Nissan Motor Co. said it will weigh plans to make all-electric cars in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, as the Japanese automaker steps up its electric-vehicle activity in China's fast-growing car market.
---------- Nissan says it will offer Leaf EV, right. ----------
A senior Nissan executive disclosed the possible factory plans Sunday at a ceremony in which Nissan and its Chinese joint-venture partner Dongfeng Motor Co. signed an agreement with the Guangzhou government to set up an electric-car program - part of Nissan's global effort to help accelerate use of all-electric cars.
Under that agreement, Nissan's second with a Chinese city, the Japanese company will work with the city government to study ways to promote "zero-emission" cars such as the Leaf, which Nissan plans to start test-marketing in the U.S. and Japan late next year and in China in 2011.
As part of the program, Nissan plans to look into the economic rationale for producing Leaf cars in Guangzhou and to "determine the next step," Nissan Executive Vice President Hiroto Saikawa said in a speech at the ceremony. He did not provide details.
With just about a year to go before General motors flips the switch that starts things rolling in the Chevrolet Volt production plant, the automaker is starting to dole out short Volt test drives in early pre-production models of what will be the world's first mass-produced series plug-in hybrid.
So far, the fun's be limited to the East Coast and the New York Times and NBC-TV's Today Show. But GM is bring the Volt out West next week for the Los Angels International Auto Show's press days Dec. 2 and 3, and all of us at Edmunds, Green Car Advisor, Edmunds.com and Inside Line, will be bringing you driving impressions. Stay tuned for where and when.
Meantime, we can report that the first journos to sit behind the wheel and press the accelerator pedal were generally impressed with the car, which- we and they hasten to remind you - is still a long way from being dialed-in.
The biggest issue, as reported in the Times and on CNBC.com in their Chevrolet volt test drives, seems to be the engine noise when the brain controlling the Volt's power system realizes that the four cylinder, 1.4-liter internal combustion engine-generator has to really crank it up to start replacing electrons that have been drained from the battery.
Ask a Tesla Roadster owner why he drives one and invariably you'll be told it's for the environment.
Mother Nature, you think. Climate change. Polar bears.
And that's half true. Maybe even three-quarters true. But drive a Tesla Roadster - especially the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport - and you soon learn about the other environment, the one few motorists know. Here are a few examples of what that environment looks like:
In the next lane, at a stoplight on a road that skirts Stanford University, a smirking Corvette ZR1 owner revs his otherworldly 638-horsepower 7.0-liter V8. You twist the key in your ignition forward an eighth of a turn, which instantly switches the drive mode from Standard to Performance. The traffic signal changes, you and the 'Vette driver floor it. Three seconds later the powerful Chevrolet is occupying space in your rear-view mirror. Traction-control limitations. The Chevy salesman probably forgot to mention them to the now-frowning ZR1 owner.
Then there's the blue Infiniti G37 Sport 6MT with the close-ratio six-speed manual transmission and the short-throw shifter, one lane over on the 101 Freeway approaching San Francisco, Candlestick Park on the right. He's playful, as are you, and just like the Corvette driver soon he, too, is a shrinking part of the landscape behind you despite his best efforts to outpace and then just keep up.
And then there's the Miata owner, poor thing, taking a sweeping onramp as quickly as possible, white-knuckling it all the way and hoping his newer baby dressed in stormy blue mica paint doesn't lose traction and become roadkill. While he struggles, you race up behind him, drop back, race up behind him again, raise a hand to your mouth as if to cover a yawn.
People who own Roadsters absolutely buy them for the environment: Mother Nature on the one hand, and it's-amazing-how-truly-awesome-the-environment-is-as-seen-from-a-Tesla-cruise-missile on the other.
Electric-sports car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, Reuters reported today, citing two sources familiar with the matter said.
An IPO filing from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric, zero-emissions Roadster, is expected any day, the news agency quoted one of the sources as saying. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.
Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad, in an interview with Green Car Advisor, declined to comment on what she called "rumor or speculation."
Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since the Ford Motor Co. debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric-car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.
The company's chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.
But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.
Tesla's IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on Sept. 25.
Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green-technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.
More to the point, if Tesla does go public and experiences the kind of financial boost A123 did, the investor acceptable will be a huge shot in the arm not only for Tesla but for electric vehicles and EV-related technologies in general.
In addition to the success A123 experienced with its IPO, Tesla has another good reason to prepare an IPO now: The automaker is flush with cash from recent federal low-interest loans, which makes investors more comfortable than pumping money into a flat-broke startup.
The California agency that sets the American standard for automotive emissions today unveiled a much-improved Website that helps consumers choose the least polluting cars on the market.
---------- Click on art to enlarge. ----------
The California Air Resources Board Website, using information collected for vehicle certification in the golden state, offers a practical and easy to use system that ranks vehicles according to their emission characteristics and provides tools to compare models.
The site allows visitors to view models by technology/fuel type, smog score, global-warming score and engine family. And there's a very smart tool that, with a click of your mouse, allows you to view all the tax incentives available for a particular model.
Last year, the agency adopted a state regulation requiring automakers to affix the Environmental Performance Label to California showroom models that convey the vehicle's smog and greenhouse-gas emissions. The simply illustrated graphic has two rankings, from one to 10, that depict vehicle emissions. The higher the score, the less polluting it is.
Driveclean.ca.gov puts these same rankings in an online format, making them practical for web research. The Website also provides information about clean-car technology and guides users to consider the emissions of the models they are evaluating.
We salute CARB, once again, for taking another significant step to make the world we live in a healthier place.
Several Plans Involve Greater Cooperation With Taiwan in EV Development
Here's a roundup of news out of China as that country tries to outplay the competition in the electric vehicles game:
Next at Bat Mainland automaker Chery Automobile is expected to announce soon its plan to establish a global electric vehicle R&D center across the straight in Taiwan.
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Electric version of Panda sedan from China's Geely Automobile reportedly is being built in Taiwan.
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The China Economic News service says sources in Taiwan told it the Chery R&D facility would be built at the Green Energy Intelligent Vehicle Innovation Park in Taiwan's Changhua Coastal Industrial Area.
You're forgiven if you didn't know Taiwan had an EV development complex. We didn't either.
Turns out that the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs is extending incentives for manufacturers of EVs and related components to establish their operations in and around the innovation center.
Not only that, analysts at IHS Global Insight say Taiwanese automaker Yulon Motor has already unveiled an EV of its own - the Luxgen EV Plus - and is set to work with China's Geely Auto on an electric version of the Geely Panda subcompact.
Chery has its own alliance with a Taiwanese contract car builder - Prince Motors - that assembles Chery autos in Taiwan and is likely to be involved in the new electric vehicle research center.
Heading for First
Automakers in Taiwan and China are expected to announced at a joint conference next week plans to team up to build 45,000 electric cars a year on the island by 2015, with about 30 percent slated for export.
The announcement, according to the Chinese auto parts industry news service gasgoo.com, is expected to come during a Nov. 24-25 "Bridge-Building" conference designed ot help bolster business ties between China and Taiwan.
On Second
A group of ten Chinese automakers have formed an alliance to jointly develop electric vehicles and related components, according to a report in Automotive News China.
International agreements between heads of state often are more about politics and posturing than about getting things done. We're hoping this one is the latter.
Both countries are actively promoting development of electric vehicles (China more so than the U.s., we think - but it is easier when you're a government without effective opposition) and the pact calls for them to to:
Develop common standards for chargers, plugs and test procedures.
Identify research and development needs, manufacturing issues and issues related to the introduction and marketing of EVs and prepare a "roadmap" to help vehicle developers keep on top of technology and marketplace evolution.
Pair select U.S. and Chinese cities for joint demonstrations of EVs and related technologies, with data on charging and vehicle use patterns, grid integration, customer preferences and other useful stuff to be shared.
Develop and distribute material to boost public awareness and understanding of EV technology.
Sponsor annual U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Forum meetings, alternating between the two countries (the first was held in Beijing in September, so the U.S. gets the next one).
Production of the Smart ForTwo ED plug-in electric vehicle began this week at Daimler AG's factory in Hambach, France, the automaker reported today.
The first 1,000 of the zero-emissions ForTwo EDs (electric drives) will be provided to customers participating in various mobility projects in major cities in Europe and the U.S. in order to generate broad feedback on electric driving under everyday conditions.
That said, the current, second-generation ForTwo ED equipped with the most modern lithium-ion battery pack won't be available to the general public until 2012. At that time, it will be produced as a regular part of the Smart product portfolio and be sold through the Smart sales network.
The Smart brand has taken a pioneering role in electric mobility since 2007. Back then, 100 ForTwo EDs of the first generation went into practical customer operation under everyday conditions of city traffic in London.
Feedback from that project was very positive and a year later Daimler introduced the second-generation ForTwo ED with a more advanced electric drive and a better lithium-ion battery pack.
As for the Hambach plant, it was inaugurated in 1997 and a year later began building Smart ForTwos. By September 2008, more than 1 million ForTwos had been manufactured at the plant.
Today, the ForTwo is present in 41 countries. Most of the ForTwos are sold in Germany, Italy and the U.S., and those markets are expected to be big ones for the electric version.
Tesla Roadster No. 203 wired for recording background tire noise for video games.
A little story about a green car and noise.
Tesla owner, SCCA racer and Microsoft executive Tom Burt writes in the Tesla Motors blog's "Customers" section that he recently was asked by sound engineers for Microsoft Game Studios - the Forza and Gotham Racing video games to be precise - to loan his car to the cause.
Burt said "yes" and off they went one morning to the track on Roadster No. 203.
After attaching three exterior boom microphones wrapped in what looks like sheepskin area rugs to cut down wind noise, plus a mic in the trunk, one in the cabin and two in the front end near the tires and just above the sway bar, they took off, Burt driving and a sound engineer riding shotgun and giving him direction.
You can read the details in Burt's posting - his 119 MPH speed runs, tail-twisting skids and spins, and tire-howling donuts, all captured for possible future use in video games.
And in a full a day of this kind of punishment, Burt reports, the car performed almost flawlessly - a little brake fade after hard stops at the end of each of three 119 MPH speed runs and two minor episodes of motor overheating that limited power and required brief cool-downs - and he still had just enough juice in the batteries to get home.
Why a Tesla?
Seems the sound guys wanted to record background noises for a couple of video games - tires squealing on corners and the whoosh of a speeding vehicle - and thought the Tesla would enable them to do it without all the loud engine and exhaust noise that they'd have to filter out if they used a regular petrol-powered car.
Concern among some taxpayer and environmental groups that Chrysler's recent decision to downplay development of fuel-efficient electric vehicles violated a pledge used to gain federal bailout funds are unfounded, an administration official says.
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Chrysler, which based part of its federal bailout on promised development of electric vehicles such as this "EcoVoyager" concept, has pulled way back on electrification plans since emerging from bankruptcy.
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"We obviously would be very happy if Chrysler and GM were making lots and lots of high mileage cars [but] it's not a prerequisite. It's not an obligation" of the bankruptcy bailout funding, auto industry restructuring task force chief Ron Bloom said in an interview with Reuters news service.
"We're completely separating policy from ownership," Bloom said of Chrysler's decision. "We trust that the [Chrysler] board has carefully thought out the various options ... and made judgments on the electric program based on that."
The federal government has extended $30 billion in capital to General Motors and $8.5 billion to Chrysler, representing a 60 percent share of GM and a 10 percent stake in Chrysler.
GM is pushing ahead with its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid program as well as with a number of conventional hybrid models, and is expected to expand the Volt's extended-range, gas-electric system to other models as well.
Chrysler, now controlled by Italy's Fiat, has slowed its previosuly announced vehicle electrification plans and now intends to meet federal fuel-efficiency standards by utilizing Fiat-develped gasoline engine efficiency technologies and adding more small cars to its lineup.
Chrysler and GM both have applied for federal guaranteed loans under the $25-billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loans Program, but their applications have not been approved to date.
Bloom said that the federal autos task force doesn't intend to dip into matters involving the automakers and the Energy Department-managed loan program.
We think Chrysler is financially constrained right now from aggressively pushing an expensive electrification program and can probably do what it needs on the fuel efficiency front under its new product plan - which includes introducing the dual mode hybrid Ram pickup next year, an all-electric commercial van early in 2012 and a pair of plug-in hybrids for limited test fleet use in 2011.
But we also think the company is playing the expediency game and could wind up surviving for the short term under the Fiat-designed plan only to fall into a deep hole in later years as more and more of its competitors bring well-develped electric vehicle programs into play.
The game, after all,isn't just about improving fuel economy.
Perhaps more important in the long run is reducing dependency on petroleum fuels and slashing emissions - things electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles can do far better than the best gas and diesel internal combustion engines the industry can develop.
Introduction of the long-awaited Aptera 2e all-electric three-wheel vehicle has been delayed until sometime next year, a quarter of its small workforce has been laid off and its co-founders have taken leaves - one of them permanently - as the company slogs through a painfully slow private financing campaign it had hoped to close by now.
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Aptera 2e prototypes sit on company's new assembly line earlier this year. Aptera has pushed previously planned 2009 introduction to 2010 because of financial woes.
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In a statement issued this morning in response to reports earlier in the week that it had canned its co-founders and laid off a large portion of its staff, Aptera CEO Paul Willbur said "we now have to adjust our production schedule to align with financial realities."
He didn't address reports of layoffs and board-ordered ousters of Aptera founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, but confirmed that Fambro has taken a leave of absence and Anthony has severed his day-to-day connection with the company.
Apetera marketing director Marques McCammon confirmed in an interview with Green Car Advisor that the company has laid off 10 of its 40 employees.
The financial realities Wilbur referred to include a slowdown in the pace of private financing as investors wait to see which of the nation's entrepreneurial advance vehicle makers will be bolstered by large, low-interest federal funding from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.
Norwegian electric-car maker Think has plans to launch its vehicles in the United States and has picked a site in Indiana for its U.S. manufacturing facility, Reuters news service reported Tuesday, citing a major investor in the company.
The exact location and other details will be announced in a few weeks, said Charles Gassenheimer, chairman and chief executive of lithium-ion battery maker Ener1 Inc, which has a 31 percent stake in Think and has had financial problems of its own.
Think had said previously it was exploring the opportunity to launch its vehicles in America and was considering opening a new U.S. manufacturing plant and technical center.
Gassenheimer declined to give more details on Think's plans in the American market, but said the carmaker has applied for a U.S. government loan under a program set up to encourage production of fuel-efficient vehicles.
The loan application is in the initial stages, Gassenheimer said in an interview with Reuters.
Ener1, which also has a battery supply agreement with Think, took a stake in the automaker this year after the Norwegian company went on a fund-raising round to save itself and exit bankruptcy-court protection.
U.S.-based Ener1 gave Think another lease on life by agreeing to invest about $18 million in three tranches and convert $3 million in debt into preferred shares of the automaker.
Car is Heavier Than Chief Engineer Would Like, but There's Time to Slim Down
Video of Volt battery pack crush test shows just one of the scores of indignities the packs have been subjected to in an effort to find any flaws before they go into production cars.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
With a year to go before production begins on the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, General Motors has 80 prototypes running around the country to test the critical battery and power electronics systems and program managers say they're happy with what they re seeing - except, perhaps, around the car's waistline.
There have been problems - mostly small ones that have been resolved - Volt's new chief engineer, Andrew Farah, said in a media briefing this afternoon.
One ongoing concern is weight - the battery pack still weighs in at more than 400 pounds, and the car is heavier than Farah would like. Although not critical to the launch, it's an important issue as every pound of weight eats into fuel economy and battery range.
Farah (left, with pre-production Volt model) wouldn't say what the actual or target weights are for the car, GM's first extended-range, plug-in hybrid.
He did say that efforts to slim down the Volt are ongoing.
Farah also continued to support the company's controversial claim that the Volt could qualify for a 230 MPG city-cycle rating under an early proposal for one of the new federal fuel economy tests being developed for cars that use rechargeable batteries and electric motors some or all of the time.
We continue to shake our heads, suspecting that the claim is likely to come back and bite GM, hard, when real drivers get out there and find that a lot of fancy slow-motion driving tricks will be needed to come close unless then never drive hard or far enough to deplete the batteries and religiously charge them up every night
Among the lesser, and resolvable problems has been that the car's quiet operation in the all-electric mode revealed some noise and vibration issues that would not have been apparent in a noisier car with a conventional powertrain drowning out some of the exterior road and wind noise and mechanical humming and thrumming that affects every vehicle.
Are you in the LA area with the desire and ability to spend Tuesday, December 1 becoming more enlightened about the automotive and energy industries?
The first five people to send an e-mail to pr@edmunds.com noting the make and model of their vehicle and their age (or age range if preferred) will receive a free ticket to attend the Bloomberg Cars & Fuels Briefing - a day of business and information where a small group of advanced auto and fuels technology industry leaders will gather to strategize on the latest ideas and deals.
Award-winning Bloomberg journalists will lead discussions with pioneers including advanced auto technologies investor Vinod Khosla, Honda energy and environmental stragegy director Robert Bienenfeld, Tesla Motors business development chief Diarmuid O'Connell, plug-in hybrid builder and designer Henrik Fisker and oil expert David Sandalow, the federal Energy Department's assistant secretary for policy and international affairs.
Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl and GreenCarAdvisor Senior Editor John O'Dell will also take the stage.
Don't miss a chance to be one 100 guests to hear about the latest in biofuel technology, advanced autos, research on the new automotive customer, and the roles India, China and Korea will play in this rapidly evolving market.
Volt plug-in hybrid (left) and Cruze compact sedan will be featured at Chevrolet's 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show display.
Got a Chevrolet Volt on your car-shopping list but don't know where to get one once they become available?
General Motors Corp. says it will announce in two weeks - at the upcoming 2009 Los Angeles International Auto Show on Dec. 2 - the first markets in which it will be selling the extended-range rechargeable hybrid starting very late in 2010 or early in 2011.
The automaker also will unveil the U.S. production version of the fuel-efficient Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan, for which it is claiming highway fuel economy of close to 40 miles a gallon.
Already on sale in Europe and Asia, the Cruze will hit dealer showrooms in the U.S. in the third quarter next year.
