Five weeks before a February visit from Lee Myung-bak, South Korea's president, the head of the country's leading scientific university set his engineers a race against the clock.
Suh Nam-pyo, president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist), had long been toying with the idea of a revolutionary electric vehicle that would take its power from cables beneath the road rather than relying on batteries. "Could you possibly build one?" he asked the boffins.
