Who Owns Best Of What’s New Award?

Wild guess. Who (or what) is the recipient of the Best of What’s New award for Popular Science Magazine’s automotive category?

Are you thinking Ford? Are you thinking Jaguar? Are you thinking General Motors? Or how about the automatic dimming rearview mirror created by Gentex? How about those Chevy parts that look as if they were made from the future?

If you guessed these, then you are totally wrong.

You see, the recipient of the Best of What’s New award for Popular Science Magazine’s automotive category is the 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo. This award is actually part of this year’s 19th Annual Best of What’s New awards by the mentioned magazine.

If you are interested in knowing more about this vehicle and how come it was the one chosen by Popular Science Magazine, then you may want to catch the December issue of the magazine which would soon be hitting newsstands (and perhaps even your favorite bookstore) come the 14th of this month.

According to the editors of Popular Science Magazine, the 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo was chosen because it used the Porsche variable turbine geometry (or the VTG) setup. Such was first developed and used in the mentioned vehicle. And this was also created with the assistance and cooperation of yet another company – the Borg Warner Turbo Systems.

Many are not yet quite familiar with this vehicle, after all, it has only been on sale just this summer. However, this award just goes to see that even the newest could also be the best.

As per the VTG setup, the technology was actually based on the type of technology that has been used in previous years by diesel engines that were used in early 1990s units. The technology has been quite successful for such vehicles and Porsche did believe that it could also work well for the 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo.

Experts in the industry do say that such a concept is quite alike to other manufacturers of turbo who make use of variable nozzle or geometry compressors. These other manufacturers also do make use of a system that was for a short time used on some series of gasoline production engines.

Joe Ratzkin is an avid fan of anything automotive. This 34-year old bachelor wanted to be a mechanic when he was a kid but changed his mind and became a freelance writer and researcher instead. He is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.