By Scott Doggett, Contributor

If a seven-man contingent representing the biggest automakers thought they could talk California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger into terminating his campaign to force them to meet California's stringent fuel-efficiency standards, they were sadly mistaken.
 
Following a private, 45-minute meeting Thursday  with executives from Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and BMW, the governor has released a statement that reads, in part:
 
“... I made it clear to the automakers that California will not back down in the fight to protect our own environment by regulating pollution that causes global warming. We will continue to press the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to grant our request for a waiver, and we will use legal remedies if they fail to do so.
 
“Hiding behind the federal government's proposed CAFE standards won't work, and it won't effectively reduce the pollution that causes global warming. In fact, I believe the federal government should adopt California's model; with 13 other states on board, we are heading in the right direction,” Schwarzenegger said.
 
Schwarzenegger referred to the EPA's denial of a waiver that would allow California to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles sold in the state – regulations that are more stringent than the federal government's.

 If California receives the waiver – and the three major presidential candidates have all said they support the request, which the Bush Administration sat on for two years before denying – at least 13 other states would adopt or are considering adopting California's tailpipe-emissions rules.
 
Calls placed to the Michigan and Sacramento offices of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which sent representatives to the meeting, went unanswered.
 
The following industry representatives attended the meeting: Troy Clarke, president of General Motors North America and chairman of the Alliance; James Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales, USA; James Press, vice chairman and president of Chrysler; Jim O’Donnell, president and chief operating officer, BMW North America; Ziad Ojakli, vice president of government and community relations, Ford Motor Company; David Geanacopoulos, vice president and general counsel, Volkswagen of America; and Dave McCurdy, president and chief executive officer of the Alliance.
 
Schwarzenegger's entire statement can be read at the governor's website. 

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the governor's office, easily overlooked while overlooking and overhearing all.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who last year told the Big 3 automakers to "Get off your butt" and meet the state's tailpipe emissions regulations, is scheduled to sit down with representatives from Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and Toyota at the state Capitol in Sacramento Thursday.

The meeting, at the automakers' request, comes just two weeks after 12 governors, led by Schwarzenegger, threatened legal action against the Bush administration for trying to prohibit states from setting automotive emissions limits.

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It was only a matter of time before automakers started using subsidized gas prices as a sales tool – in fact, Jesse Toprak, Edmunds.com's senior industry analyst, suggested last week that the time is now.

Keeping Jesse honest, Chrysler today announced a plan that will let new car and truck buyers freeze the cost of regular gas, E85 and diesel at $2.99 a gallon for up to three years.

The company is calling the plan "Let's Refuel America," and says the offer kicks in Wednesday and expires June 2 (although, as we've all seen, incentive plans have a way of outliving their original expiration date if they're driving a lot of new traffic).

For a vehicle averaging 25 miles per gallon and traveling 12,000 miles a year, the guaranteed price freeze is worth $144 for every dime above $2.99 per gallon that the price of regular gas rises.

There's a lot of small print and red tape involved, and the gas price incentive has to be taken in lieu of most other incentives that Chrysler is offering at the time.

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Plug-in hybrids are seen by many, including Magna, as the next great  frontier.

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Another entry in the plug-in hybrid race, this time from a competitor with really powerful potential.

Magna International, the top-tier Canadian auto parts maker, says it will roll out a plug-in car late next year or in 2010.

So as not to foul relationships with the major automakers that it already supplies with scores of parts, Magna says it won't sell a competing plug-in but will sell them the bits and pieces needed to make their own.

In markets where its customers don't sell cars, though, Magna intends to field a complete plug-in under its own brand.

The company, which reported $26.1 billion in sales and a $663 million net profit last year, is serious about becoming a car maker.

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Could fuel-slurping Nissan Titan's appetite shrink as a Chrysler-built truck?

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

It wasn't long ago that most auto industry consultants – and auto industry insiders, at least those in the truck departments --  were poo-pooing the idea that rising gas prices and oil shortage concerns would bring big hurt to the full-size pickup market.