GM, which for decades ceded the small car market to Japanese automakers, is aiming squarely at Toyota and Honda with the Cruze, claiming in its early marketing materials that the sedan will have more passenger and cargo space than either the the Honda Civic or Toyota's Corolla.
Even electric motorcycles aren't immune to the holiday markdown.Brammo, which sells its Enertia electric motorcycles on line and at several Best Buy stores on the West Coast, has chopped the retail price of the 324-pound bike by a third, citing efficiencies gained by broader production.
Closely-held Brammo, whose investors include Best Buy, is selling the Enertia for $7,995, down from its prior price of $11,995. Customers can get the out-of-pocket price down to $7,195 with a 10 percent federal income-tax credit, the Ashland, Ore.-based company said.
Brammo was able to reduce the price because of production efficiencies as well as the declining cost of "key motorcycle components, said John Farris, Brammo's director of marketing.
He declined to say how many Enertias have been sold or which component costs fell, though he said the cost reductions were "across the board."
Anticipating a payoff in cleaner city air and a lowering of national CO2 emissions, the German environmental ministry is awarding automaker Daimler a grant of up to 9 million euros ($13.46 million) to subsidize development of an all-electric version of its Sprinter commercial van.
Up to 50 of the electric vans will be produced by the Mercedes-Benz Van unit and delivered to customers in environmentally sensitive inner city areas for real-world testing.
Because they travel relatively short distances and spend a lot of time idling while cargo is being unloaded and delivered, commercial vans are an ideal platform for electrification.
They benefit from electric drive systems' powerful torque; don't suffer from the need to be recharged after 50-80 miles of driving and improve both air and environmental noise quality with their zero emissions, near-silent motors.
Dana Holding Corp., which specializes in making truck frames and axles as well as sealing and thermal products for vehicle makers, has been tapped by electric-roadster maker Tesla Motors to supply a proprietary EV battery-cooling system said to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.
---------- Tesla's rear-mounted battery pack (in purple, above) is made of thousands of tightly packed lithium-ion cells and requires a sophisticated cooling system to prevent thermal problems and cell failure. ----------
Dana's system, called the Long Heat Exchanger, helps maintain optimum temperature levels in lithium-ion batteries by transferring heat generated by the battery into the car's climate-control system, the company said.
Dana is debuting the system in Tesla's 2010 Roadster Sport.
While battery failures haven't been a significant problem for any electric-car manufacturer yet, lithium-ion batteries - the type preferred by most for all-electric and plug-in electric cars because of their light weight and high power density - are prone to heat buildup than can cause individual cells to break down.
An inexpensive but effective battery cooling system would be a major boon to the EV industry.
Ohio-based Dana is looking to benefit from the expanding electric-vehicle market as sales of its truck frames, driveshafts and axles fall. Dana's third-quarter revenue dropped 31% from a year earlier to $1.33 billion.
Closely held Tesla estimates the Roadster's battery life at 100,000 miles, or about seven years. The company, which in September received an $82.5 million equity investment to expand its number of showrooms, has delivered more than 900 Roasters, almost a third of that total since mid-September.
(Updated at 7 p.m. Pacific time, 11/16/09, to add details throughout.)
By Robert E. Calem, Contributor
Top executives from more than a dozen companies announced today that they had formed a coalition supporting plug-in electric vehicles, and they unveiled a plan calling for 120 million EVs on U.S. roads by 2030 - an ambitious proposal bearing a federal price tag of more than $120 billion over the next eight years.
Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., members of the newly formed Electricifcation Coalition said plug-in electric vehicles hold the key to solving America's dependence on oil and its associated "economic, environmental and national security vulnerabilities."
High penetration rates of grid-enabled vehicles, or GEVs - vehicles propelled in whole or in part by electricity drawn from the grid and stored onboard in a battery - could radically minimize the importance of oil to the U.S., strengthening the country's economy, improving its national security, and providing much-needed flexibility to American foreign policy, the business leaders said.
Simultaneously, such a system would clear a path to dramatically reduced economy-wide emissions of greenhouse gases, they said.
The conference showcased 13 business leaders and several influential politicians, including Carlos Ghosn, CEO of the Nissan Motor Co.; David W. Crane, CEO of electric utility NRG Energy; David P. Vieau, CEO of battery maker A123 Systems; Frederick W. Smith, CEO of Federal Express; Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota; and Nancy Sutley, chairperson of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Their presentations at the event were optimistic and filled with statistics about the prevalence of cheap electric energy and the benefits of proliferating GEVs.
Among their arguments: that electricity prices are stable and the supply of electricity is abundant, with lots of spare capacity; that electricity is a domestic resource; and, that the infrastructure is already in place to generate, transmit and distribute the electrical supply to homes - with their GEV-filled garages - nationwide.
But the coalition's vision and its goals - spelled out in a 170-page document released today titled the Electrification Roadmap - are a complex assortment of policy recommendations and business initiatives that will face a lot of challenges, even its backers concede.
A few weeks ago, the marketing reps behind the Chevrolet Volt asked the public to submit names for the exterior paint color of the hybrid. Some 13,000 names were submitted.
We think "greenish silver" pretty much describes the paint job you see here, but the Volt folks wanted - and got - more thoughtful entries. Among them: Joule of the Nile, High Ohm Silver!, Kermit the Fog and Bye Bye Foreign Oil Blue!
Well, today the list was narrowed down to three. Yes, one of the following three names will be the name General Motors gives the original Volt exterior paint:
Viridian Joule, submitted by David Thomas of Sanford, Florida.
environMINT, submitted by Matthew Valbuena of Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
EV-ergreen, submitted by Devin McQuarrie of San Jose, California.
If you feel strongly (or even if you don't) about this, you can vote on one of these names. GM promises that the name that receives the most votes will be the name assigned to the paint. The deadline to vote is 8 a.m. Eastern time, Dec. 1.
And what, ask you, will David, Matthew or Devin receive? GM will be sending all three to the Los Angeles Auto Show, where the winner will be announced on Dec. 1. And "the winner will have the chance to drive a pre-production Volt."
Yeah, we think the winner deserves more than that, but hey, GM just posted a $1.2-billion loss. At least the winner will have a chance to turn the motor over. Electricity isn't free, you know.
Private Capital Eroded by Production Delays, Aptera Now Waits Federal Loan OK
The co-founders of Aptera Motors reportedly have been ousted in a shakeup that includes numerous layoffs.
Former Tesla motors PR chief-turned-consultant Daryl Siry, writing for Wired.com, reported Sunday that sources at the San Diego-based company told him Aptera co-founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony have been dismissed, apparently because of substantial conflicts with the new management team they brought in last year.
A spokesman for Aptera told Green Car Advisor this morning that "something is up" but said he was unable to offer more.
Aptera marketing director Marques McCammon told Wired that Fambro has taken a voluntary eave of absence to help save money. The article said Anthony's status was unclear.
The reported shakeup comes as Aptera is awaiting word on its application for several million in federally guaranteed loans under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.
Siry writes in Wired that the rift apparently grew as the team assembled under Paul Wilbur, Aptera's new president and chief executive, discovered that the three-wheeled, aircraft-styled electric vehicle Fambro and Anthony had designed wasn't ready for the market.
Wilbur told Green Car Advisor early this year that a number of changes from the original design had been ordered to make the vehicle more marketable. Some some cosmetic and some safety-oriented. One, the decision to use roll-down side windows instead of the original fixed windows, necessitated a lengthy and expensive re-engneering of a large part of the door assembly.
Wilbur's team decided last year to delay production of the Apteraluntil late this year to make sure the car would satisfy consumers, but the delay reportedly has eaten through most of the $24 million in private capital Fambro and Anthony raised just before hiring Wilbur.
The funding came from topnotch investors, including Google and IdeaLab, unlikely to be willing to watch idly as an internal rift grew.
Siry reports that Wilbur and his team opted to wind things down and lay off employees to pare expenses while waiting for the anticipated government loan to come through, while Fambro and Anthony argued for forgetting the engineering changes and building and releasing cars as they were initially designed.
Aptera's board reportedly came down on Wilbur's side.
Toshiba expects to sign up about five car companies as customers for its new lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles, the head of the business told the London-based Financial Times said in an interview published Sunday.
Shoshi Kawatsu, general manager of the Super Charge Battery (or SCiB) division, also said that Toshiba was preparing for the possible manufacturing of batteries in the U.S. and Europe and would make a decision on whether to go ahead in 2011, depending on market growth and the needs of its customers.
Toshiba joined the race to mass produce lithium-ion batteries for zero-emissions electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids last year, announcing then that the Japanese electronics giant aimed to make 3 million lithium-ion battery cells a month starting in 2010.
Battery packs for hybrid cars can contain hundreds of cells. In the fall of last year, the company was making 150,000 cells a month, mostly for electric bicycles; a current production figure was not immediately available.
Kawatsu's comments highlight Toshiba's confidence in its battery technology and the growing number of new entrants fighting for a share of the potentially huge market in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
"No confidence, no investment," Kawatsu told the Financial Times. Toshiba is spending $279 million to build a second SCiB factory as it pushes into the market with the goal of reaching $2.2 billion in sales by 2015.
Folding Electric Bike, Steam Speed Racer Other Green Transportation Honorees for 2009
Frankly, my dears, we find year-ending annual lists of the top 10, or 20, or even 50 things quite contrived, subjective and a pain to research and write - but fun, fun, fun to read.
Especially when they include things we would have stuck on 'em.
So we peruse them and this weekend found Time magazine's selection of the top 50 inventions of 2009, a list that includes a quintet of green car items (well, a triplet of cars plus an electric bicycle from way down under and a green unicycle from Honda).
Topping the transport list, in 15th place, was the YikeBike, a lithium-powered, folding two-wheeler from New Zealand - slated for production in very small numbers initially (100 or so) by mid 2010. It looks like a modern two-wheeled adaptation of a kid's Big Wheel trike.
The top automotive ranking was Nissan's Leaf EV, a 5-seat hatchback that we've been writing about for quite some time. It has just begin a 22-city U.S. tour but won't hit the market until this time next year. The Leaf, unveiled in August, will be the first mass-market, affordable (under $35,000 we believe) EV from a major automaker. Time ranks it the 25th best invention of the year.
Honda's U3-X concept, an electric, gyroscopically balanced unicycle controlled by the rider's shifting weight, placed 27th. The automaker showed it last month at the Tokyo Auto Show, and we thought then that it would beat the heck out of Segue's personal transporter for convenience and usability if Honda decided to make and market it.
In 40th position is another green car we wrote about earlier this year, the WorldFirst F3 Formula Three race car developed by at team at the University of Warwick-affiliated Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre using as many biological and biodegradable parts as possible. Thus a steering wheel made of bioplastic reinforced with carrot fibers; brake pads lined with cashew shells, potato-starch based plastic body parts, biodiesel fuel made from chocolate waste and vegetable oils and road-racing speeds of up to 125 miles an hour.
Occupying 50th place on the list is another British "invention," the world's fastest steam car. Imaginatively named British Steam Car, it's a 25-foot-long, dry-lake racer powered by the steam from a dozen boilers piped through more than 2 mile of tubing and putting out sufficient power to goose the rocket-shaped speedster this past August to 151 miles an hour on a Mojave Desert test track at Edwards Air Force Base northeast of Los Angeles.
Pricing has not been set yet on Nissan's Leaf electric car (pictured), which will see limited distribution starting late next year, but the automaker's top marketing executive for North America told us today that the monthly cost to the consumer should be equivalent to the monthly cost of a fully loaded Honda Civic plus its fuel.
(Article updated 11/13/09 to correct pricing.)
That means the purchase price (about $28,000) or comparable monthly payment for a high-end Civic plus the cost of the gasoline it would need to cover 1,200 miles (at 30 MPG and $3/gallon, about $120), said Brian Carolin, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Nissan North America.
Although Nissan's global plan is to sell the zero-emissions car without battery and to lease the battery to car buyers at a cost roughly equal to the $120 calculated above, both Carolin and Mark Perry, Nissan's director of product planning and advanced technology strategy for North America, told GreenCarAdvisor that Nissan has not yet decided how to price the package in the U.S.
"We may sell the car and battery together, we may lease it as a package, or we may sell the car and lease the battery," Carolin said. "We just haven't decided yet."
The idea that a wholesale switch to electric cars would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is one of a number of myths dispelled by a new report.
---------- The Tesla Roadster EV offers greener motoring than gas-powered cars, but what if we all drove them? ----------
The report, "How to avoid an electric shock: Electric cars from hype to reality," was conducted by the European lobby group Transport & Environment.
The report found that while there were significant potential environmental benefits to be had from a switch to electric vehicles, these were wholly dependent on changes in the way electricity was generated, energy taxed and carbon-dioxide emissions regulated. Current EU legislation contains loopholes that are likely to lead to emissions and oil use going up.
How could electric cars increase emissions?
Binding EU targets for car CO2 emissions agreed last December include "super credits" that enable carmakers to sell up to 3.5 SUVs for every electric vehicle they sell and still reach their official EU target. Electric cars are also counted as zero-emissions vehicles despite the fact that the electricity they use can come from high-carbon fossil fuels such as coal
The combined effect of these loopholes would be that carmakers that choose to market electric cars to meet EU targets would have to do less to reduce emissions of conventional cars. The overall effect would be higher CO2 emissions and oil use.
According to the report, the most certain way to promote electric-powered transport is to tighten long-term CO2 standards for cars to 80 g/km by 2020 and 60 g/km by 2025 while at the same time increasing fuel taxes. A lack of stringent CO2 standards removes the main incentive for motor industry to invest in electrification.
Electric cars must be rewarded for their energy efficiency, not for moving emissions from exhaust pipes to power station chimneys, the report concluded.
It's not only Chrysler's battery-electric and plug-in electric hybrid vehicle programs that have been pared back - way back - under the post-bankruptcy plan devised for the company by its new management.
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Fiat Doblo small van is now being considered as platform for "new" Chrysler's fit electric vehicle...
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The once-vigorous Chrysler hydrogen fuel cell program - aimed at bringing fuel-cell electric vehicles, commercial and private, to market some day - is pretty much a memory as well. It was absorbed into Daimler's program when the German automaker acquired Chrysler back in 1999 and though it survived the 2007 divorce, it was phased out two months ago.
We're told by knowledgeable people who for various reasons didn't want to be identified that there are no plans right now to actively pursue further development of fuel cells but, of course, that "options are being kept open."
----------
It would be replacing a Dodge-based electric sports car such as this Zeo concept first shown in January 2008.
----------
We don't think - as some do - that Chrysler's entire alternative fuels and powertrains effort has been killed by Italy's Fiat, which took control of the country's smallest and weakest automaker as it came out of bankruptcy earlier this year.
Although Chrysler's two-year-old environmental vehicle group, ENVI, has been disbanded under Fiat, we believe the company will keep doing some development work and will follow though on its previous promises to put the hybrid Ram truck into the market next year followed by a pair of experimental plug-in hybrids - for test fleet use only - in 2011.
Not only did those few vehicles remain in the just-announced five-year plan, but the members of the ENVI team, as far as we know, all are still working at Chrysler - they've just been mainstreamed into the regular product development program. And Fiat appointed former ENVI boss Lou Rhodes to be head of vehicle electrification programs for both Fiat and Chrysler - a post that probably wouldn't exist if there wasn't at least some work going on.
There are changes, though, and not for the good.
The Dodge EV once thought to be a sure thing for 2010 is no more, and except for a battery-electric commercial van based on the Fiat Doblo minivan that is under "strongest consideration" for production by late 2011 or early 2012, the chances for other Chrysler hybrids, plug-in hybrids or EVs to make it into the retail market before the next 5-year plan is unveiled in 2015 are pretty slim.
CEO of Renault-Nissan Alliance Tells All in Exclusive Piece For Edmunds Inside Line
Nissan Leaf electric car will go on sale in select U.S. and Japanese markets next year, first of eight EVs from Renault-Nissan Alliance slated for next three years.
It's not often that a top auto executive publicly takes a stand that commits the company to a course of action that puts it out in front of the pack.
Comfort, in the auto industry as in most others, lies in conformity.
But Carlos Ghosn, never one to shy away from taking the lead when others dare only to follow, is staking his own reputation and the economic future of both of the companies he heads - France's Renault and Japan's Nissan - on the conviction that electric vehicles are no longer to be considered concepts and prototypes best suited for PR campaigns and media feeding frenzies at the major global auto shows.
In an opinion piece written expressly for Edmunds Inside Line, Ghosn lays out his philosophy and rationale for leapfrogging the competition to become the first automaker to put a mass-market electric car into production - the 2010 Nissan Leaf - and to vow to field a slate of eight retail and commercial EVs in the next few years, four from Nissan and four from Renault.
Ghosn doesn't claim in his piece- the first in what Inside Line editors intend to become a regular series of think pieces from top automotive executives - that the Renault Nissan Alliance was a leader is developing EVs, pointing out that, in fat, electric cars were around a century ago.
He does say, though, that after being "relegated to low-volumes specialist applications" for decades, now - not later - is the time to bring them into the mainstream.
What we like about Ghosn, in addition to his willingness to stick his neck out, is that he's not making some smarmy bid for ecological sainthood.
He runs a business and has made his decision on purely business grounds, the three chief among them being:
Oil prices will rise and the cost of gasoline with them.
Governments will continue to increase restrictions on vehicle emissions, making zero emission EVs an invaluable part of any automakers' portfolio.
Public concern about the quality of the environment -and the automobile's impact on same - will continue to increase.
Facing those conditions, he says, no automaker that hopes to remain competitive can long ignore the need to electrify.
As for the Renault-Nissan EVs, Ghosn has this to say:
"We are confident in our lithium-ion battery technology, which Nissan has been developing over the past 17 years. We are producing our own batteries, through a joint venture with NEC, so we will have better control of quality, cost and the ability to meet our forecast demand. We consider the battery as a core technology and a business. Through a separate venture with Sumitomo, we are planning a business to refabricate, resell, reuse and recycle the batteries, giving them a second life as energy-storage solutions in markets worldwide. "We are also the only automotive group that has established more than 30 partnerships with governments, municipalities, utility providers and other organizations to lay the foundation for both the charging infrastructure and for incentives and policies that will encourage consumers to embrace electric cars. From San Diego to Yokohama to Monaco, the momentum is building for zero-emission mobility."
