United Parcel Service has ordered 200 hybrid electric trucks and 300 compressed natural gas vehicles from Daimler as it seeks to make its delivery fleet more fuel efficient.

Daimler said the order represents the largest ever placed for "green" commercial vehicles. Retail value of the trucks has been estimated at $50 million.The chassis will be supplied by Daimler's Freightllner subsidary, the hybrid systems by Eaton Corp.

In addition to helping US "green" its fleet and cut its fuel bills, use of the trucks throughout the U.s. fleet could help spread awareness of alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles.

The hybrid delivery trucks, which combine a diesel engine and electric motor, achieve 40 percent improvement in fuel economy and a 90 percent reduction in emissions compared to non-hybrid UPS vehicles, Daimler said.

The CNG trucks produce about 20 percent less carbon dioxide and other emissions than diesel-powered trucks.

The vehicles will be used by UPS for daily delivery operations across the United States and will function in concert with the package service's fleet of conventional diesel vehicles, UPS said in a statement.

The 200 hybrid electric vehicles, which will be deployed next year, are expected to save 176,000 gallons of fuel annually. The 300 CNG trucks  will enter service later this year.

The order will raise to 2,218 -- slightly more than 2 ppercent -- the number of low-carbon vehicles in the 93,000-truck UPS fleet.

Scott Doggett, Contributor

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --Energy gazillionaire T. Boone Pickens has been singing a variation of the same song for several years now, but it's a tune worthy of repeat play:  The planet, says a man who made billions in petroleum exploration and ought to know his stuff, is using more oil than it produces, the situation isn't going to improve and nobody's doing much of anything about it.

"America is in a hell of a bad spot," he said in a presentation Tuesday at the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles annual conference here.

Without a radical reduction in the nation's appetite for imported crude, which now accounts for 72 percent of our total daily consumption, "we are going to be reduced to something less than the superpower we are now."

For Pickens, who has become one of the country's biggest backers of wind energy and of natural gas as a transportation fuel, the cure is painful but necessary.

We must cut back on the use of oil for automotive fuels and shepherd in a rapid and widespread adoption of domestically produced alternative fuels, he said,

Pickens, who left the oil exploration business in 1996 to set up his BP Capital Management investment company and, it turned out, to become one of the nation's biggest alternative energy boosters, has big holdings in natural gas and, not coincidentally,  believes it to be the best interim solution on the transportation side of things.

"Everything" from propane to biofuels will have a place in the effort to reduce oil consumption, he said, but available supplies of domestically produced natural gas are the largest "alternative" energy source around and, if used entirely for transportation fuel, could reduce oil imports by 38 percent.

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Gorton Vallely stands with his company's prototype battery-electric, medium-duty truck at Alternative Fuel Vehicles show.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --The Detroit Auto Show this year had a herd of diesel concepts, a few hybrids and a host of muscle cars, typical fare these days for a mainstream auto show.

Absent was much of anything to do about other "today" alternatives to gasoline, leading people who are concerned about the auto, the energy sector and the environment to wonder what the automakers are up to and why they aren't moving faster to throw off the yolk of demon oil.

Can't answer that question. If I could I'd be out making millions as a highly paid consultant and seer instead of sitting in front of my computer in a 'Vegas hotel room overlooking the scenic roof of the power plant that keeps the casino chilled.

But I can suggest that for every innovation we don't see coming from our mass market automakers there's a small business out there somewhere hoping to offer up a solution.

Many of them are serving the fleet business – the trucking, bus and taxi companies that buy lots of relatively expensive equipment, are subject to strenuous emissions regulation in most states and bleed profits every time the price of gasoline or diesel goes up even a penny a gallon.

Walk around the showroom floor at the annual Alternative Fuel Vehicles national conference here this week and you see that can do spirit everywhere.

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By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

I just grin these days when friends and neighbors complain about the price of gasoline -- which is running around $3.71 a gallon in our part of Southern Californnia.

Fuel for my daily driver -- the natural gas Honda Civic GX in Edmunds' longterm fleet -- averaged just $2.53 a gallon last month, and I'm expecting it to fall below $2 a gallon for April. That'll be a savings of nearly 50% and will put $100 or more back in my pocket each month. 

My secret weapon is the Phill home CNG pump that does an overnight replacement of  the half-tank of fuel I use on my daily 116-mile commute tank overnight (it takes 19 hours or more to fill a a completely empty eight-gallon tank).

Using the Phill means I pay for my natural gas at the same rate Southern California Gas Co. charges homeowners for the gas they use for their ovens and hot water heaters. There's also a bit of electricity involved because the pump operates on a 15 amp, 220-volt circuit.

For March, the first month I used the Phill, I pumped the equivalent of 51.88 gallons and paid $40.29 for the electrical power and $91.17 for the natural gas, for a total of $131.46, or $2.53 a gallon.

Next month a whole-house discount on natural gas kicks in (a perk our gas company offers home CNG fuel pump users) While the cost of electricity won't change, I'm expecting the overall price of a gallon-equivalent of natural gas for the Honda to drop to $2 or less.

Honda, which was making and selling only aobut 1,000 Civic GX models a year, says more people are finding out about the hefty fuel savings the car can bring -- the company expects to double production next year and is thinking of doubling it again the year after.

