The 255 million cars on the road in the United States account for 40 percent of the country’s fuel consumption. Most of that fuel is wasted. Lei Zuo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, may have a partial solution: harvesting energy from the car’s suspension. Zuo explained that only 10 to 16 percent of the fuel a car consumes is actually used to drive—that is, to overcome road resistance…