There's lots more, and you can read it all on Inside Line.
And, of course, we invite you visit Green Car Advisor's extensive Nissan and Renault categories to follow the companies' green patch over the years.
(Updated 11/13/09 to correct Chevy Aveo monthly fuel figure.)
"Miles per gallon" made sense when all cars drank gas, or diesel, and that was that.
But with the advent of rechargeable electric vehicles, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid, the fuel-use scene gets quickly blurred.
How many miles per gallon do you assign to a Nissan Leaf, with a lithium-ion battery and no fuel tank or internal combustion engine?
---------- Edmunds.com proposes the EPA scrap its mileage-based fuel-economy guide, right, for one built on fuel costs. ----------
And how does a car shopper compare the Leaf, or any of the other all-electric cars heading our way in the next decade, to a gasoline-burning Honda Fit or a Ford Fusion hybrid or, to complicate things even more, compare any of those cars to a Chevrolet Volt or other extended-range plug-in hybrid that uses gasoline and electricity from the commercial power grid.?
Can't be done - unless the consumer's an electrical engineer with a minor in math.
To make it easier and more accurate for consumers to get honest comparative information, Edmunds.com is proposing to the EPA that it replace the mileage-based fuel-economy stickers it's been putting on new cars since 1975 with stickers that display monthly fuel costs.
That's right, replace MPG with MFC.
Then consumers could see that at 1,250 miles a month, a 2010 Toyota Prius would cost, on a national average, $67 a month at the pump, while an electric Mini E would cost $49 a month to "fill" from a 220-volt charger in the consumer's garage; the monthly gasoline bill for a four-cylinder Chevrolet Aveo would be $11 $111, and a 2011 Chevrolet Volt - running on gas and electricity - would cost $54.
That's information people can use to make informed decisions.
Edmunds.com - our parent - is submitting its recommendation and rationale in a letter being sent Friday morning to the agency and to the Department of Transportation.
The 2010 Detroit auto show will include a 37,000-square-foot exhibit devoted to electric vehicles, organizers announced today.
The exhibit, called Electric Avenue, will be on the main floor of Detroit's Cobo Center. The display will have about 20 of the zero-emissions vehicles from both conventional automakers and startup companies, a statement said.
The electric-minded presentation will illustrate "the long-term viability of the auto industry using a subject that is top of mind globally these days," Doug Fox, chairman of the auto show, said in a statement.
The auto show, scheduled for January 11-24, also will reprise last year's EcoXperience exhibit, which allowed attendees to drive a variety of electric vehicles around a landscaped quarter-mile track in Cobo's basement.
That exhibit again will be sponsored by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
Electric Avenue's sponsor is Dow Chemical Co., which is developing batteries for electric vehicles.
A joint venture between Dow and South Korean battery-maker Kokam Engineering Co. Ltd. received a $161 million federal grant this summer.
Construction has begun on an 800,000-square-foot development and manufacturing plant near Dow's headquarters in Midland, Michigan. The plant is expected to cost about $665 million.
A study by the U.S. Department of Transportation has determined that hybrid electric vehicles have a higher rate of driving into bicyclists and pedestrians than automobiles packing conventional internal combustion engines.
The study, which was conducted by DOT's National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, found that pedestrian and bicyclist crashes involving both HEVs and ICE vehicles commonly occurred on roadways, in zones with low speed limits, during daytime and in clear weather, with higher incidence rates across the board for HEVs.
The study said a variety of crash factors were examined to determine the relative incidence rates of HEVs versus ICE vehicles in a range of crash scenarios. For one group of scenarios -- those in which a vehicle was slowing or stopping, backing up, or entering or leaving a parking space -- the HEV was twice as likely to strike a pedestrian or bicyclist than a convention vehicle.
The study concluded that the different incident rates could be attributed to the different sound levels produced by the vehicle types. In other words, the lack of noise produced by the near-silent electric motor of an HEV accounted for higher collision rate; the biped or cyclist didn't hear what was coming.
Given that more people are killed in car-versus-pedestrian collisions than car-versus-car collisions, you might think the study would result in legislation requiring HEVs to be louder. But that's not going to happen -- not now, anyway.
Instead, the NHTSA "will continue monitoring the incidence of pedestrian and bicyclist crashes involving HEVs. In future, a larger sample size would allow us to perform a more detailed analysis such as limiting the entire analysis to low-speed crashes, analyzing different vehicle maneuvers individually, etc."
Volkswagen underscored its commitment to electric vehicles today by announcing creation of a new "electric traction" unit and naming Karl-Thomas Neumann, former head of the giant parts supplier Continental AG, as chief of the new operating group.
---------- VW says it will launch retail version of E-Up! small EV in 2013. ----------
Neumann, who served as head of electronics for VW before leaving for a post at Continental in 2004 will report directly to Volkswagen Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn, who said of the new VW electric traction group that electric drive systems are "crucial technology for the Volkswagen Group and offers enormous potential" for growth and profit.
The company is part of a growing movement by French and German automakers to embrace electric vehicles in the face of growing political concerns about oil dependency and the climate impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuel burned in cars and trucks contributes an estimated 12-14 percent of global CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases.
Peugeot has begun pre-bookings for the i0n (pictured), its i-MiEV-derived electric car developed in partnership with Mitsubishi and scheduled for production next year.
The company says that it has already signed letters of intent with nine companies and various government agencies for car sharing and large fleets in Europe.
For individual customers, pre-bookings are open on the websites of Peugeot Germany, Great Britain, Spain, France and Italy.
Like the Citroen C-Zero, which like the iOn will basically be an i-MiEV with a different badge, the four-seat, zero-emissions iOn will contain a lithium-ion battery pack that can be charged in six hours from a standard 220-volt outlet or get a charge to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes at special rapid-charge stations.
Peugeot has said the EV will develop a maximum power output of 64 base horsepower and top out at 81 miles per hour. That's good enough for European cities and Europe's increasingly speed-restricted autobahns, which currently have an "advisory speed limit" (or richtgeschwindigkeit) of 80 mph.
The iOn will also incorporate a number of innovative services, in particular through its "location and communications" box.
The box will not only handle liaison with an emergency call service, for which Peugeot is a leader throughout Europe, but will also provide feedback of technical data (including state of the battery, distance covered and kilometers before maintenance) for the professional management of vehicle fleets.
Panelists Say Earth-Friendly Future Won't Come Easy For Private Transportation
Although predominately a business-oriented exploration of environmental practices and processes the Opportunity Green 2009 conference at UCLA this weekend promised transportation geeks a look at ideas of personal mobility in a green future.
We're not sure it followed through, as the program became in part a promotion of the Mini E electric vehicle program - thanks to the event's sponsorship by Mini USA - and in part an examination of the obstacles still in the way of truly green mobility.
---------- Passer-by eyes Mini E parked on UCLA campus during Opportunity Green conference. ----------
Thus the opening of the panel entitled "The Next Generation of Transportation," consisted of a somber warning from moderator Dan Neil, the L.A. Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic.
"I'm sorry," he opined, "but I fear that society cannot magically make the wide, sweeping changes needed in transportation without suffering" the same far-reaching government and corporate grab for control "that we see coming in health care."
Event sponsor Mini, of course, disagreed - the company was there to persuade eco-friendly professionals that parent BMW, a fossil fuel-burning company of global proportions, is finding its inner green machine and that the right answers to our transportation needs are on the way.
Spotlighting the Mini E and offering test drives to the participants of the event, Mini collected input from drivers about their experiences to add to the data its in-house green team will use as it plans the BMW's eco-friendly future.
Neil pointed out in the transportation session that the Mini E is a not-ready-for-prime-time electric car - not with that "beautifully upholstered lithium battery pack in the back seat," taking up room most drivers would want for passengers and cargo.
The California company also reports the installation of chargers in San Diego and Iowa.
Coulomb Technologies, the mostly unchallenged leader in networked charging stations for electric vehicles, announced today that it has signed an agreement with a Sydney-based company to distribute Coulomb's charging stations throughout Australia.
The agreement is exclusive to ChargePoint Pty Ltd, which Coulomb says is in "advanced discussions with a number of government and private sector partners for pilot projects in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, which are all due to commence in the first half of 2010."
The pilot projects will be used to evaluate charging behavior, energy grid load analysis, and environmental and societal impacts.
The first mass produced electric vehicles will arrive in Australia in 2010, with most manufacturers expected to release models down under in 2012. Coulomb is clearly hoping to have its charging stations in place in time to meet demand.
Meanwhile, Coulomb announced today that the Elk Horn, Iowa, will be getting four of its charging stations this week. That's significant because at present there are no EV charging stations between Denver and Chicago.
Coulomb says the stations will be the first of many along the I-80 corridor through Nebraska and Iowa.
And in California, Sequoia Solar, a San Diego company that designs and installs grid-connected solar systems, has announced plans that it will unveil the first of many networked solar-powered EV charging station this week.
Powered by a combination of the sun and Coulomb's charging stations, Sequoia said it plans to extend Coulomb's network and their own solar technologies throughout San Diego County.
In little over a year, Coulomb Technologies of Campbell, California, has gone from zero installed charging stations to chargers installed in many cities and on several continents. Our hats are off to CEO Richard Lowenthal (pictured), the driving force behind the spread of the stations.
Electric drive systems developer and supplier UQM Technologies says it has received a U.S. patent on a new operating geometry for electric motors that require fewer of the expensive permanent magnets that transfer the motor's power into wheel-turning torque.
The system developed by the Colorado company can help reduce the cost of EV and hybrid vehicles' electric motors and the demand for the rare-earth metals used in their permanent magnets.
UQM's engineers developed a component layout that allows a motor to produce the same level of power using 20 to 25 per cent fewer or smaller permanent magnets, said Jon Lutz, the company's vice president for technology.
An electric motor has two basic pieces, a fixed-position stator, or outer assembly that contains the permanent magnets and the rotor, which holds the cols of copper wire coils that produce an electro-magnetic field. The rotor is spun by the interaction of the magnetic field with the permanent magnets (think of that experiment when you were a kid and put the same ends of two magnets together, watching in awe as an invisible force-field pushed them apart).
By reducing the number of magnets needed in an automotive drive motor by 25 percent, Lutz said, UQM can lower the cost of the entire motor by about 5 percent - a savings that can help trim the cost of electric vehicles.
The system is one result "of our longstanding effort to minimize the magnet content and production cost" of UQM's motors, Lutz told Green Car Advisor.
Authorities today are trying to determine the exact cause of a spectacular fire at a lithium-battery-recycling facility in Trail, Canada, owned and operated by Toxco Inc., an Anaheim, California, company that has a recycling agreement with electric-car maker Tesla Motors and recently received $9.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to expand its recycling operations.
Fire officials and Toxco executives said today that they believe Saturday night's blaze, which set off a series of explosions witnesses described as resembling a fireworks show, likely started with an internal short in one of the used lithium-ion batteries stored at the 70,000-square-foot facility.
The 52 firefighters who responded to reports of explosions at the plant were forced to let the fire burn itself out because lithium is highly reactive to water.
Trying to douse the flames would only have made them worse, fire official John MacLean said, adding that environmental authorities were called in because lithium emits lithium oxide and the corrosive lithium dioxide.
According to the company's Website, Toxco is the only company in the world "that can recycle any size or type of lithium battery."
The company's credentials no doubt contributed to Toxco receiving a DOE grant in August to expand its battery-recycling operations in preparation for the mass production of large-format lithium batteries expected to occur in coming years as gasoline-electric hybrids and pure-electric vehicles enter the market in great numbers.
Like spent nuclear fuel rods, used large-format lithium-ion batteries pose a serious environmental problem, because their disposal carry various risks, including the threat of fire and explosion.
Striving to keep pace with rival Renault and stablemate Peugeot, France's Citroen has announced plans to launch an electric car late next year.
The Citroen C-Zero, like Peugeot's previously announced iOn EV city car, will be based on the Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric already in production in Japan.
With two all-electric cars coming from PSA Peugeot Citroen and three from Renault in the next three years, France is in line to become the nation's leader in EV offerings.
Citroen said the four-seat C-Zero will use the same power and energy storage system as the i-MiEV, including its lithium-ion battery pack that can be charged in six hours from a domestic outlet or get a charge to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes at special rapid-charge stations.
The Cadillac Converj plug-in hybrid concept is on the way to becoming a real car, the Detroit News is reporting.
---------- GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz with the Cadillac Converj concept at the 2009 Detroit auto show. ----------
Citing unidentified insider sources, the newspaper says that General Motors sees the highly styled Caddy, which would use the same technology as the Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in, as one way to help generate new excitement around a brand that has been losing sales all year.
Although GM officials, concerned at the time about the company's plummeting financial fortunes, later said they didn't plant to build the car, (a decision the automaker's bankruptcy, federal bailout and new recovery plan may well have changed) GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz remarked at the show that if the Converj were to be put into production, the retail model would closely resemble the concept.
He also said he saw a market opportunity for a Cadillac plug-in hybrid because it would be easier to pass on to luxury car buyers the cost of the expensive lithium-ion battery pack (estimated at $10,000 to $12,000 for the four-seat Volt, which will retail for more than $40,000 before federal tax credits).
The venue was a stone's throw from the office in the People's Republic of Santa Monica, but 54 miles from home, and the freeway trip on a day when there wasn't much traffic showed two things - the car zips along quite nicely at speeds of 70-80 mph, and at those speeds sucks down a lot of energy.
When we left the house, the range indicator showed we had 82 miles of travel on a full battery pack. When we arrived - a trip of 42 miles - it showed just 34 miles of range, meaning we'd lost 6 miles, or 7 percent or our anticipated range, to high-speed driving.
Several of the regular drivers -who use their Mini E's as their primary vehicles - told us that ranges of 80-85 miles at freeway speeds is the norm, although one L.A. driver, Adam Weisman, said that when he first got his Mini E this summer he was pounding down juice like a dehydrated marathon man, regularly running out of battery after 60 miles of so of driving.
We're not sure what the real things will look like, but the last three of those - shall we say - interestingly-named, unusual looking electric car concepts that Renault showed at the Frankfurt Auto Show earlier this year will become production cars for the European market, the automaker has now said.
---------- Production version of this Zoe Z.E. concept will be core of Renault's European EV lineup. ----------
Renault previously had announced that one of the "concepts," the Fluence Z.E. electric sedan, was the prototype for the EV it will begin selling in Israel and Denmark in 2011.
Now comes word that the company will start building a retail version of the 4-passenger Zoe Z.E. minicar at its plant in Flines, France - near Paris, starting in 2012.
The company said in a statement last week that production models based on the Zoe would account for about two-thirds of its European EV sales and be its core electric car.
Two more EVs were announced this morning as Renault said it will build a production version of the 2- seat Twizy Z.E. low-speed city car (right) at a Spanish plant in Valladolid, 90 miles northwest of Madrid, and a version of the Kangoo-based commercial minivan (left, below) at its plant in Maubeuge, in Northern France, beginning in 2011.
The Fluence will be sold as a sort of national EV in Israel and Denmark under a partnership of the Renault-Nissan Alliance and California-based EV infrastructure developer Better Place.
(Updated 11/8/09 to add confirmation and remarks from a Chrysler spokesman.)
Chrysler's ENVI Group, formed in 2007 to develop a line of electrified vehicles for the company's three brands, has been disbanded and the company's January pledge to have 500,000 conventional and plug-in hybrid-electric and all-electric vehicles on the road by 2013 has been junked under its new, Fiat-controlled leadership.
In an interview with Reuters news service Friday, Chrysler spokesman Nick Cappa - who only a few days before had assured us that the ENVI team was still "quietly" moving along - said the special group has been disbanded and its work "absorbed into the normal vehicle development program."
Cappa since has confirmed to Green Car Advisor that the formal group no longer exists. He bridled, though, at use of the term "disbanded," saying that the group's members all are still working and that former ENVI chief Lou Rhodes is still in charge of vehicle electrification programs - for both Chrysler and Fiat.
He confirmed, however, that the pre-bankruptcy timetable for putting hybrids and EVs into the Chrysler lineup has been replaced. By one that takes a much slower approach, it appears.
Prior to its bankruptcy and takeover by Fiat, Chrysler had showed a suite of five electric and PHEV vehicles and promised to have at least one in production by next year.
But last week, in delivering a day-long look at Chrysler's post-bankruptcy 5-year product and business plan, executives including Sergio Marchionne - CEO of both Fiat and Chrysler - made no mention of electric vehicles.
And Marchionne later told some reporters, according to Reuters, that electric cars would represent less than 2 percent of Chrysler's anticipated sales in 2015. That would be fewer than 60,000 - far from the 500,000 promised at the Detroit Auto Show in January, a few months before the car maker filed for bankruptcy.
Marchionne does plan to bring the Dodge Ram dual-mode hybrid to market next year and to introduce the fuel-efficient Fiat 500 and a lot of Fiat's fuel-efficient engine technology to the U.S. through Chrysler. He told reporters last week, Reuters reports, that he believes electric vehicles will struggle until battery reliability and range issues are resolved.
Chrysler reportedly still is talking about an all-electric commercial van to the market.
But Fiat got its 20 percent stake - and effective control - of Chrysler in a deal with the Obama Administration in which Chrysler promised to bring more fuel-efficient vehicles to market.
It's disappointing to see the company back-peddling on the electric front and will be interesting to see if Marchionne can do it without electrification.
It's not often automakers get noticed for doing something good, so we though we'd bring this tidbit about car designer-turned builder Henrik Fisker to your attention as a break from our usual Firday fare.
Fisker showed off his upcoming Karma plug-in hybrid Thursday evening to a crowd of about 200 close friends, and future customers, at an event in Santa Monica highlighted by presentation of the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce's 2009 innovation award to Fisker.
The native of Denmark, now CEO of California-based Fisker Automotive, was honored for "providing outstanding contributions and innovation addressing critical issues" with is work to bring a new line of highly fuel-efficient luxury automobiles to market.
The $88,000 Karma, which initially will be built in Finland while Fisker readies a former GM plant in Delaware for production in 2012 of line of less-expensive, "family-oriented" plug-in hybrid sedans, is slated to begin arriving for customer delivery in mid-2010.
