marketplace." AMC will be churning out everything from a pillarless luxury sedan (the revamped Ambassador) to fuel-efficient compacts—that’s right, the retrostyled Gremlin and Pacer, below! I don’t care how much everyone claims to hate these cars—if they really did bring these back, they’d sell like crazy.

Swiss concept visionaries Rinspeed, famous for outlandish one-offs like the Splash hydrofoil amphibian, is outdoing itself for this year’s Geneva Motor Show with what it seems to imply will be a functional submersible concept car. Called the sQuba, this submarine car will both drive on land and dive up to 33 feet beneath the water’s surface. The breathless and charmingly ESL website copy at the Rinspeed site leaves the nuts-and-bolts status of the sQuba conveniently ambiguous: it promises a vehicle "beyond the scope of many human virtues of imagination," though whether it’s gone beyond designers’ own imaginations, in the form of a working prototype for Geneva, remains to be seen. While Rinspeed has certainly delivered in the past, the sQuba concept seems a bit out-there even for them. What do you predict?  Do you expect a sQuba to appear in a giant shark-tank before awed visitors at the Geneva Motor Show? Or is this concept so unfeasible that it’s doomed to remain suspended in the realm of CGI geekdom?

And check out our update on the sQuba: real pics and video!!

Check out the Aptera, developed by off-duty robotics engineer Steve Fambro in his spare time. Currently in working prototype form, it’ll be available as both an all-electric vehicle that’ll run 120 miles on a charge, and a gas-electric hybrid that gets 300 mpg. A solar roof strip provides auxiliary charge to the battery and air-conditioning system, it seats two comfortably in its cockpit, and it’ll supposedly be able to keep up with highway traffic. The Aptera is also designed to be abnormally safe for a low-slung three-wheeler, with an F1-inspired safety cage, 45-inch front crush zone, and wide, stable stance. The really incredible thing is that the Aptera is reported to be available later this year—at a retail price of $30K. Read more at msn.

Sure, they won’t talk back, overfill your oil, or show up for work stoned. They probably won’t even expect a tip. But there’s something unavoidably creepy about a robotic arm that fills your tank for you. Maybe it’s just because I won’t even trust my cars to a human station attendant—they don’t know how to be gentle with old cars, and those zippers on their jackets make me nervous—but the idea of surrendering your ride to a robot that can only deal with cars "whose contours and dimensions have been recorded to avoid scratching" seems to me a recipe for disaster. Good thing that, so far, the robots are experimental technology confined to the Netherlands. But I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before they invade. I’m curious: do any of you ever use gas station attendants, or do you get out of the car and do the dirty work yourselves?

…I always kind of hoped it would look more like the DeLorean. But "evolutionary" designer Ross Lovegrove has a hankering for a futuristic automotive jellyfish that’ll seat four, run on solar energy, drift around on caster wheels, and double as a streetlight. That’s right: when parked, the empty people-pod will ascend upon a telescopic pole and radiate light, illuminating pedestrian walkways and "keeping the ground level free of parked vehicles." Well okay, that’d be a good idea if it weren’t for the fact that scoping out parked vehicles is a major reason for walking around at night. I guess there’d be a lot less reason to do so if said vehicles didn’t look any more interesting than water balloons. Even the mannequins look sad about it. More views at BornRich.