Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:
You plug this solid-state inverter into your car's lighter socket and power whatever 110 volt AC appliance you want, 75 watts max. No need for special DC gadgets. It's made for recharging cell phones and other batteries, but I've used it for my scanner and my printer while on the road. Also, I've run a small B&W TV set (5'5), and more important, my baby's bottle heater (I admit is a small one). You can power almost anything that doesn't use large resistance like hair dryers, waffle makers, bread toasters, small ovens. I haven't tried a coffee maker yet. The same company offers an assorted line of automobile inverters with more output power (200 watts on up). This is the smallest one.
— Juan J Gil
XPower MobilePlug 75, Manufactured by Xantrex.
Update: BoingBoing reader Ben Zanin disagrees with the review: "Admittedly, the convenience factor is nifty, but the efficiency is /terrible/. The cigarette-lighter-cum-power-socket puts out DC current, which is then passed into a DC-to-AC inverter, which in all of the given examples (recharging cell phones, running a scanner and a printer, heating a baby bottle) then passes the energy into a wall-wart adapter… that is, an AC-to-DC inverter.
"Derek Woolstar wrote about this much more clearly than myself. The numbers he came up with for such current inverters place their efficiency at less than 10%. Even if the efficiency were as high as double that, you'd lose more than 95% of your energy while transferring it from battery to device. See also this Harper's article."