Pictured from left at Thursday evening's award fete are Friis Arne Petersen, Danish Ambassador to the US; Torben Aaskov, President of Danish American Chamber; Fisker; and Johs Worsoe, Executive Vice President of Union Bank, which sponsored the award.
Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., one of China's largest automakers, said it plans to invest 6 billion yuan ($879 million) in developing alternative-fuel vehicles and related technologies in the next two years.
SAIC's chairman, Hu Maoyuan, said the money would be equally divided among research, product development and component and vehicle manufacturing programs from now though 2011.
The company plans to launch a line of hybrid and all-electric cars in China under the Roewe brand by 2012 and reportedly has begin testing a plug-in hybrid system of its own design.
The effort is part of a drive to fulfill the government's request that 5 percent of all passenger vehicles built in China by 2011 use alternative powertrains and that each Chinese automaker have at least one electric, hybrid or other alternative model in its lineup.
Automaker Alliance Jumps On Board, EV-Makers Could Reap Huge Benefits
Let the horse-trading begin.
The Obama Administration, seeking to boost development of all-electric and plug-in hybrid-electric cars, is suggesting that automakers be given CAFE credits that would let low and zero-emission vehicles count for up to two cars when annual fleet fuel efficiency averages are calculated.
That standard would mean that an automaker seeking to meet the 35.5 MPG fleet average required by 2016 could use a single battery-electric car rated at, say, 100 miles per gasoline-gallon equivalent, to offset seven 12 MPG pickups and SUVs, as the average fuel economy of the eight vehicles - with the ZEV's rating doubled - would be 35.5 miles per gallon.
---------- Green Cars could be worth their weight in cash if proposed national fuel-economy credit trading program takes off. ----------
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents the domestic industry as well as several of the large foreign brands, has jumped on board the idea of emissions-based fuel economy credits.
"The ability to earn, bank and trade credits," Alliance spokesman Charles Territo told the Wall Street Journal, "is essential to meeting the goals of the national [CAFE] program.
A credit program that enables automakers to bank and trade excess fuel economy credits also could be a huge boon to companies such as Tesla Motors, Coda Automotive and Fisker Automotive, which have -or will have, in the case of Fisker and Coda - nothing but zero- and extremely low-emissions vehicles in their fleets.
Think City electric cars on the road at Valmet Automotive production plant in Finland.
As it prepares to move its manufacturing operation from its own facilities in Norway to a contract builder in Finland, a post-bankruptcy Think is cranking up its publicity engines.
The 18-year-old company, which has an agreement with investor Valmet Automotive to have the Finnish engineering and auto manufacturing services provider take over production of the plastic-bodied "urban EV," is showing a ready-for-market model at this weekend's Helsinki Electric Motor Show.
The car, primarily sold to utility and government fleets participating in electric vehicle test programs, is intended for public sale once Valmet production begins.
Think - once owned by Ford Motor Co. - also has plans to launch sales and manufacturing operations in the U.S., where battery supplier Enerdel and its parent, Ener1, are headquartered (Ener1 is also Think's largest single stakeholder).
Electric Vehicles International, a manufacturer of electric delivery trucks and low-speed neighborhood electric vehicles, has moved its factory and corporate headquarters back to the U.S. after operating in Mexico for several years.
The company, founded in California in 1989, moved to Toluca, Mexico, after spending years developing its drive system because it saw a bigger market for its work trucks south of the border, a company spokesman told Green Car Advisor.
The move back - the new facility is in Stockton in California's Central Valley - has been planned for almost a year, spurred by growing U.S. interest in electric vehicles.
EVI manufactures and markets all-electric Class 3 through Class 6 (5- to 13-ton) delivery trucks, and has recently begun marketing a low-speed NEV for businesses.
It also uses a proprietary electric drive and control system to do custom plug-in hybrid conversions for private business fleets.
The company says it has sold more than 1,000 of its electric trucks to date through sales offices in Mexico and Texas.
While it was heartening to hear Chrysler's new powertrain chief talk about small and efficient gas and diesel engines this morning, it was far less so to listen and not hear anything about that long-rumored Dodge EV or a line of plug-in hybrids in the 2009-2014 Chrysler product plan that was unwound for us during the day.
Under the old, pre-bankruptcy plan, there was to be a Dodge EV in 2010 and a Chrysler extended-range plug-n hybrid in 2011, with more to follow. Maybe even a Chrysler 300 with all-electric drive.
Chrysler's new corporate website has a nice feature and Q&A about electrification and the work of the 2-year-old ENVI (stands for ENVIronmental) group that's developing EV and PHEV concepts and prototypes for Chrysler.
We did hear that Chrysler will bring the popular Fiat 500 subcompact (right) to the U.S. late next year as a 2011 model, to be sold in major metropolitan areas - hooray!
But discussion of its activities and plans for its future and for future electrified vehicles was glaringly absent from today's product plan session under Chrysler's post-bankruptcy bosses from Fiat.
But we're optimists at heart, and keep hearing our Chrysler friends telling us not to worry, that ENVI's still part of the company plan and still working on vehicles and systems that eventually will see the light of day.
So we cross our fingers and wait for Sig. Marchionne and crew to honor us with that information. Sooner, please, than later. John O'Dell, Senior Editor.
Video explains Fiat Multiair system that will be used in many of Chrysler's new models to improve fuel efficiency, reduce emissions and boost power.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Chrysler's new powertrain chief, Paolo Ferrero, says the company will begin widespread adoption of gas and diesel engine technologies from its new owner, Fiat Group, with the first of a family of more fuel-efficient engines due next summer.
The company believes that hybrids and electric vehicles are a longer-term strategy and will concentrate in the "short-to-medium" term on internal combustion engine improvements and downsizing, and introduction of fuel-efficient clean diesels and engines using alternative low carbon fuels such as compressed natural gas.
Chrysler also will be adopting the start-stop system, also called a micro-hybrid system, that is used in some Fiat models to shut down the engine at stop signs and when idling. It can reduce emissions and improve fuel economy by as much as 5 percent, Ferrero said.
The first model in the Chrysler lineup to use it will be the the 2011 Jeep Wrangler.
By 2014, Ferrero said during a morning presentation at the day-long Chrysler product plan meeting, 38 percent of Chrysler vehicles will use small, four-cylinder engines, up from 19 percent today, and 14 percent will use diesel engines, up from 9 percent now.
Fisker Automotive hasn't started building cars yet, but is well on the way to ensuring a healthy launch platform when its first - the $88,000 Karma extended-range plug-in hybrid - starts rolling out of the assembly plant next summer.
The company, which so far has announced 45 U.S. dealership agreements and two smaller European distributorships, said this morning that it has now signed the 100-plus dealership Emil Frey Group to handle much of its European sales and service.
The Swiss company has outlets in six countries - Switzerland, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic - and handles premium brands.
Fisker previously signed GP Supercars in Italy and the Nellerman Group in Denmark as distributors and is working on a deal in China.
While the Karma initially is to be built in Finland by Valmet Automotive, Fisker last week agreed to acquire and outfit an idled GM plant in Delaware to build a second line of less-expensive plug-in hybrids and said that Karma production eventually would be moved to the U.S.
The company is financing its U.S. production and R&D in large part with proceeds of a $528 million federal loan.
Dodge Zeo8 concept shown at Detroit Auto Show last year could be basis for a new EV in revised Chrysler product lineup under post-bankruptcy recovery plan.
If there's anything certain about Chrysler's new 5-year product plan, to be unveiled in a lengthy conference tomorrow, it is that small cars, advanced technology gas engines and at least one electric vehicle all are likely to figure into the automaker's future.
The company, fresh out of bankruptcy, is now controlled by Italy's Fiat and Fiat, according to the leaks from Chrysler' suburban HQ in Auburn Hills, Mich., wants to use its new American unit as a portal to being its popular Fiat 500 subcompact over form Europe and to reintroduce the Alfa Romeo brand to the states.
Fiat, we've heard, also intends to use its "multiair" fuel-efficient engine technology in Chrysler vehicles going forward and, insiders say, wants to use the Dodge brand for introduction of an electric car - likely one of the models that have been under development - quietly - by Chrysler's ENVI group.
Yes, Virginia, the ENVI group, tasked with developing EVs and extended-range, plug-in hybrids for Chrysler when it was formed in 2007, has survived the financial mayhem and is still plugging away, so to speak.
Whether Chrysler's new masters will pick the sexy Dodge Zeo electric sports car, one of the Jeep plug-ins or the Chrysler 300-based EV concept shown at the Detroit auto show in January - all ENVI productions -or select an all-new Chrysler- or Fiat-based model for the EV is up in the air.
But as we've said all along - and as Fiat's Sergio Marchionne well knows - Chrysler can't survive in the new automotive age without EVs and PHEVs in its portfolio.
Nissan is ready to pump $220 million into its existing Japanese battery joint venture and an additional $330 million into a new lithium-ion battery factory in France that it would own with partner Renault, the Nikkei news service in Japan is reporting.
---------- Renault Fluence ZE concept is stylized version of EV the French automaker plans to start selling in Israel in 2011. ----------
Renault-Nissan Alliance chief Carlos Ghosn said just last month that the two companies were considering France as the location for a new battery plant, so the news from the Nikkei seems reasonable.
One of China's major oil companies - already a partner in the joint venture that will supply lithium-ion batteries for California-based Coda Automotive's upcoming electric sedan - is now considering a network of battery swap stations in China, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
China National Offshore Oil envisions a national network of stations where motorists can swap discharged EV batteries for full charged packs. "We can't build" electric cars, "but we can supply the energy," the oil company parent's strategy director told the newspaper.
Such a program, if it were to be launched, its success would be predicated on a number of Chinese automakers building their electric cars with swappable batteries.
----------
A Renault EV prototype sits on battery exchange platform in Better Place demonstration, while machinery pulls new battery pack from storage.
----------
The company is thinking along the same lines as California's Better Place, which plans national networks of battery exchange stations in Israel and Denmark for EVs to be built and sold in those countries by the Renault-Nissan Alliance starting in 2011.
With more fuel-efficient vehicles being pitched as key to a better future - at least from an environmental standpoint - two major green enterprises are launching student contests in an effort to breed awareness of the need to improve the efficiency of both cars and the electric-charging systems that may help propel them.
---------- Better Place, which plans to market this elaborate battery swap station, is challenging graduate design students to come up with a hands-free EV charger that costs less than $1,000. ----------
Better Place, the closely held electric-vehicle charging services provider, is awarding 65,000 euros ($96,000) in prizes in a global contest for graduate level design-school teams to come up with what the company deems to be the best hands-free electric-charging systems whose materials costs less than $1,000.
---------- High school students are asked to put on their thinking caps and design a dashboard instrument that helps drivers get better mileage. Ford's professional engineers came up with this "smart gauge' system in its Fusion hybrid. ----------
(The company apparently doesn't think that the highly touted multi-information display panels in the new Toyota Prius' and the Ford Fusion hybrid do the trick.)
Both contests represent efforts to look beyond professional engineers to see what new generations of thinkers will come up with in the arenas of EV charging and gasoline and diesel fuel economy.
SEAT, the Spanish car maker owned by Volkswagen, is discussing a major nationwide electric car program building off VW's developing EV technology and working with one of Spain's largest construction companies for infrastructure support.
The plan, outlined in a Dow Jones report, says builder Actividades de Construccion y Servicios would install a battery charging infrastructure while SEAT would electrify various models using VW technology unveiled earlier this year on the E-Up! concept.
All that's needed, apparently, is around 8 billion euro, (or $ 11.8 billion U.S.) and the support of Spain's Industry Ministry.
The idea of linking development of electric cars with development of an EV charging infrastructure seems to be foreign to the U.S, where each piece of the equation seems to be running at different speeds and on different timetables.
Batteries, batteries, batteries. That's looking like the name of the game these days.
Automakers have shown they can build decent conventional hybrids, and are about to show how well they can do on all-electric and extended-range, gas-electric hybrids - but the wall they all run into is how far their cars and trucks can go before the electrons run out.
That's in the batteries, and with few exceptions (Nissan and Hyundai come to mind) automakers don't make batteries. They may assemble the individual cells into battery packs designed for their specific vehicles, but it is at the level of the cell - and the chemistry incorporated into that cell - that the ability of a battery to store and release energy is controlled.
So its good to see so much activity in the battery development world.
Latest is in South Korea, where Hyundai Mobis and LG Chem have announced a joint venture agreement to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrids. The $34-million venture is scheduled to start producing in the second half next year, with a goal of building batteries for as any as 200,000 vehicles a year.
General Motors, concerned that the departure of Volt development leader Frank Weber will worry the faithful - and mindful of its long-ago and well-kept promise to open the doors on the program - is hosting a live Web chat at 4 p.m. Eastern time this afternoon (1 p.m. Pacific) to answer questions and explain how the change in Volt leadership will, or won't, affect things.
Weber himself, along with Doug Parks, who will be replacing him in the Chevrolet Volt program, are hosting the chat.
We're providing a platform, so sign up below for a reminder and come back at the appointed time to follow along and ask questions of your own.
Automaker Says Departure Part of Long-Planned Shift of Duties; Volt Still on Schedule
GM is losing the longtime head of it's Chevrolet Volt extended-range, plug-in hybrid development team but says the departure of Frank Weber (left) to its German subsidiary, Opel, is part of a long-planned leadership shuffle.
Weber, 43, is returning to Opel, where he previously was a top product developer, after heading the Volt project since March 2007.
He is the second top member of GM's vehicle electrification team to depart in recent months.
Bob Kruse, executive director of vehicle engineering for hybrids, electric vehicles and batteries, left in September to start a consulting firm and was replaced by GM engineering veteran Micky Bly.
Doug Parks, chief engineer for GM's compact car programs in Europe, will replace Weber, who is returning to Opel Dec. 1 in a still undefined "senior leadership" post.
Weber's shift comes just as a post-bankruptcy GM, looking for cash and ways to refocus itself on its core products, is scheduled to close its deal to sell majority interest in Opel to a group headed by Canadian tier-one components manufacturer Magna International and backed by Russia's Sherbank.
Textron Corp., the global industrial giant that already makes low-speed electric utility vehicles and electric vehicle components, reportedly is eying a full-fledged EV manufacturing operation in China.
---------- Four-wheel drive low-speed EV from Textron's E-Z-Go subsidiary. ----------
IHS Global Insight, citing a Chinese business news service, reported this morning that an unidentified Textron executive told the news service that the factory would specialize in low-speed limited-range neighborhood electric vehicles that use conventional lead-acid batteries.
It would be operated in collaboration with an existing Chinese automaker, the report said, and would be capable of producing 10,000 NEVs a year.
Plans Change after Smith Electric Vehicles, Ford Mutually Dissolve Prior Agreement
Ford Motor Co. says it has selected Azure Dynamics to build the upcoming Ford Transit Connect electric delivery van after the automaker and Britain's Smith Electric Vehicles mutually decided to sever their longstanding ties.
Smith, which has been using Ford truck chassis in Europe for its electric trucks, had been named last year as builder of the Transit Connect battery-electric vehicle.
The word we hear is that Smith, which has a North American offshoot, Smith Electric Vehicles U.S., decided the small-EV market is getting too competitive and is going to concentrate its resources on the large-truck segment.
The change won't delay the planned launch of the electric van, though, said Ford spokeswoman Jennifer Moore. "We're still on track for late 2010," she told Green Car Advisor.
Azure, which already works with Ford on the hybrid version of the E450 commercial van due next year, will used its proprietary "ForceDrive" battery-electric powertrain for the Transit Connect EV.
In the biggest federal boost for green car development in decades, the 2010 energy budget bill just signed into law by President Obama includes $814 million in funding for various alternative fuel and vehicle programs.
One provision, $283 million for fuel cells and hydrogen fuel, restored more than $100 million that in funds for automotive-specific programs that Energy Secretary Steven Chu initially proposed cutting from the budget.
Chu said at the time he didn't see fuel-cell electric cars as commercially viable in the next 15-20 years.
Automakers and fuel cell developers quickly rallied to persuade Congress that Chu hadn't see the whole picture and promised to have commercial quality fuel cell cars - which use hydrogen for energy production - in the market by 2015.
Other green aspects of the bill include $311 million to help fund various vehicle electrification and advanced internal combustion engine projects and $220 million for advanced biofuel development.
As expected, the bill was cheered by trade groups representing the fuel cell, biofuels and electric drive industries.
SEMA, the paean to power, where exhaust fumes are perfume and green is a paint color, not a philosophy, is changing just a bit.
---------- Extended-range plug-in hybrid eVARO three-wheeler prototype will debut at SEMA show in Las Vegas next week. ----------
They've got environmentally friendly tires on display at the annual SEMA show now, along with cars that run on ethanol and automakers that brag about low emissions right along with their horsepower hype.
And this year, as last, there will be a display at the Las Vegas venue dedicated to the pursuit of fuel economy - the Progressive Automotive X Prize competition that's seeking a commercially viable 100-miles-per-gallon (or the alt-fuel equivalent) passenger vehicle.
The X Prize stand undoubtedly will feature a few of the contest entries, and is staging at least one vehicle debut, the three-wheel eVARO from Future Vehicle Technologies, the British Columbia development team that did last year's standout Aleconcept,which boasted 92 mpg fuel economy running with a gasoline engine.
President Obama has, as expected, signed a bill extending eligibility for federal Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program loans to certain fuel-efficient, three-wheeled vehicles, and Aptera, for one, isn't wasting any time.
---------- Aptera 2e prototype being tested early this year. ----------
The Southern California-based vehicle developer and would-be manufacturer of the three-wheel, wingless-aircraft shaped Aptera 2e, said it is updating its previously rejected application for a $75 million loan from the program that would help finance its anticipated 2010 manufacturing launch.
We've long believed that the world of inter-city delivery trucks is an ideal place to really push for vehicle electrification - the trucks don't usually need to travel all that far and a quiet electric motor sure beats a noisy diesel, idling by the curb and spewing noxious exhaust while the driver trundles a pallet of chips or sodas into the neighborhood convenience store.
Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. thinks so, too. and says that it's hefty Newton delivery tuck is doing so well that it is migrating the battery-electric drive system into the smaller Class 3 and Class 4 commercial truck segment (think Ford F-350 and F-450 dualies outfitted with cargo boxes).
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Smith Newton Class 5 delivery truck. New models will use same cab design but smaller chassis.
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Class 3 trucks weigh in at 5-7 tons, while Class 4 trucks are in the 7- to 8-ton range.
Newton launched in the U.S. earlier this year with Class 5-8 trucks, the 7.5- to 12-ton covered delivery and utility trucks used by companies such as Coca Cola, Frito-Lay and AT&T.
Smith says its Newton electric drive system can deliver up to 150 miles of range and a top speed of up to 50 miles an hour.
Smith U.S., headquartered in Kansas City, is an offshoot of Britain's Smith Electric Vehicles, which developed the Newton and bills it as the world's largest electric truck.
Nissan may be going global with the Leaf electric car sooner than planned.
The initial launch of the worlds first modern mass-produce EV was to be held on a limited basis in Japan and the U.S. next year, with global sales to follow in 2012, when the Leaf would be joined by several other new EVs Nissan is developing.
But now it looks as though Mexico might get its first Leafs in 2011.
Dow Jones International News, citing Nissan Executive Vice President - and head of the Americas operations - Carlos Tavares as its source, said Nissan has won a promise from the Mexican government to provide financial incentives for EVs in 2011 and to launch a study of the feasibility of developing a battery charging infrastructure.
Veep Discloses that New Plug-In Hybrid Will Come in More Than One Flavor
It wasn't much of a secret to leak - Henrik Fisker has always talked about offering multiple models of the "project Nina" plug-in hybrids his company plans to build.
But Vice President Joe Biden, somewhat notorious for his talkativeness, let slip during remarks at a recent Fisker event that those models would include an SUV-styled crossover and a coupe, in addition to the sedan that's always been talked abut.
Fisker later conformed that the Veep was correct, and went on to tell reporters that after he'd shown Biden sketches of the sedan the Vice President told him it "looked like a four-door Ferrari.'
We're not sure if Fisker, who made his name designing BMWs and Aston Martins, thought that was a compliment.
Biden's tongue slipped in Delaware earlier this week at ceremonies announcing the acquisition of the idled General Motors' Wilmington Assembly factory by Fisker's eponymous Fisker Automotive for $18 million - plus an anticipated $175 million in refurbishing and equipment costs. The money is coming form a $528 million federal Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan the company recently was awarded.
Gas-electric hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles may account for as much as 8 percent of new vehicle sales in the U.S. in 2013, up from about 2 percent last year, as the combination of rising oil prices, falling prices relative to hybrids' conventional counterparts and a broader network of plug-in charging sites pull more people away from gasoline-burning cars, according to a recent report on the next generation of autos.
Worldwide, hybrid-vehicle sales will surge to about 2 million units in 2013 from about 550,000 units last year, while rechargeable - or plug-in - battery-electric cars will account for about 350,000 sales, compared with less than 10,000 plug-in sales last year, according to the NextGen research unit of technology industry specialist ABI Research.
With domestic new vehicle sales slumping to about 13 million units last year and the U.S. accounting for about half of the hybrid vehicles sold worldwide, less than one in 40 new U.S. cars were hybrids or plug-ins last year.
"As the economy improves, the price of oil is going to go up, so it will be much more sensible to go battery-electric or hybrid," said Larry Fisher, research director for Oyster Bay, New York-based NextGen and project manager of the report.
"As hybrids and electric vehicles come into production in greater numbers, the cost premium will come down."
Whether the surge is already taking place is a question whose answer was blurred as new car sales to surged across the board in July and August, driven by the federal cash for clunker program, only to plunge last month when the incentives stopped.
A little birdie tells us that Hyundai has signed an agreement with Korea's state-run power company to develop an electric car and charging system that will be ready for sale in Korea by 2011.
The car itself will be done by Hyundai and its Kia subsidiary, with Korean Electric Power Co. working on the EV battery charger.
Hyundai may already have the car well-in hand. It showed a prototype city EV, the i10 Electric (right), at the Frankfurt auto show earlier this year.
The car used a 16 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack and promiosed a top speed of 80 mpgh and a range of up to 100 miles on a single charge.
The memo calls for the first charger and a prototype Hyundai EV to be ready in just 10 months - August 2010 - with the car and charger to be ready to go on sale sometime in 2011.
News crews focus on Tesla owner Simon Hackett after he and bearded co-driver Emilis Prelgauskas piloted red Tesla Roaster 313 miles through Australian outback on a single charge.
Doesn't sound like a lot of fun to us, but the news from Coober Pedy in South Australia is that a Tesla Roadster being driven in the annual Global Green Challenge rally for alternatively fueled vehicles has just set a new Tesla distance record of 313 miles on a single charge - achieved by rolling through the Australian outback at a painfully slow crawl.
Drivers Simon Hackett and Emilis Prelgauskas drove south from Alice Springs, in approximately the geographic center of Australia, to a rally point about 112 miles north of Coober Pedy, famed for its opal mines, at an average speed of around 35 mph.
They had an estimated 3 miles of range on the Tesla's lithium-ion battery pack remaining when they arrived.
The previous distance record for a Tesla on a single charge was 241 miles during the Rallye Monte Carlo d'Energies Alternatives early this spring. That car, which Tesla says was the only entry to complete the entire rally course, had an estimated 38 miles of range remaining.
It wasn't clear from earlier statements but it is unequivocal now: Fisker Automotive plans to welcome the United Auto Workers Union with open arms if its deal to acquire a former GM plant in Delaware goes through as planned.
Avoiding unions is de rigeur for most new manufacturing enterprises in the U.S., but a company spokesman told Green Car Advisor this morning that Fisker is "looking to establish a mutually beneficial partnership with the UAW" as it opens its first U.S. assembly plant.
Fisker announced a few minutes ago that it has signed a letter of intent to buy the former Wilmington Assembly facility for $18 million and will refurbish and equip it to produce a new plug-in hybrid family sedan that will go into production in late 2012.
The area around the factory - which GM shuttered earlier this year as part of its bankruptcy reorganization - is home to thousands of skilled auto workers who belong to UAW Local 435.
Fisker has said that it expects to employ as many as 2,000 at the plant when it hits full capacity, and spokesman Russell Datz told us this morning that hiring a highly skilled UAW workforce "is essential" to the factory's success.
Deal Could Open Employment Door For UAW Workers Laid Off When Plant Closed
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
As just about the whole world was predicting all weekend, Fisker Automotive and the GM assets liquidator, Motors Liquidation Co., have done a deal in which start-up Fisker will buy the idled Boxwood Road assembly plant near Newport and Wilmington, Del., for production of a new plug-in hybrid.
Fisker, based in Southern California, received a $528.7million federal loan last month to help pay for a production plant and plant refurbishing costs, among other things.
Fisker said the letter of intent calls for it to pay $18 million for the plant if its evaluation of the 52-year-old facility doesn't uncover insurmountable problems. The deal is scheduled to close in four months and Fisker then would spend an additional $175 million refurbishing and outfitting the plant to produce the new plug-in starting in late 2012.
Other details of the deal weren't immediately available, although it sounds as though Fisker apparently will use at least some of the UAW workers laid off by General Motors when the Boxwood Road factory - also called the Wilmington Assembly plant - was idled earlier this year as part of GM's short-lived bankruptcy reorganization, in which underutilized facilities were closed and turned over to the newly created liquidation company for disposal.
It's unclear whether the plant would be unionized - a costly move for a nascent car maker - but in a statement released just before the formal announcement this morning, UAW director Gary Casteel said that the deal gives "UAW local 435 workers the opportunity to partner with Fisker Automotive to create a greener America by building a plug-in hybrid car that will compete globally."
Honda Motor Co. pulled the plug on Formula 1 racing to divert the money being spent there to green technologies and the company that's been playing second fiddle to Toyota in the green cars sweepstakes says it wants to hybridize larger vehicles again.
---------- Honda's top executive prefers hydrogen fuel cell FCX Clarity but says battery-electric cars will come first. ---------
That's the word from Honda President and CEO Takanobu Ito, speaking with a select group of automotive writers - including Edmunds' Inside Line News Editor Kelly Toepke - at the 2009 Tokyo auto show last week.
Toepke tells us that Ito is committed to the further greening of Honda, even to the extent of developing an environmentally friendly sports car that - his words - is truly green, "not like the car Lexus announced" at the show. He was referring to the limited production, V10-powered, $375,000 Lexus LFA supercar, which he apparently doesn't believe is green enough.
It hasn't started building its own yet, but start-up electric delivery van maker Bright Automotive has started a consulting business offering services to other automakers interested in electric powertrains, lightweight materials techniques and general manufacturing efficiency.
Those things are specialties of Bright, formed at the beginning of 2008 by battery specialist John Waters - he designed the battery pack for GM's renowned/notorious (take your pick) EV1.
The company's IDEA commercial van prototype features a plug-in hybrid powertrain that mates a gas engine and an electric drive system and is hundreds of pounds lighter and far more aerodynamic - thus four or five times more fuel efficient - than competing vans of the same load capacity.
The new offshoot, called Bright eSolutions, is an in-house consulting and engineering operation offering to apply Bright's staff and their learnings from the IDEA development process to customers' projects.
The group launched the new business unit today in conjunction with the announcement of its first contract- with the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Command (TACOM) for a $1.4 million project to demonstrate Bright's parallel hybrid technology for no-combat use in military vehicles.
The rumors began a little over a month ago - we reported on on of the early ones - that India's REVA Electric Car Co. was eying upstate New York for a U.S. assembly plant for its just-unveiled NXR 3-door hatchback EV (right).
Well, we missed the formal announcement (no correspondents in that part of the Empire State), but it was made, late Friday: Reva has selected a just-formed U.S. electric car company, Bannon Automotive, to partner with it in an as-yet unbuilt EV factory near Syracuse.
The announcement has brought mixed reviews from New York citizenry, some welcoming the idea while others worrying that the state is handing out tax incentives and other financial lures to a relatively unknown enterprise.
Reva and Bannon have executed an exclusive North American licensing deal and have agreed to pony up a combined $26.5 million to rehabilitate and outfit an abandoned 150,000-square-foot building in a Syracuse suburb, the local newspaper reported.
Fisker Automotive appears ready to announce a deal this week to lease or buy a shuttered GM factory in Delaware to use for production of the plug-in hybrid family sedan the company has said will follow its Fisker Karma extended-range PHEV.
Vice President Joe Biden and state and local officials in Delaware are slated to attend an announcement at 10 a.m.Tuesday at the former GM Boxwood Road plant, near Newport, Del., and a spokesman for Fisker said Friday that a plant-location announcement was being scheduled for that day.
The new car, expected to be smaller and less costly that than exotic Karma, has been code-named "Project NINA" by the company, homage to the ship in Christopher Columbus' tiny fleet and signifying, company founder and chief executive Henrik Fisker has said, a "new world" for the auto industry.
The car, as previously described by Fisker, is to be a $48,000 (estimated) extended-range hybrid marketed to upscale families in 2012. The Karma, an $88,000 performance car, is just beginning production by a contractor in Finland, with deliveries to U.S. customers to begin in the summer. Both prices are before any applicable federal and local tax credits or other incentives.
Southern California-based Fisker Automotive received a $528 milllion federal loan last month from the Department of Energy to finance Project NINA and to fund additional U.S.-based engineering and development work on the Karma.
We're sure they've got an in-house name for it, but GM says it will give consumers a chance to come up with the official name for the Chevrolet Volt's initial exterior color - a silvery hue that has a slight color-shift toward emerald when the light hits it just right.
Killerwatt?
The automaker will fly three finalists in the Volt color naming contest to Los Angeles for the 2009 LA Auto Show in December (there are worse places to be that time of year) - they will also get a $400 gift card, two nights at an LA hotel and admission to the show's initial media preview day on Dec. 2.
ElectroLicious?
The finalists will be announced Nov. 16 and the public will be asked to vote on the best name from then until Dec. 1 on a special GM website.
Names can be submitted on the contest site until the evening of Dec. 1, when the winner will be announced.
Shockingly Silver?
In addition to the trip and show, the winning contestant will get the opportunity to test drive a pre-production Volt.
GM says it will spend $202 million to ready its Flint Engine South site to build the 1.4-liter four-cylinder engines that will be used as on-board generators in the Chevrolet Volt extended-range hybrid .
The company originally had planned to spend $359 million to build a new factory on a nearby site at its Flint campus, but its reduced financial circumstances have led it to settle for renovation of an existing plant there.
As has always been the plan, the factory also will build the engines for use in a conventionally-powered small car, the Chevrolet Cruze, which is scheduled to launch in the U.S. in late spring next year. The Volt won't go into production until almost the end of 2010.
The Flint plant, which GM first announced last July, then suspended amidst the financial tumult that led the the automaker's short bankruptcy and taxpayer rescue, is slated to produce 40 engines per day when production starts late next year. Production will hit 800 engines a day by fall 2011, GM officials said.
Pre-production Chevrolet Volt (left) on display at GreenHouse in Virginia; Studio shot of Chevrolet Cruze compact (right).
Because the cars will launch before the factory's running at full capacity, engines for both - a turbocharged 1.4-liter for the Cruz and a normally aspirated version for the Volt - initially will be imported from a GM plant in Austria, a company spokesman said.
Tesla Motors has opened a Colorado showroom, less than six weeks after the electric sports car maker said it received $82.5 million in equity funding to help it open stores.
The company debuted its showroom at the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colo., today.
It will serve as the EV maker's Rocky Mountain-regional hub.
Tesla's looking to boost sales fin what it says is the most environmentally friendly state in the U.S. Colorado provides state tax incentives that help lower the cost of EVs.
Tired of just looking at the pictures of Nissan's upcoming new electric car? Hankering for a good old fashioned eyeballs-on-metal, look-for-yourself at the real thing?
---------- You'll still have to picture yourself inside one: Nissan says test drives of the Leaf EV won't be available during national tour. ----------
Nissan plans to help you out with that.
The automaker will be staging an 11-state, 24 city (one of 'em in Canada) pre-sale tour of the five-passenger, 100-miles-per-charge Leaf hatchback it plans to launch in the U.S. and Japan next year.
No drives, though - the car on tour will be the only left-hand drive prototype that exists and Nissan doesn't want to chance breaking it, a spokeswoman tells us. (Our photos here are off the only right-hand drive Leaf prototype, which was unveiled in Japan in August.)
Initial sales of the Leaf in the U.S. will be limited to large markets and regions where utilities and government authorities have executed agreements to facilitate installation of private and public EV charging stations.
But the sales territories are expected to expand as - the automaker hopes - people in other areas demand a charging infrastructure of their own. Nissan plans a global rollout of at least three EV models in 2012.
The Leaf tour in the U.S. will begin Nov. 13 with a four-day run in Los Angeles and end up in New York City on St. Valentine's Day (Feb. 14) after a five-day stand there.
Nissan says that people will be able to look, touch and ask questions, and will providing all the necessary information about the tour on its Leaf Website.
Here's the basic schedule, so you can see when the Leaf will be in your vicinity.
Test Car Shows Ford's Done the Necessary Work; Cost, Infrastructure Still Need Tune Ups
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Just got my first drive in one of Ford's prototype battery-electric Focus EVs, the culmination of a short electrification program Ford and the Electric Power Research Institute held for the media in San Francisco this morning.
It's great that Ford is pursuing the electric car path, with plans to have a retail Focus EV in the market in 2011, but a little depressing to hear - again - that we're talking about a $40,000 (guesstimate) Focus with 100 miles of range.
Understood - EVs are going to be expensive at first, until growing volume helps car makers and parts suppliers achieve the economies of scale that brings costs down.
But still worrisome to think that initial success - and first impressions by many in the media and on the street - are going to depend on the discount buyers will get with federal and in some areas regional tax credits and, probably more important, the ability of utilities and private providers to establish a usable public network of EV battery chargers.
With the former, the Focus EV is likely to cost about the same as the post-credit Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in hybrid, or $32,500 - give or take a few. That won't intimidate early adopters, but it's a lot for the average car buyer, even with the substantial fuel and maintenance savings that come with an EV.
Without the latter, the Focus and other EVs and PHEVS are likely to languish at any price - doing duty only as second or third cars, spending lots of weekends in the garage and coming out only to make trips to the store or to haul the kids to school or adults to work.
AutoObserver contributing editor Bill Visnic hung around the first annual Plug-In Vehicles (and batteries) conference in Detroit on Monday and filed this synopsis of the day's goings-on for Green Car Advisor.
DETROIT - As the inaugural "Business of Plugging In" conference proceeded here earlier this week (it ended Wednesday afternoon) participants from the auto, energy and regulatory sectors generated intriguing discussions and exchanges of important information and ideas.
The conference attracted a sellout 600 attendees and offered more than a dozen panels, keynote speeches and sessions.
Some highlights from the first day of the conference:
The situation for the supply of lithium for lithium-ion batteries is a topic of frequent discussion. Experts here say lithium - which is produced mainly in South America and Russia - should remain reasonably priced and in good supply "for many years to come." Lithium is claimed to be the thirty-third most abundant element in the earth's crust.
For those attending college or preparing to attend college: consider an engineering degree in materials science. Executives from several of the key battery-development companies say there is and will continue to be high demand for people with such expertise, which combines knowledge from many of the fields crucial to battery development.
Automakers or suppliers - who's best to make batteries? The consensus seems to be that suppliers eventually should take the wheel on this one, although for many crucial first-generation production vehicles, automakers seem anxious to keep battery development as close to home as possible. As the industry progresses, though, most believe suppliers should handle ongoing battery development and manufacturing to insure that all automakers have access to the most up-to-date innovations and chemistries.
To be effective replacements for conventionally powered vehicles, electrified models are going to have to get a lot lighter. Duh.
Many Cost Reductions Due to Subsidies, Not Manufacturing Efficiencies; Goals Uncertain
By Bill Visnic, Contributor
DETROIT - A shocking fact from the Business of Plugging In conference here: At today' s prices, the raw materials needed to produce the advanced lithium-ion batteries for plug-in hybrids or extended-range electric vehicles with energy capacity similar to General Motors' Chevrolet Volt will cost at least $8,000 per vehicle.