But sales of those trucks are off by 12.5%, and the first casualty has just been announced as Nissan Motor Corp. said Monday it can no longer justify building its slow-selling Titan pickup – a truck launched in 2003 with hopes of making Nissan a significant player in what some company insiders cheerily referred to as the BFT market ("B" for Big and "T" for Truck and you can fill in the rest).

The Titan isn't leaving the market – at least not yet – but it is leaving the billion-dollar assembly plant Nissan built in Canton, Miss., to handle its new big trucks.

Under a deal announced Monday, Chrysler – whose Dodge Ram proves its mettle in the big truck segment -- will build the next-generation Ttitan for Nissan at a plant in Saltillo, Mexico.

In return, Nissan – which does small cars a lot better than Chrysler – will supply a new small passenger car that its new "partner" will sell in the U.S., probably under the Chrysler brand.

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Hybrid version of BMW's X6 will hit U.S. roads as an '09 model.

BMW says a hybrid version of its X6 "activity vehicle" will, indeed, hit the U.S. market in 2009, initially available only with the company's twin-turbo, 407-horsepower, 4.4-liter V8 coupled to the dual-mode electric drive system co-developed with General Motors and the former DaimlerChrysler.

It's the automotive equivalent of strapping a hydrogen bomb to a nuclear bomb for extra oomph.

In that configuration the hefty X6 won't be the poster child for fuel economy, but it will use less gas than the conventional model.

BMW hasn't disclosed mileage estimates for the hybrid, but says it should be about 20 percent better than the 19 mpg combined city/highway rating for the conventional version. That would put it close to 23 mpg for drivers who can keep the accelerator pedal off the floor.

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Part 1 of  2 Parts

This 1994 Chrysler patriot racecar concept used a flywheel for extra power.

By Bill Visnic, Contributor

Technology developed for Formula One racing has resuscitated decade-old talk of using flywheels as the energy-storage medium for hybrid-electric passenger cars.

When the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the governing body of F1, quietly issued its 2009 technical regulations late last year, they included provision for F1 cars to use a "kinetic energy recovery system," or KERS. It enables the cars to recovery braking energy – as do the hybrids we drive today – and use it, on demand, as “surge power” to boost acceleration when the driver deems appropriate.

The KERS regulation effectively means F1 racecars will be hybrids come 2009.

The three British companies that cooperated on development of a kinetic system already purchased by one F1 team won the Engine Innovation of the Year award from the Professional MotorSport World Expo Awards earlier this year. The system uses a carbon-fiber composite flywheel, rather than a chemical battery, to store the braking energy.

Passenger Cars by 2012?

Underscoring the technology trickle-down theory that always has been a marketing goal of F1 racing, the companies say a similar flywheel system could be available for hybrid passenger cars as early as 2012.

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Plug-in hybrids under development include these from Toyota and GM.


By Scott Doggett, Contributor

President Bush said Wednesday that he wants Americans "driving not on gasoline, but on electricity."

In a speech at the International Renewable Energy Conference in Washington, D.C., the president also said that developments in electric car battery technologies "are amazing, and the United States is investing millions of dollars to hasten the day" they replace gasoline tanks.

Since 1991, the federal government has subsidized battery research at the rate of about $25 million a year, far less than the hundreds of millions of dollars Japan and other East Asian countries send each year to subsidize battery research to help their automakers compete.

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Taking  a page from the playbook he used at Toyota, Chrysler Vice Chairman Jim Press said Monday that every vehicle the company makes will eventually be hybrid-powered.

Press, who was head of Toyota's U.S. sales and marketing arm and its Washington, D.C., governmental unit before being lured to Chrysler late last year, made the remark while talking to reporters at the Levin Institute in New York.

Press offered no timetable, but said the U.S. government's mandate to increase fleetwide fuel economy by 40 percent by 2020 is a big hurdle that hybrid technology can help Chrysler overcome.

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In the "Gee, is this news?" category:

The industry organization representing the three major U.S. automakers and Japanese giant Toyota Motor Corp. has begun lobbying Congress to block the ongoing bid by California and as many as 19 other states to set tougher fuel-economy rules than the 35 miles per gallon national standard established late last year.

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