Until usable EVs and plug-in hybrids come along, it's a great deal for those of us with long commutes.

Nearly 1.8 million alternative-fuel cars were sold in the United States during the 2007 model year, about 250,000 more than the previous model year, according to figures gathered by the automotive information and marketing company R.L. Polk & Co. and released by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

The sales tally included 1,670,933 E-85-capable flex-fuel vehicles, 375,506 diesel-powered and 347,847 hybrids that use gas engines and electric motors. Honda Motor Co. also sold about 1,000 Civic models modified to run on compressed natural gas -- the only factory-built CNG cars in the market.

Sales of E-85-capable vehicles more than doubled from the 823,726 sold during the 2006 model year, while sales of hybrid vehicles increased 37 percent from the 253,081 hybrids sold during the 2006 model year. Sales of diesel vehicles actually fell 21 percent from the 475,203 sold during the previous model year, due to the discontinuation of some models.

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We don't write about it much here on the Green Car Advisor site, but Edmunds has a 2007 Honda Civic GX in its long-erm fleet and we do most of the driving -- it's not hot-rod enough for most of the crew.

One of the benefits is that it comes with a single occupancy carpool lane sticker, and with a 116-mile daily round trip commute on crowded Southern California freeways, that's worth a lot.

Another is that fuel is relatively cheap -- especially as we've just installed a Phill home CNG unit in our garage and can fill the tank with compressed natural gas while we sleep.

Won't bother you with all the details here -- you can jump over to the Civic GX long-term blog on Edmunds Inside Line for all the details -- but we've found that using the Phill has really boosted the car's perceived fuel economy. Because the home unit packs more CNG into a tank, nominal mileage climbed to 32.34 per gallon over the 1,395 miles that we've been using the Phill, up from 29.05 mpg for the prior 12,713 miles when we were using retail pumps.

We haven't received a home natural gas bill that includes the Phill useage yet, but the guys at Honda's alternative fuels unit tell us their figures show the stuff should run about $1.40 a gallon, and that includes CNG and the electricity to run the pump.  

As regular gasoline here in Southern California is about $3.61 a gallon, and CNG at the retail pumps was close to $3 last time we checked, that'll be quite a savings.

We'll keep you posted.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Auto X-Prize entries will include mainstream vehicles and fanciful concepts.

By Robert E. Calem, Contributor

New York --The Automotive X Prize competition, an effort to do for the green car what the original X Prize did for private space flight, was officially launched Thursday at the New York International Auto Show, where sample vehicles were displayed by four of the more than 60 teams from nine countries that will be vying for shares of a $10 million bounty.

The prize money was put up by Progressive Insurance, which has become the  main sponsor in return for a name change: the competition is now the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.

Additionally, the federal Department of Energy plans to provide a $3.5 million grant to fund a national education program organized around the competition in order to “inspire youth and the general public about the alternative vehicle and fuel options of the near future,” the X Prize Foundation announced.

Inspiring Entrepreneurs
The contest, developed over the past two and a half years by the non-profit  foundation, has the lofty goal of inspiring entrepreneurs to develop a new generation of commercially viable automobiles with low emissions and fuel economy equivalent to 100 miles per gallon.

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By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

California's clean air regulators are updating the state's controversial zero emissions vehicle, or ZEV, mandate and are holding a public hearing in Sacramento next week to hear comment on the proposed revisions.

In advance of that, the Plug In America advocacy group today sent a lengthy letter to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging him to influence the panel to protect present rules calling for automakers to collectively build 25,000 zero emissions vehicles for sale in the state between 2012 and 2014 and 50,000 between 2015 and 2017.

One of the proposed changes would cut the number of ZEVs to just 2,500 in the first stage of the build-up and to 25,000 in the second stage.

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Honda Motor Co.'s new subcompact hybrid, scheduled to launch in 2009, should come to the U.S. with a cost premium of less than $2,000 according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

That's about half the premium Honda charges for its gas-electric Civic Hybrid to account for the cost of the hybrid electric system.

The new small car – Honda has refused to provide a more detailed description – will be smaller than the Civic but still could serve as a family vehicle, insiders say.

Honda isn't planning on a radical change in its hybrid system to accommodate the reduced cost. It will be able to lop $2,000 or more off the cost of the system because of the economies of scale the company intends to achieve by selling at least 200,000 of the new small hybrid worldwide each year.

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Ah, Monday.

Another week of commuting begins, and with it, more concern about what the price of gasoline is doing to the family budget.

Which brings up this thought: What if you could do a whole year's worth of commuting on a couple gallons of gas?

A team of students from a French technology school accomplished the equivalent (in theory) when they achieved an amazing 7,148 miles per gallon driving their ultralight, ultra-streamlined wondercar around the 1.94-mile banked circuit at Rockingham Motor Speedway outside of London during the Royal Dutch Shell-sponsored 2007 Eco-Marathon last July.

We say "in theory" because Team Microjoule, entered in the "prototype" category, didn't burn anywhere near a gallon of gas -- the car's fuel tank held only 1.01 ounces of fuel and the mileage was extrapolated from the gas used during 7 laps around the racecourse.

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