---------- GM engineers work on T-shaped lithium-ion battery pack for Chevrolet Volt. ----------
It gets deeper when the experts here start talking about the manufacturing investment required for all manner of electrified-vehicle components that at this moment don't exist. A plant to manufacture enough batteries for 10,000 large-battery-capacity electric vehicles will cost $60 million to $80 million.
Participants in the conference point to these figures as evidence that the Obama administration's goal of one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015 probably isn't going to happen - despite word from many with battery interests that costs are dropping.
J.E. Robertson, chief technical officer and executive vice president of new-product creation for Canada's Magna International Inc. (the same Magna that's buying GM's Adam Opel car-making operations in Europe), did say that plants designed to make the batteries in high volume could reduce costs.
But for now, somebody's got to build a plant to address even 10,000 vehicles.
Nissan's wild Land Glider concept(left) will be transformed into a real EV that the automaker will bring to market in the next few years, part of a stable of four electric cars - including a luxury Infiniti model - the automaker intends to build as it begins its drive to electrify.
The Infiniti EV and Land Glider-based Nissan model were announced by Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn during the Tokyo auto show press preview this morning.
The company, which was late to market a hybrid, intends to use battery-electric cars, starting with the already developed Nissan Leaf, as a way to catch up to or even surpass Toyota and Honda in the fuel efficiency race. Ghosn has said he believes electric drive will grow to be the dominant automotive propulsion system.
Nissan, Renault Also Planning to Lease Batteries for Their EVs in Most Markets
There are all sorts of hopes and plans for lowering the cost of electric cars - most hinging on government subsidies and increased sales volumes that will power component costs - but one that doesn't lean of outside help is the idea of leasing the batteries with the car rather than including them in the sales price.
---------- Reva NXR is slated for 2010 launch in Europe, Asia. ----------
We first heard the idea from Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place. He suggests looking at the batteries as the principal part of the fuel system and thinking of leasing in terms of how we pay for fuel in our gasoline cars.
We don't buy a lifetime's supply of gas when we buy a new car now, he says. We pay for it as we need it. Why not the same with batteries and electricity?
Pay a monthly fee for the batteries and the few pennies it costs to recharge them each day and if the lease price is figures properly your "fuel" costs are likely to be the same or less than if you were driving a car with an internal combustion engine.
Among other things leasing means the car makers, not you, are responsible for fixing problems and for providing updated batteries when improvements are introduced.
Now we know the analogy doesn't hold up all that well - the electrons are the fuel and the batteries more like the fuel tank - but the idea still sounds pretty good.
The city of Boulder, Colo., and its power provider, Xcel Energy, have launched a long-term "smart grid" project and Toyota Motor Co. wants to be a player.
---------- Toyota's prototype Prius Plug In Hybrid pictured in Japan last year. ----------
The automaker and world's leading seller of gas-electric hybrid vehicles is announcing this afternoon that it will place 10 of its experimental Prius plug-in hybrids in service in Boulder next year as part of the project.
The Prius PHEVs are part of a fleet of 500 of the cars to be placed into service around the globe in 2010 as Toyota begins testing for possible retail sales of a hybird with extended all-electric range and rechargeable batteries.
First Smart Grid City
Xcel has begun what it calls the SmartGridCity project in Boulder, making the university city - already one of the greenest in the nation - into the world's first smart grid enabled municipality.
Honda Motor Co. is still high on hydrogen, but now thinks battery-electrics might be the way to go until there's a hydrogen fueling infrastructure to support the fuel-cell electric cars the company prefers.
---------- Honda EV-N electric city car concept being displayed at Tokyo Auto Show. ----------
Honda CEO Takanobu Ito told an industry seminar in Tokyo Monday that he would now consider launching electric cars in the United States, Europe and Japan while waiting for hydrogen cars to become marketable. Reuters news service reported Itos' remarks today.
The automaker, which made a big splash last year with its ready-for-production FCX Clarity fuel-cell electric car, had been counting on that technology to enable it to catch up with hybrid champion Toyota in the fuel-efficiency sweepstakes to mature.
But ongoing road tests of the Clarity and General Motors' fuel-cell Equinox SUV haven't generated enough interest to spur fuel companies to build hydrogen stations, limiting the potential market for fuel-cell cars to urban areas of California and the New York metropolitan region.
That's not enough to generate the high volume production that would be needed to increase the number of component suppliers and reduce the cost of the highly specialized fuel cell systems.
From Gas to Electric, 3-Wheelers to Exotics, Contestants Vie to Build 100 MPG Vehicles
Students from West Philadelphia High School are youngest competitors, but no slouches when it comes to design or performance, as shown by their Alternative category entry, the biodiesel-electric EVX-GT hybrid sports car. The school also has a diesel-electric hybrid Ford Focus in the Conventional class.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Judges for the Progressive Automotive X Prize contest have winnowed the field in the race for $10 million in prize money for building the best 100 MPG MPH car to the final 43 teams.
The teams will enter a total of 53 vehicles (there are different categories, so multiple entries are possible) in a competition pitting them against one another in a variety of road and safety tests.
All the finalists already have survived two design judging rounds that pared the number of entries from the original 111 teams with 135 vehicles.
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The Progressive Automotive X Prize was launched at last year's New York Auto Show.
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The contest, aimed at inspiring green-car development, was announced more than 18 months ago. It challenges contestants to design, build and operate a commercially viable vehicles that can deliver fuel economy of at least 100 miles per gallon - or the equivalent.
Part of the competition involves presenting a marketing plan to the judges, who will decide if the vehicle has real-world possibilities.
Among them, the final entrants use 14 different fuels including gasoline and electricity, with battery-electric and hybrid-electric the most popular types of powertrains.
In the hybrid-electric category, teams are entering vehicles whose internal combustion engines run on gasoline, diesel biodiesel, ethanol, butanol and compressed natural gas.
There are even three entries that use plain old gasoline as their sole fuel.
Webcast from Michigan Plug-In Meet Fields Queries About Volt, Other Plug-In Issues
When GM sponsors these things most of the questions are likely to be Volt-centric and awfully flattering of General Motors' program - as last week's maiden effort to co-host a GM-CalCars Webcast showed.
But we thought we'd try one more time in hopes real answers to serious questions about the electrification of the auto and all of its ramifications might spring from questions poised to Mark Duvall, director of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
Duvall and Britta Gross, GM's hydrogen- and battery-electric programs director, are participating in the "Business of Plugging In" conference being sponsored by the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research.
It starts at 4 p.m Eastern time, 1 p.m. Pacific time, and you can participate from here, without having to leave the comfort of your armchair (or office chair, as the case may be).
Norwegian EV-maker Think says it will resume production next month after more six months of financial turmoil that idled manufacturing.
But the new plastic-bodied Think City car (right) won't be built in Norway. Production is moving to Finland where investor and contract auto builder Valmet Automotive will assemble them along with the Boxters and Caymens it now builds for Porsche. Valmet also has the contract to build the Fisker Karma exotic plug-in hybrid for Southern California-based Fisker Automotive.
Think Sales Director Richard Walz told Automotive News Europe that the company hopes to have 4,600 cars built next year, to supply government and private customers.
Green Car Advisor hasn't been able to wrangle seat-time in one of the company's cars since it was owned by Ford Motor Co. (which bought Think in 1999 and sold it in 2003), but we can report that back then it was a fun, practical little runabout, with a range of 50 miles and a top speed of 55 miles an hour. That range has been doubled since then with advanced lithium-ion batteries.
South Korean battery make LG Chem says it will spend more than $300 million over the next three years to build a manufacturing plant in Michigan for advanced technology batteries.
---------- Basic design for Chevy Volt battery pack shows it contains more than 200 individual lithium-ion cells. ----------
The company is one of four battery makers approved for generous state tax incentives this summer as Michigan bids to become the nation's battery-making center.
At least three other battery groups, from Germany, South Korea and the U.S., also have expressed interest n locating plants in Michigan, state officials say.
LG plans to make batteries for a variety of applications and customers, but is linked closely with General Motors because a subsidiary, Compact Power, earlier this year won separate contracts from GM to build the lithium ion battery packs for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in hybrid and an as-yet-unnamed 2011 Buick plug-in hybrid.
The LG plant is to be located in Holland, Mich., about 180 miles due west of Detroit.
Compact Power which has a facility in Troy, Mich., near Detroit, apparently will build the completed battery packs using lithium-in cells made by parent LG Chem at its new plant.
(Alert: CalCars tells us this morning that GM has rescheduled the starting time for the Webcast. It's now 3:30 p.m. Eastern, not 12:30. We're sorry or any inconvenience.)
We're not sure if it will be a full and frank discussion of the issues, or a GM promo for the Chevy Volt, but if you have questions we haven't answered already - about plug-ins in general or the Volt specifically - here's a chance to get 'em answered.
The hour-long Webcast begins today at 12:30 3:30 p.m. Eastern, 9:30 a.m. 12:30 p.m. Pacific (and you know what time it will be if you live in one of the other time zones).
The session will be conducted by GM's Tony Posawatz, manager of the Chevrolet Volt project, and Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Project (CalCars).
Wheego Electric Cars says it has selected traction battery specialist Discover Energy Corp. as supplier of the traction batteries to be used in its low-speed Wheego Whip neighborhood electric vehicle.
Discover produces a power-dense type of lead-acid battery called a dry cell or absorbent glass mat (AGM) battery in which the electrolyte is absorbed into a mat of fine composite fibers.
An AGM battery has no liquid to spill the event of an accident and because of its design and components handles the higher operating temperatures of an EV system better than other lead-acid batteries and holds its charge longer.
Governments' Clean Fleet Mandates Creating Huge Market for Workhorse EVs
Canadian EV-converter Rapid Electric Vehicles has signed the City of Santa Monica, Caif., as the first U.S. customer for its Ford Escape-based REV 300 ACX electric sport utility.
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REV showed off its Ford Escape conversion at the recent 2009 AltCar Expo in Santa Monica.
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REV, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, makes and installs a conversion package that includes the electric powertrain and power management system that replace the gasoline powertrain in Ford Escape SUVs.
The city selected REV "because they have a high-quality conversion" that can help move it toward its goal of a zero-emissions fleet, fleet superintendent Rick Sikes said in a statement issued by REV.
The company is talking to other U.S. fleets and earlier this month announced a preliminary agreement with the city of Inglewood, Calif.
REV is targeting cities and other government agencies because EVs, though expensive up front, can often save a fleet operation money in the long run due to their reduced maintenance and operating. Most government fleets are required to purchase low-carbon, fuel efficient vehicles and many have federal or state funding to offset the higher purchase cost of electric vehicles.
It's a potentially huge market, with more than 30 million government and commercial fleet vehicles in the U.S.
Volt test car passes UPS truck on Interstate 80 near Toledo, Ohio, during 2-day engineering development drive.
An engineering team for the Chevrolet Volt - the highly-touted plug-in hybrid General Motors Co. plans to launch around this time next year - is on the road for a 1,200-mile test in a fleet of eight pre-production Volts and pulled off to the side of the road today for a brief chat with journalists.
The big story for Volt skeptics may be the report from engineers that they don't see any problem achieving the car's targeted 40 miles of all-electric driving range.
The Volt's lithium-ion batteries are performing well and chief engineer Andrew Farah said he has "no concerns about being able to get up to 40 miles" with production Volts.
The team (left) departed the the Detroit area Tuesday and was in West Virginia this afternoon, about halfway through the Volt test drive.
Overnight, half of the test fleet got battery charges and half didn't, the better to replicate real-world driving in which some drivers may not have access to the overnight recharging that would allow resumption of battery-only operation.
Great Britain, where the Mini was born, will finally get a chance to sample the all-electric version of the tiny car (right).
BMW, which now owns Mini, said a lease program that has put nearly 1,000 battery-electric new-generation Mini-Es on the road in the U.S. and Germany will be extended to the United Kingdom next year with 40 of the cars available for 6-month leases.
Half the leases - at 330 British pounds per month ($527 at today's exchange rate) - will be with fleet users and half with private parties who agree, as in the U.S. and Germany, to drive the car at least 300 miles a month, keep it garaged when not in use and provide Mini with a regular stream of comment and criticism.
The purpose of the program is to find out how people use the cars, especially their driving and battery-charging patterns.
In California, support for government-mandated regulation of private industries tends to go south with the geography. And when it comes to the idea of regulating electric-car charging systems planned for the state, the public utilities are following suit, leaving the state regulatory commission with little guidance as it begins considering the issue.
Bay Area-based Pacific Gas & Electric, in a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission published last week, said that private charging system companies such as Coulomb Technologies and Better Place need to be closely regulated as they build out and operate electric charging station networks.
At issue, the utility said, is the stability of the power grid as more and more EVs and extended-range hybrids become available and need places to recharge their batteries.
Also at issue - but unmentioned - is whether and how much private companies should profit from providing electric car owners with power that the utilities originally provided.
At the far end of the state, San Diego Gas & Electric argued against such regulation, saying that the Public Utilities Commission was formed to regulate public utilities, not private companies.
Volvo officials didn't have much to say about U.S. plans when they showed off their new C30-based electric car concept and a prototype plug-in, diesel-electric hybrid (right) in Sweden last month.
But the head of the automaker's U.S. operation confirmed in a recent interview what we've long suspected, that Volvo does plan to bring plug-in hybrids and diesels to this market at some point.
The big questions are when, and what about that EV? Both went unanswered in Volvo Cars North America CEO Doug Speck's interview with Automotive News.
Fuel prices, consumer interest and government support of the various advanced automotive technologies will drive Volvo's efforts, Speck said.
He repeated what Volvo told us last month - that the company's first pug-in hybrid would hit the market in Europe in 2012. He added that it will come to the U.S. sometime after that, and that Volvo diesels also would be sold here at some point.
It all makes sense - as does our suspicion that a Volvo EV won't be withheld from this market for too long once the company gives the go-ahead to a production project.
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Volvo showed off this C30 hatchback-based battery-electric prototype in Sweden last month.
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The U.S., after all, accounts for nearly a quarter of Volvo's sales and the company can't afford to withhold its newest and most advanced vehicles for very long.
Add to that the demands of the new U.S. CAFE rules which require average fleet fuel efficiency to hit 35 mph by 2020 and you can build a pretty good case for Volvo hybrids, diesels and EVs being sold here.
A new "transportable" solar EV charging station is being tested in the Northern California city of San Jose - and no, you can't tow it behind your Tesla or other electric vehicle for constant charging and unlimited range.
---------- One of the city's plug-in Prius conversions using SunPods' solar EV charging system at temporary location in San Jose. ----------
It needs a grid-connected electrical hookup.
That said, the SP-300 "Plug-N-Go" EV charger is, according to manufacturer SunPods Inc., the world's first modular, integrated solar power system that can be pre-assembled at the factory and dropped off at your site, ready to go except for that electrical hookup.
It is an effort to move EV charging off the grid (as much as possible), SunPods co-founder and president Dan Jaeger said. "It just didn't make sense for us to power electric cars with electricity produced by burning coal and other carbon-based fuels."
The charging station does need a hookup to the grid, though, to supply power for the inverter that makes it possible to send excess solar electricity back into the grid, and to draw power from the grid for charging when the sun doesn't shine.
The production version Bluecar EV unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show earlier this year is a go, scheduled to hit the streets in 2011 with almost 6,000 orders already in hand, the chief executive of Italy's Pininfarina said in a recent interview.
The famed Italian design-and-build house is teaming with French industrialist Vincent Ballore on the Bluecar EV project - Pininfarina to...well, design and build the vehicle, Ballore to supply the lithium-polymer battery-and-supercapacitor energy storage system
Pininfarina CEO Silvio Pietro Angori confirmed that things were still on track in an interview with Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper, picked up and reprinted by auto industry journal Automotive News' European edition.
Moving to underscore its commitment to electric drive technologies, Ford Motor Co. has named former hybrid systems director Nancy Gioia to the new post of director of global electrification.
Although Gioia already oversaw electrification programs in her previous job as director of sustainable mobility technology and hybrid vehicle programs, Ford said the new position will help it intensify its focus on EVs and hybrid-electric vehicles..
---------- Ford's Nancy Gioia, at Small Business Administration conference earlier this year. ----------
No new vehicle programs were announced along with Gioia's promotion, but the company said it plans to accelerate development of conventional and plug-in hybrids and battery-electric vehicles.
The company presently sells the Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner hybrid SUVs and the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrid sedans.
Additionally, the company has announced launch plans for a battery-electric Ford Transit Connect small commercial van in 2010, a battery-electric Focus compact car in 2011, and a new conventional hybrid model and its first plug-in hybrid in 2012.
National Laboratories Team Up to Tackle the 'PHEV Conundrum,' Devise Realistic MPG
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
You might have noticed that we have a hard time swallowing GM's claim that its upcoming Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in hybrid will be rated at 230-miles per gallon in city driving.
---------- Plug-in Prius conversion being tested on Argonne National Laboratory dynamometer. ----------
Actually, it is possible that the car can be rated at that phenomenal level of fuel efficiency - what we have trouble with is the idea that it will actually deliver.
The problem is in determining how to handle blended power-source vehicles such as the Volt when determining fuel efficiency.
It's easy with conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and standard hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs) - they use only one fuel, so however much is used over however many miles are driven is the fuel economy, or MPG.
And battery-electric cars (EVs) are -relatively - easy as well. Variables Galore
One method is to compute the BTU value of the electricity they consume, adjust for energy loses in the charging process, and compare the resulting total BTU consumption with the BTUs in a comparable amount of gas (1 gallon equals 33.44 kilowatt hours of electricity) and you can come up with an MPG equivalent (there are other wrinkles, but this isn't a science class so we're just giving you the short-and-sweet version).
But plug-ins (PHEVs), especially those with extended all-electric range, bring so many variables to the table that finding a meaningful MPG-equivalent figure is daunting.
If the Volt's claimed 40 miles of all-electric travel holds up in the real world, then a person who owns one and never drives more than 40 miles before recharging could claim infinite MPG - plus the value of the electricity used.
