French automotive executive Carlos Ghosn told reporters attending a product review in Portugal today that automakers Renault and Nissan are talking with a Gulf region country abut participating in a bold electric car project that already has been adopted by Israel.

"We are negotiating to launch an electric car with a Gulf state," Ghosn told a news conference in the coastal resort of Cascais, near Lisbon.

Renault and Nissan, which have operated as an alliance since the French company took control of the Japanese automaker in 1999, plan to put an electric-powered car on the road by 2010.

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Aptera hopes new executive will help bring exotic EV to market by end of year.

Fledgling hybrid- and electric-vehicle maker Aptera Motors said it has hired performance car specialist Neil Hannemann, whose previous projects included the Dodge Viper and Ford GT, to head its program management and manufacturing effort.

The company is announcing its new personnel move today and says Hannemann will provide much-needed production expertise.

Southern California-based Aptera has promised to begin delivering production models of its aircraft-styled Typ-1by December. The 2-seat, 3-wheeled vehicle, classed as a motorcycle despite its enclosed passenger cabin, is to be priced at about $30,000, the company says.

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 Amphere, foreground, and Faraday electric trucks heading for North America.

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Britian's Smith Electric Vehicles has teamed with Ford Motor Co. to build two new battery-electric commercial trucks for the North America market.

Smith, which recently opened an electric truck assembly plant in Fresno, said that it will use Ford F-Series heavy duty truck chassis and Ford of Europe's Transit Connect van to underpin a range of new intra-city delivery and work trucks that run on electricity provided by rechargeable iron-phosphate lithium ion battery packs.

The announcement was made today at the at the annual Commercial Vehicle Show in Birmingham, England.

The initial vehicle, called the Smith Faraday Mark II and based on the F-Series chassis, is set to launch in the U.S. late this year, the electric truck company said. The second, called the Smith Amphere, will use the Transit chassis and will begin production in 2009.

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ZEV Mandate's goal of clean vehicles such as EV1 hasn't been realized.

While our colleague Nick K is sipping champagne in Monaco (see item below) we'll be up in lovely Sacramento, capital of California and the place where former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger now holds down a day job, to monitor a hearing on proposed updates to the state's historic and controversial Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate.

Thursday's all-day session will pit supporters of the battery-powered electric vehicle against automakers and, it appears, the staff of the California Air Resources Board, as the first significant ZEV Mandate updates since 2003 are considered by the board.

The big issue is that while present regulations call for the nation's major automakers to collectively build a minimum of 25,000 zero emissions vehicles for sale in the state between 2012 and 2014 and 50,000 between 2015 and 2017, the air board's staff is recommending the numbers be cut by 90 percent, to just 2,500, in the first period and by 50 percent, to 25,000, in the second phase.

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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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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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Comedian, talk show host and, most important, incredible car guy Jay Leno raises an interesting question in his Driving section column in London's Sunday Times.

Commenting on the 1925 Model T he's restored and had been using as his L.A. commuter car for the previous week, Leno wondered if rebuilding and driving an older small car wouldn't be more environmentally friendly than "building a Prius in Japan, putting it on a freighter and shipping it all the way across the ocean?"

Driving a well-kept older car for a long portion of your life, he posits, "is probably more environmentally friendly than getting a new hybrid every three or four years.

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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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Nissan Motor Co., which has come late to the hybrid game, doesn't want to be caught unplugged when electric cars start hitting the market, says company boss Carlos Ghosn.

An electric Nissan will be introduced in the U.S. in 2010, he told reporters Wednesday during an impromptu discussion at the Geneva Motor Show, with a global launch of the vehicle to follow in 2012.

Ghosn, who chairs both Nissan and its French partner, Renault,  said the electric car would be sold worldwide by both brands. He did not elaborate on brand distinctions, model variances or particulars of the electric drive system being prepared, but did say the cars would not be identical.

Renault would target the European market, Ghosn said, while Nissan would target Asia and  the U.S.

Ghosn said that California's 2004 law aimed at reducing automotive carbon-dioxide emissions has spurred Nissan and Renault engineers' joint research  into alternative energy sources such as electric drive.

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Think's Ox Concept stretches Norwegian EV maker's offerings.

Electronics giant GE said it has pumped $4 million into Norway's Think to help push development of the company's battery-powered electric cars.

Think – which had been owned by Ford Motor Co. but was dumped when the U.S. automaker decided its small electric cars wouldn't sell here – unveiled a five-passenger, highway-legal crossover concept today at the Geneva Motor Show.

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