The now absent, "Turtle Gauge"

A great interview with Takehisa Yaegashi of Toyota in Business Week.

The chief challenge involved cracking a lot of tough system-integration riddles. And the size and shape of a car is fairly limited so new ways had to be found to cram a lot of equipment into a small package. Then there were safety issues involving the addition of an all-new energy source to the engine compartment in the form of the high-voltage battery.

Managing the energy flow was a major issue. How to do that safely -- and in a shape that wouldn't freak out customers -- required an advanced computer control system.