But GM says the Volt's range extender consumes a gallon of gas every 30 miles after the battery is depleted, so a driver with a 50-mile commute would get 75 MPG on gasoline, plus the electrical consumption, while someone driving 100 miles a day would be getting around 50 MPG from the gas engine-generator, pus the energy value of the electricity used for the first 40 miles.
Borrowing from Fifties-era dream machines like GM's Firebird - with a nod to George Jetson's flying car - a Dutch engineering firm is rolling out a jet turbine technology it says will provide a much needed boost for tomorrow's electric vehicles.
The company, Micro Turbine Technology (MTT), is developing extremely small gas turbines to be used as for things as mundane as generating auxiliary cabin power for big-rig trucks and exciting as extending the travel range of electric cars.
An 'electric jet-car' brings up images of wildly futuristic machinery, but cars powered with this technology would have more in common with real-world hybrids such as the Toyota Prius or upcoming Chevrolet Volt.
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Chrysler experimented with turbine power in the early 1960s.
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MTT's powertrain would use the micro-turbine as an on-board generator to supply the cars' batteries with extra energy when needed. The turbine, like the gas-powered engine-generator in a Chevy Volt, would never provide power directly to the driven wheels.
MTT claims its micro-turbine is ideal as a range extender, more efficient than a traditional internal combustion engine-generator thanks to its small volume, low weight and simple design using few moving parts.
One plus is that, unlike failed past attempts at turbine-powered cars and racing machines, the micro turbine being developed by MTT is meant only to complement an electric powertrain.
We first showed you the Honda EV-N city car concept a few days ago, but now the company has released more photos of the electric city car concept.
Even though Honda insists this particular car - so lovingly evoking the original CV-CC - the photos are still worth looking at.
They likely give us a glimpse at what might be featured on an electric city car if Honda does decide to build one, and who knows - if enough people see the photos and kick up a fuss with Honda's dealers, the company just might come around on the EV-N.
In addition to the new Honda EV-N photos, the automaker also has supplied a bit more detail about the concept, which, it says, has user-changeable seat fabric, fold-flat rear seats, solar cells in the roof, and a wireless communication system built into the instrument panel to keep the car in touch with traffic info, navigation signals from EV charging stations, other Hondas, and who knows what else.
There's also one of those neat Honda U3-X (experimental) self-balancing electric unicycles stored in the door, for when the crowded city streets degenerate into crowded alleyways (they do that in Tokyo) and you just don't feel like walking the rest of the way.
If Nissan's battery-electric 2011 Leaf is too much car for you, perhaps we can interest you in the LandGlider.
The tiny (122 inches long) two seat EV city car concept can't be too much for anyone, save perhaps areally small elf. It will share the Nissan stand at the upcoming 2009 Tokyo Auto Show with the Leaf and several non-electric Nissan intros including the new Fuga performance sedan.
Envisioned at a sort of oversize, 4-wheel, covered, electrically driven motorcycle, the Land glider offers tandem seating, an airplane-style steering yoke and a flexible motorcycle-like suspension that leans into corners.
The trick is an array of sensors that monitor vehicle speed, the steering angle and the yaw (or leaning) rate, instantly calculating the degree of lean needed to let the car scoot around curves.
Nissan isn't likely to build a Glider for the masses but says that it points in the direction engineers and product planners are thinking as they ponder a future a small car for congested cities.
Move over, Mini-E, Daimler reconfirmed this morning that it will begin "large-scale production" of the Smart Fortwo EV in 2012 and will begin ramping up with limited production of a series of 1,000 test cars next month.
The automaker is backing that promise - which we initially reported in August - with a multi-million euro investment in outfitting the Smart plant in Hambach, France, for production of the electric drive models, which will be sold in the U.S. and Europe.
The French government will provide tax credits and other incentives.
Daimler said that the first 1,000 electric Smarts would be delivered, beginning at the end of this year, to customers in Europe and the U.S. - typically commercial and government fleets - in order to obtain "feedback from use under everyday conditions."
---------- Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche, appearing with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Hambach plant. ---------
The automaker has been testing electric Smarts in limited programs in London and German since 2007 and earlier this year introduced a second-generation version of the car, with a battery pack developed and manufactured by California EV-maker Tesla Motors. l The lithium-ion battery pack is mounted between the car's rear wheels and provides juice to run a 40-horsepower electric motor than kicks out 92 lb.-ft. of torque. That give the two-seat Smart rather snail-pace acceleration of 0-37 in 6.5 seconds, with top speed of 62 miles an hour, but it's designed as a commuter car for crowded cities, not a racer for California freeways.
Range, according to Smart, is about 70 miles on a charge, and a depleted battery can be fully recharged overnight from a standard 220-volt outlet.
Tesla Motors Corp. reportedly has selected Panasonic to supply the batteries for its Model S electric sedan (left), scheduled to go into production in late 2011.
Tesla wouldn't comment on the deal - initially reported by GreenTech Media and based on information from unidentified sources.
It makes sense, though, especially based on today's other Panasonic news - that the electronics giant is developing a way to mass produce low-cost EV batteries using commercial lithium-ion cells made for laptop computers.
The battery pack in the Tesla Roadster EV uses 6,800 laptop cells, individually wired together and protected from runaway heat buildup by an internal liquid cooling system and use of thousands of fuses meant to isolate an overheated cell so it can't spread its thermal overload throughout the pack.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has estimated the present cost of the hand-built pack at $36,000, accounting for a third of the roadster's base price.
Despite the expense, use of the commercial laptop cells is favored by Tesla over purpose-built EV batteries, and the company plans to use the same or a similar system for its Model S battery packs.
If Panasonic can build them on an automated line in its existing battery plants, as it has claimed - the cost savings for Tesla would be significant.
In an interesting development on the EV battery front, electronics giant Panasonic Corp says it has developed a technology for linking mass-produced lithium-ion cells (right) into bundles large and stable enough for hybrid and all-electric cars, Reuters news service reports.
The system sounds like an automated, mass-production version of the Tesla Motors method of linking thousands of conventional laptop battery cells into a hand-assembled power pack for its speedy Tesla Roadster EV.
Because the Panasonic system would use existing battery plants and production equipment it could dramatically reduce the cost of EV batteries - presently the most expensive component on an electric car.
The report doesn't mention them, but the Panasonic technology presumably includes a battery management system and a cooling methodology to keep the volatile cells from overheating and to protect the entire pack from damage if a single cell does experiences what the industry likes to call a "thermal event."
Panasonic said it hopes to have a commercial EV battery ready as early as 2013. In addition to use in autos, an affordable, compact lithium-ion battery pack could be sold as an energy storage device for solar- and wind-generation systems and for fuel cells.
Judging from the amount of copy they fed us in advance, Toyota is a whole lot prouder of the rear-wheel drive "Toyobaru" sports coupe it is showing at this month's 2009 Tokyo Auto Show than of the FT-EV II electric city car concept (above) that also will be there.
But an electric city concept there will be - based off the hot-selling toyota iQ micro-mini and an "upgrade" of the FT-EV city car concept that debuted in January at the Detroit Auto Show.
Toyota's not let much out about the new city EV, but what we can tell you is that that it has a lithium-ion battery pack installed under the floor that can deliver about 56 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 62 miles an hour (that's a nice round 100 kilometers an hour in metrics.)
There are no brake, clutch or accelerator pedals - it's all operated by hand with the levers on a futuristic steering wheel, although "control apparatus" might be a better way of describing it.
The reason for the lack of foot controls? Toyota has envisioned a day when radio signals, perhaps from cables embedded in the road, will guide cars and this equips the concept with an "auto mode" for those city commutes when you'd rather spend the time reading the morning paper.
We can also say that it seats four people despite an overall length of just 107 inches long, and those people would climb in through a pair of sliding doors (one on each side).
And that's about it -except that Toyota hopes to have a real battery-electric city car in the market by 2012.
As for that 'Toyobaru" that's stealing the little EV concept's thunder - it's the FT-86 (left), fruit of a collaboration between Toyota and Subaru, in which Toyota now holds a stake. It is intended to replace the MR 2 as Toyota's fun car, will use Subaru's 2.0-liter horizontally opposed, flat-four engine, reportedly handles like a dream and is due to hit the streets in late 2011. You can read more about it on Inside Line.
Daimler chief Dieter Zetsche says he's still is betting on a hydrogen future for the automobile.
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Mercedes B-Class fuel cell cars are being used in long-term road tests in Europe and U.S.
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But in a round-table interview with reporters form a variety of media including (subscription only) Automotive News during the recent Frankfurt Auto Show, Zetsche said that hybrids and battery-electric cars will be long-term interim technologies until hydrogen fuel cell cars and hydrogen fueling technology are ready for market.
Daimler is investing heavily in both electric and fuel cell technologies, he said, and has banded together with other German automakers to boost hydrogen fueling technology.
Asked if Daimler would consider four-cylinder engines for its Mercedes-Benz cars as U.S. fuel economy regulations tighten, Zetsche said that he wouldn't rule out the option .
He also said, according to an interview transcript posted today by Automotive News, that he sees a continued weak U.S. market for luxury cars for several years and that the Chinese market is likely to step in to gill the void.
Fuel efficiency for luxury cars is becoming a necessity rather than an afterthought, Zetsche said, adding that he is convinced that many customers continue to want a comfortable and spacious car but "would not like to be called callous by their neighbor because the fuel consumption is astronomic."
Daimler - indeed, the entire auto industry,- is at the "tipping point now" for electric cars, he said, pointing out that hydrogen fuel cell cars use all-electric drivetrains.
Tesla Motors has begun a mobile service program featuring house calls for customers in the United States and Canada.
The company plans to announce later today that it now has specialized technicians, known as Tesla Mobile Service Rangers, who will make visit owners' homes, offices or parking garages and will carry equipment to enable them to perform an array of procedure on the Roadster EV, including annual inspections and firmware upgrades.
Customers will be charged $1per round-trip mile from the nearest Tesla service center, with a minimum charge of $100, which the company says is less than the actual cost of a house call. Parts and labor, of course, are extra.
We reported last month that Audi executives at the Frankfurt Auto Show said the stunning e-Tron concept, an all-electric version of the Audi R-8, could see limited production in 2012.
Now Autoweek - via the Straightline blog over at Inside Line - says that Audi of America's president, Johan de Nyschen, is confirming that the electric car's headed for production, with working prototypes excepted to be on the road within two years.
It can't happen too soon, far as we're concerned. ---------- See video link at end of article. ----------
Nissan's not letting any grass - green or otherwise - grow under its feet as it prepares to launch its Leaf electric car in select U.S markets next year.
The first installment of what the company hopes will become a vital video campaign launched today with a fairly basic 60-second video touting Nissan's lithium-ion battery technology.
Based on our test drive of the Leaf's power train - installed in a Nissan Versa because the real car wasn't ready - and the unveiling of a pre-production (but 99 percent finished) Leaf in Yokohama this summer, its a pretty neat EV.
Let's hope the videos get to be a lot more content-rich to do it justice as the campaign progresses.
Aptera Motors, Elio Motors and other companies developing fuel-efficient three-wheeled vehicles got a boost from Congress this week in their quest for federal funding.
Legislation to make three-wheeled vehicles eligible for Energy Department loans passed a conference committee of House and Senate leaders Wednesday and then got approval from the full House on Thursday.
It is part of an energy spending bill likely to go before the Senate by next week for final congressional passage, a Senate aide said.
"Obsolete bureaucratic definitions should not create roadblocks and stifle innovation," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who co-sponsored the legislation.
If the Senate passes the bill, it would have to be signed by President Barack Obama to become law.
General Motors Co. has been critical of the bill.
The Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program is intended for large automakers that make many cars and that have the potential for large gasoline savings, the company has said.
GM spokesman Greg Martin declined comment on the latest development.
GM has applied for three department loans totaling more than $10 billion.
Say goodbye to those storied noisy streets of Paris.
The French government today committed 1.5 billion euros ($2.2 billion) to a 10-year plan to help put 2 million electric cars on the road by 2020.
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Renault showed this Fluence ZE electric car concept at the recent Frankfurt Auto Show, vowed to have EVs on sale in France by 2012.
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The funds will help pay for manufacturer and buyer subsidies, a nationwide network of more than 4 million EV charging stations, and subsidies for battery manufacturing and industrial research.
It Takes a Nation
"No player can take the risk alone, but if all the actors take it at the same time, that works," France's Ecology Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said at a press conference in Paris today. He was accompanied by executives from French carmakers Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen, both of which have pledged to begin selling electric vehicles in France by 2012.
Borloo said that the funding will help install a million EV charging points by 2015 - mainly in private residences but also in car parks and select locations on busy highway.
But beginning in 2012, the government will require all new apartment developments in the country to install charging stations to being the nationwide total to 4 million by 2020.
That's two per vehicle and an indication that France, which produces most of its electricity in nuclear power plants, expects the total number of EVs and plug-in hybrids to grow beyond the 2 million goal.
Research Could Lead to Better Electrical Storage for Hybrids, EVs, and Much More
Microscopic carbon nanotubes may have the potential to transport electricity faster and over greater distances with minimal loss of energy, according to Honda Research Institute USA. In this image, the 10 tubes grown on red. pink or peach-colored substrata have metallic conductive properties while the one growing on a blue substrate has semiconducting properties and could not be used to replace metallic conductors such as copper. The empty substrata on either side of the center section are particles too small or too large to grow usable nanotubes.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
By themselves, carbon nanotubes don't do much - don't look like much, either (in fact, you need a pretty powerful electron microscope to see 'em).
But shoot a jolt of electricity into them and it's a new ball game.
They conduct electricity faster, over greater distances and with less energy loss than just about anything else, and they are so small that you can pack an enormous number of them - and an enormous amount of high-efficiency conductivity - into a fairly small package.
Huge application possibilities exist, especially in the search for lighter, cooler-running and more powerful electronics and electrical storage devices for hybrid and electric vehicles.
That's why America Honda Motors is so excited about the announcement today from its R&D unit that researchers there have devised a way to grow carbon nanotubes so that 91 percent of the tubes gown have the necessary metallic properties, nearly double the best efforts of of other research efforts, the company says.
Commercial in Five Years?
A Honda spokesman told Green Car Advisor the research could result in commercial applications for carbon nanotubes in five years or less.
The project was led by Honda Research Institute USA, in Columbus, Ohio, in conjunction with researchers at Purdue University, in Indiana, and the University of Louisville, in Kentucky.
The research, to be published in Friday's edition of Science magazine, opens "new possibilities for miniaturization and energy efficiency, including much more powerful and compact computers, electrodes for supercapacitors, electric cables, batteries, solar cells, fuel cells, artificial muscles, composite material for automobiles and plane, energy storage material and electronics for hybrid vehicles," Honda said in its announcement.
Arizona-based Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. today signed a $99.8 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to join Nissan in the biggest deployment of electric vehicles -- and creation of the largest charging infrastructure -- ever undertaken.
That eTec was earmarked to receive the contract is not news; we reported that in August. But along with news of the signing today, eTec provided further details regarding how it intends to use the money.
In a statement, eTec said the final scope of work will include the deployment of 10,950 Level 2 (220-volt) chargers, 260 Level 3 (440-volt) fast-chargers and 4,700 Nissan LEAF zero-emissions electric vehicles in five states: Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington.
In conjunction with the contract signing, The EV Project (as eTec and Nissan call it) officially commenced today. ETec marked the commencement of the project with creation of the project's official Website.
The Website is designed to provide general information about The EV Project and it provides information about how to purchase a Nissan LEAF and how to apply for a free charger at a home or work.
Balqon Corp., an emerging developer of heavy-duty electric vehicles, today announced the release of its battery-powered Mule M150, a pure-electric truck designed for use in on-highway short-haul applications.
The Harbor City, California, company expects the plug-in delivery vehicle with a 7-ton capacity to appeal to businesses and agencies seeking a zero-emissions cargo solution for inner-city routes, port facilities and airports.
Powering its fully integrated heavy-duty electric drive system are lithium-ion batteries capable of propelling the truck up to a claimed 150 miles on a single charge without cargo and 90 miles fully loaded at speeds up to 55 miles per hour.
Features include: a 6-speed automatic transmission, a quick-change battery module, a high-efficiency AC-induction motor, liquid-cooled traction controls, and wireless performance monitoring.
Balqon said the Mule M150 will go on sale the third quarter of next year. Visit the company's Website for further details.
Suzuki's swift little Swift, a fun-to-drive small hatchback that we, of course, don't get in the U.S., gets a plug for a new Swift extended-range PHEV concept to be shown at the Tokyo Auto Show later this month.
It also gets a battery - lithium-ion - and an electric motor - 74 horsepower - to go along with the plug and a 658 cc (.6 liter) gas engine.
The gas engine, as we understand things despite the dearth of official info from Suzuki, will serve as a generator - a la the Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma and a growing number of other ER-PHEVs - to keep juice flowing to the electric motor when the initial charge (from a commercial charger or or home outlet) is depleted.
No info yet on range, cost, battery size and output, charging times or whether we might actually see a few of these on our shores some day.
Thanks to our colleagues at Inside Line's Straightline blog for the tip and the pix that follow the jump.
Honda announced today that it will display at the Tokyo Motor Show next month a near-production version of the CR-Z (right), which will likely be the world's first hybrid sports car to employ a six-speed transmission when it goes on sale next year.
Alongside the CR-Z Concept 2009 will be the EV-N (below left), a small, four-seat battery-electric vehicle inspired by the N360, the twin-cylinder, air-cooled 360cc micro car launched with a plastic trunk lid in the 1960s. The revival vehicle has solar panels on the roof that could be used to charge the battery. Honda said the EV-N is "purely a design study and there are no plans for production."
The show will also see the debut of the Skydeck Concept (below right), a six-seat hybrid MPV/minivan, similar to the Ford S-Max. Honda said this design study is a great example of how hybrid technology can be placed in a range of different cars for different needs.
"To give the Skydeck the practicality of a conventional MPV, many of the hybrid system components, including the high-power battery, are housed in the car's center tunnel (rather than behind the rear seats or under the floor, as with previous production hybrids). This allows for greater cabin space, and the room for three rows of two seats. It also gives a lower center of gravity."
Mitsubishi isn't resting on its laurels after the successful launch in Japan of its i-MiEV electric city car.
