(Hope this isn't a repost...) Researchers work to turn car's exhaust into power: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance I've heard about research into this on/off over the years. One possible use was to extend battery life of laptops by converting the heat given off by the CPU, chipset, GPU, hard drive, etc. back into ernergy.
It's one of those innovations that belong in the ever-expanding list of things that they should have developed decades ago and no, I don't mean just the Detroit 3 but all car companies including Toyota. Unfortunately, crisis is where real progress is made. Given the second law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't make a laptop or an automobile a perpetual motion machine but there just isn't a good reason not to do it. Heat generated and not recaptured is energy wasted.
The trick to recuperating "waste" heat is to do so in a cost-effective manner. This is already done at industrial sites with co-generation
