THINKERS AND WONDERS

A few years ago, Doug Martin, an engineer at Ford, read an article about an unusual billboard in Lima, Peru :

It was designed to collect and filter water that condenses on the billboard's cool surface when humid air rolls in from the coast.

The billboard produces hundreds of gallons of clean water every week.
''Local residents can just come by and fill jugs with high-quality water and take it home,'' Mr. Martin said.

A short time later a thought occurred to him : ''Why couldn't a car produce drinking water, too? Air-conditioners in cars do something similar to the Peruvian billboard -generating water by removing moisture from the air.

Then he and Ford colleagues, John Rollinger, went about developing a system that dispenses that moisture as cool and filtered drinking water to people inside the vehicle.

Now Mr.Martin and Mr. Rollinger are working to turn their system into commercial technology.

''There are people in a lot of locations who don't have easy access to fresh water  -arid regions and remote regions,'' Mr Martin said.

''But even markets like the U.S. this might be a feature for people who want to have extremely pure,  clean water and don't want bottles filling up the landfill.''

The drinking water-idea points to a wider change rippling through the global auto industry:

As cars gain more computing power and adopt new technologies, engineers are finding ways to make cars do much more than take us from Point A to Point B.