The company plans to show two new concept EVs at the upcoming 2009 Tokyo Auto Show - a mini-cargo van built off the i-MiEV minicar platform, and a four-seat plug-in hybrid crossover it is calling the Mitsubishi PX-MiEV (right).
The PX - Mitsubishi's nameplate shorthand for plug-in crossover - is the first big-vehicle use of the company's "Mitsubishi innovative Electric Vehicle" technology, or MiEV.
Quiet Carrier
The i-MiEV Cargo concept is a pretty simple one: a slightly stretched i-MiEV with a cargo box behind the front seats.
Electric delivery vans make enormous sense in most cites, where short-haul delivery vehicles don't often travel far from home, spend a lot of time idling, and rarely are driven at high speeds.
Replace the gas or diesel engine and fuel tank with an elecric mtor and batteries and you've got a quiet, non-polluting cargo carrier that's a whole lot cheaper to operate than one with an internal combustion engine.
We hope this is one concept that Mitsubishi will put on the road, soon.
Plug Me In
The big news though, would be a decision to turn the PX-MiEV plug-in hybrid concept into the real thing.
As Mitsubishi describes it, the PX would use a 1.6-liter gas engine and a pair of electric motors, one front and one rear, and be able to travel in all-electric mode for about 30 miles.
The system would deliver fuel economy of around 120 miles per gallon under Japan's mixed-use test, which is the only number we have but isn't really applicable in the U.S, where highway speeds are higher and account for a larger portion of the drive cycle.
Bob Kruse, who recently led a team that played a key role in the development of the Chevrolet Volt and who crafted the automaker's long-term electric-vehicle strategy, has resigned effective today.
Kruse, executive director of global vehicle engineering for hybrids, electric vehicles and batteries since early last year, left to focus on an EV consulting company he founded last month.
He will provide automotive and vehicle electrification expertise for companies looking to seize a piece of more than $1.3 billion in federal grants available to Michigan and Detroit's major automakers.
"My departure from General Motors has nothing to do with my view of the future success for the Volt," Kruse said. "I've left on very good terms. I have a lot of respect for the leadership of General Motors."
GM spokesman Rob Peterson told Green Car Advisor that Kruse's resignation, coming only 13 months before the Volt's scheduled production launch, "won't have any impact" on the gasoline-electric hybrid sedan.
"There's never a good time to lose good people, but there's a deep bench with the Volt and that team was working together before Bob joined and they will continue to march on," he said.
Kruse's resignation comes at a crucial time for GM, which is banking on the Volt extended-range electric vehicle to help it meet stringent new government fuel-economy rules and to change the public's perception of the company as being an electric-car killer and a proponent of gas-guzzlers.
Nissan North America will begin taking orders for the company's new Leaf electric car (left) next spring and says it anticipates 20,000 pre-sales by the time the EV hits dealerships in the third quarter.
"We are confident we will have 20,000 reservations for the Leaf by the time it goes on sale," Carlos Tavares, Nissan's chairman for the Americas, said at a breakfast meeting of Nashville, Tenn., business leaders this morning.
The meeting was covered by the subscription-only industry journal Automotive News, which reported Tavares' comments in an on-line report.
Tavares said Tennessee-based Nissan North America expects to make Nashville a key launch market for the five-passenger Leaf.
Initially, the vehicle will be sold only in cities or regions that have signed agreements with Nissan to aggressively pursue installation of EV charging networks.
Canadian NEV-maker Zenn Motor Co. says it will stop making and marketing its $16,000 (U.S.) cityZenn low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle (right), drop plans for a highway-legal Zenn car and is switching its business plan to become distributor of an EV drivetrain.
The company said it is partnering with EEStor, a secretive company that claims to have developed an ultracapacitor-based EV battery that can deliver up to 300 miles of highway-speed range on a single 5-minute charge.
Zenn CEO Ian Clifford told the Toronto Star that it no longer makes business sense for the small company "to go into the distribution and sales" of EVs because of "the way things have really changed over the last year."
He was referring both to the growing number of large automakers announcing electric vehicle plans and to tough new safety rules in Zenn's home province of Ontario that would have required a number of expensive changes to Zenn's cars to make them street legal. Zenn also took a financial beating - along with the rest of the auto industry - as the recession slowed sales this year of its low-speed EV.
While Texas-based EEStor has not yet shown a working model of its ultracapacitor-cum-battery, Clifford said Zenn, which owns a 10.5 percent stake in the company, is "working on a daily basis with EEStor on this final milestone" in battery development that "takes us to commercial viability."
In an obvious move to shore up its access to state-of-the-art advanced batteries for electric vehicles, Volkswagen is setting up a joint venture with Varta Microbattery to develop EV power packs, Europe's biggest carmaker said today.
Volkswagen already collaborates with Japan's Toshiba and Sanyo as well as with China's BYD on battery technology.
The announcement comes less than a month after VW presented a prototype of the e-Up! plug-in electric vehicle at the Frankfurt Motor Show with the intention of launching the vehicle in Europe in 2013.
Only days later, VW said it was also planning on introducing a slightly larger electric vehicle in the U.S. The company, which was slow to jump on the EV bandwagon, was quickly forming pacts with battery-makers and announcing bold plans for EV production.
In a statement issued today, VW said the project with Varta aims to undertake research and development of highly advanced and yet cost competitive lithium-ion batteries.
The four-year project still requires approval from German authorities.
South Korea's CT&T Co. intends to make neighborhood electric vehicles at two production and distribution facilities in Pennsylvania, Governor Ed Rendell announced today at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
CT&T makes low- and mid-speed, short-distance NEVs that the company claims passes the crash tests required for passenger cars. The vehicles sell for about $12,000 apiece.
Although the media focuses on highway-capable EVs, it's worth noting that most of the EVs in the U.S. and the rest of the world today are NEVs such as the CT&T plug-in and zero-emissions vehicle pictured here.
Indeed, CT&T has a contract to supply 4,000 NEVs to California police organizations for parking enforcement and it sees a strong market for NEVs across the U.S.
The company says cities with large municipal fleets offer a considerable initial market opportunity, with the electric car as a low-cost option for parking authorities, parks and recreation departments, and similar agencies with short-distance, low-speed vehicle needs.
CT&T President Young Gi Lee said in a statement that the company's long-term business plan calls for 40 regional assembly and sales systems in North America. CT&T has been exporting to China, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and America since 2005.
The company is focusing on sites on the Delaware River in Philadelphia for its initial Pennsylvania location. Company executives visited five prospective sites in the Pittsburgh region Thursday, including two within the city.
While in Pittsburgh, CT&T executives also met with experts in battery and fuel technology from Carnegie Mellon University, which is engaged in a range of research initiatives to support the growth and development of electric vehicle technology.
General Motors and India's Reva Electric Car announced today that they will jointly produce a battery-powered vehicle for South Asia based on the Detroit carmaker's best-selling mini-car, the Chevrolet Spark (pictured).
Under the alliance, GM will provide the vehicle platform and manufacturing facilities for the zero-emissions car, which will begin production next year, while Reva will supply the technology for the battery, electric drivetrain and power management systems.
They did not provide forecasts for production, but GM has the capacity to produce 225,000 vehicles of all types at its two plants in India and has plans to scale up its factory in Maharashtra state by an additional 160,000 vehicles.
GM, which is also due to launch its plug-in Chevrolet Volt in the U.S. next year, joins a growing list of the world's major carmakers that are due to launch electric cars over the next three years as part of their carbon-cutting strategy.
Some, including Japan's Mitsubishi Motors, have already launched them.
Last week at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Renault announced that it was launching four electric vehicles in 2011-12. Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz showed planned battery-powered luxury models.
Lithium-ion car battery maker A123 Systems Inc. increased the number of shares in its initial public offering and priced them for $13.50 apiece, above the estimate range.
The upsized deal helped the Watertown, Massachusetts, company raise $380.4 million, far above what it had expected. On Tuesday, facing strong demand, A123 had raised the price estimate range of the IPO to between $10 and $11.50 apiece, up from the original range of $8 to $9.50.
A123 sold 28.1 million shares, 9.3 percent more than expected.
A123, which was founded by scientists linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, develops batteries and battery systems for hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and all-electric vehicles and works with such carmakers as BMW, Chrysler and General Motors.
"The fact that they have received several hundred million dollars from the government and have strong venture backers and corporate partners like Motorola and Qualcomm clearly reveals the confidence in this intriguing cleantech story," said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner with advisory firm IPO Boutique.
A123 won a $249.1 million grant in August from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of a competition for $1.5 billion in federal stimulus funds for companies that make advanced automotive batteries.
The IPO's underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have the option to buy another 4.2 million shares, which could bring the deal's total proceeds to $437.5 million.
Tesla Motors' forthcoming all-electric Model S sedan (pictured) has been designed so that its battery pack can be switched with a fresh battery pack in five minutes or less, the company's outgoing director of vehicle engineering and manufacturing said in an interview today.
Speaking with Green Car Advisor shortly after his resignation was announced, Michael Donoughe said the plug-in electric vehicle has been designed in such a way that its lithium-ion battery pack can be removed and replaced with another one in the amount of time it takes to fill the gas tank of a standard automobile.
"When you install the battery pack for vehicle assembly and when you're running at line speed, you have to do it in a fairly quick fashion," Donoughe said. "So you design for manufacturing and assembly, and as long as you're designing for manufacturing and assembly you can also design for manufacturing, assembly and swap. That's basically what we're looking to do."
Telsa, he said, is looking to ramp up quickly once the zero-emissions Model S enters production, which is still on target for late 2011. Six months from assembly of the first Model S, Tesla expects to be producing 400 a week, or roughly 20,000 annually, he said.
Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad said today that the company has already received more than 1,600 reservations for the Model S, including one from Donoughe.
General Motors announced today that it will create a laboratory in Shanghai to contribute to technological innovation in a number of automotive-related fields for GM both domestically and on a worldwide basis.
The announcement came less than a month after GM disclosed that its sales in China in the first eight months of this year increased 49.6 percent on an annual basis to 1,111,401 vehicles.
The China Science Lab (pictured) will be the first major laboratory established by a global automaker in China. In a statement, GM said the lab's initial focus will be on research related to advanced propulsion technology and joining technology.
But the lab will also focus on battery cells, megacity safety research, advanced vehicle development, and light materials. It will engage in additional activities in accordance with market conditions and its own research capability as it ramps up.
The lab will also carry out collaborative work with universities and government-run scientific institutions across China. It is expected to employ up to 100 staff during its early stage of operation. No specifics were provided regarding the lab's scheduled construction and opening dates or its cost.
Kevin Wale, president and managing director of the GM China Group, said that through the lab, "we will leverage the country's outstanding research talent together with GM's extensive resources to come up with new innovations for the benefit of vehicle users around the globe."
Mike Donoughe, currently head of vehicle engineering and manufacturing for Tesla Motors, will join the Detroit management consulting firm St. Clair Consortium as senior partner effective Oct. 1. His last day at the automaker will be Friday.
Tesla has not publicly named Donoughe's replacement. Tesla Chief Engineer Peter Rawlinson is head of engineering on the all-electric Model S sedan and will retain his responsibilities in that capacity.
Donoughe joined San Carlos, California-based Tesla 15 months ago, shortly after Tesla had begun production of its first product, the all-electric Roadster sports car. Donoughe helped the company achieve fully ramped-up production this summer, when Tesla hit its target of 25 cars built per week.
Tesla, the only automaker producing and selling highway-capable EVs, has delivered more than 700 Roadsters in the United States and Europe so far. Donoughe also focused on enhancing Roadster quality and helped execute a cost-down program that helped Tesla achieve a significant financial milestone and reach profitability in July.
Donoughe is leaving voluntarily and in part for personal reasons. He plans to dedicate more time to the Rochester, Michigan-based Cornerstone Youth Development Fund, which he co-founded with his daughter, Kelly.
Cornerstone is a non-profit organization focused on making facility infrastructure, student tuition and teacher salary investments in Uganda and Detroit to advance the education and development of youth.
Donoughe's planned departure comes at the most logical and least disruptive time for the automaker -- after the successful completion of the Roadster ramp-up but before the start of production of the all-electric Model S sedan.
"Mike joined the company shortly after we had begun manufacturing the Roadster, and his enthusiasm and expertise helped Tesla achieve fully ramped-up production," said Tesla CEO Elon Musk. "He's leaving the company on very solid footing and at a logical time in Tesla's phenomenal growth curve. We wish him a ll the best."
In a statement, Donoughe described Tesla as "a company populated throughout with excellent and enthusiastic people. It has been a wonderful experience for me to have been a part of this talented team."
California took the pulse of the zero-emissions vehicle industry this week and found plug-in electric vehicle manufacturers worried about charging infrastructure and public expectations.
The California Air Resources Board is hearing from fuel cell and EV manufacturers in preparation for releasing regulations for its Zero-Emissions Vehicle Program. Targets for 2015 and thereafter are due out by Nov. 10, with final targets due by early next year.
In its fifth major revision of the program since 1990, it voted last year to reduce the 2014 sales target from 25,000 to 7,500 vehicles.
A philosophical difference emerged between conventional car manufacturers and electric-only car companies.
Nissan, which is shooting for a 100-mile range for its Leaf EV, is playing down its perks. When asked to compare gasoline-powered and EV batteries, a company executive said not to expect comparable performance.
"Since the battery's not part of the emissions, it's not required to last 10 years and 150,000 miles," said Brian Verprauskus, senior manager of corporate planning for Nissan North America. "The issue's going to be the degradation. If the customer is OK with reduced range after 10 years, it'll definitely last that long, but after 10 years, we think there'll be more advanced batteries and the customer's going to want to swap it out with a next-generation battery."
Tesla Motors, on the other hand, is emphasizing the ways EVs differ from conventional cars. "We're trying to market cars based on the new attributes of EVs themselves," said J.B. Straubel, Tesla's chief technical officer. "It's an offensive technology shift. We can offer some new competitive advantages to customers."
EV manufacturers said the installation of charging infrastructure remained the biggest bottleneck to widespread implementation. BMW, which ran into charging issues with its MINI E pilot program, said the industry needed to agree on a standard for in-home charging infrastructure.
Land Rover announced today that a production version of its Range Rover LRX Concept SUV (pictured) will be built, with sales to begin in 2011.
Designed and engineered at Land Rover's Gaydon facility, the new Range Rover will be the smallest, lightest and most fuel-efficient vehicle the company has ever produced.
The three-door SUV will be built in Halewood, near Liverpool, England, subject to quality and productivity agreements, and will be sold in more than 100 countries around the world, the company said in a statement.
In an interview with Edmunds.com's Michelle Krebs this morning, Jaguar Land Rover spokesman Stuart Schorr said the LRX will be the first of four new segment offerings from the company, with Jaguar and Land Rover to receive two each.
He stressed the four will be premium brands, meaning they won't come cheap. Schorr also said that Jaguar Land Rover is committed to hybrids and electrics, but he refused to provide further details.
The LRX Concept debuted at the Detroit Auto Show last year and featured a 2.0-liter diesel-hybrid powertrain, which when running on biodiesel achieved a claimed fuel economy of 60 miles per gallon.
Jaguar or Land Rover Plant to Close
In a related development, India's Tata Motors Ltd. said today it will close one of the three Jaguar Land Rover assembly plants in England by 2014 in a bid to move its money-losing British unit into profitability.
Honda, looking to cover all bets, is getting ready to add a one-wheeled, lightweight personal mobility device to a stable that already includes cars, trucks, motorcycles, a jet airplane and outboard motors for boats.
The U3-X mobility device (left) - still experimental - uses Honda-developed "balance control technology" and what the company believes to be "the world's first omni-directional wheel," to enable "riders" to go forward, backward, directly right or left and diagonally, turn in any direction and speed up, slow down or stop merely by leaning the upper body to shift body weight .
Oh, and it's lightweight - under 22 pounds - and electric, powered by a small lithium-ion battery good for an hour of continuous use.
In a neat bit of engineering, Honda made the device at once single- and multi-wheeled, connecting a number (unspecified) of small motor-controlled wheels in a single line then forming that into a single large-diameter wheel.
When the individual small wheels are moving, they enable the device to move side-to-side; when locked into position and rotating as the single large-diameter wheel they enable forward and backward motion, and when working in combination, they make it possible to move diagonally, Honda says.
A British publication reported today that luxury-car crafter Rolls Royce is thinking about producing an all-electric Phantom similar in appearance to the gasoline-powered Phantom pictured here.
Auto Express News, citing an unidentified RR spokesman, said that of the brand's entire lineup a battery-powered Phantom made the most sense because, at more than 5,600 pounds with a heavy 6.75-liter V12 under the hood, replacing the engine with an electric motor and a lithium-ion battery shouldn't create a major weight issue.
The greatest problem RR engineers anticipate is coming up with an electric Phantom that gives the vehicle a respectable travel range between charges. But then, there'd be nothing preventing the engineers from adding a small range-extending gasoline- and diesel-powered engine to serve as a generator to keep the juice flowing.
With the base price of the 2009 Phantom set at $350,000, an additional EV or plug-in hybrid EV premium wouldn't likely be an issue for prospective customers. And there's something awfully cool about being able to prowl the nights in a silent Phantom.
The Electric Drive Transportation Assn., the national advocacy group for electric cars, trucks, buses, and all other electrically powered conveyances, is hosting a live chat Thursday with its executive director, Brian Wynne, from 2-3 pm - Eastern Time (11 am-noon Pacific Time).
It's the association's first try at an on-line chat and spokeswoman Jennifer Watts says it will be wide open, with Wynne fielding questions about everything from the availability of vehicles to how the smart grid works.
"We hope to talk about everything from hybrids to fuel cells," Watts said.
Volvo cars and trucks have always been designed to withstand the rigors of Sweden's rough roads and cold temperatures, with particular emphasis on surviving a collision.
This is why Volvo has invented so many safety features since the making its first car in 1927.
Those features include a safety cage for occupants, laminated windshield, three-point safety belts, padded instrument panel, crumple zones, anti-locking brakes, inflatable curtain and lane-departure warning. The full list of Volvo safety innovations is quite long.
Now the Swedish automaker is applying some of those inventions to protecting the batteries that propel electric vehicles.
In a statement released today, Volvo said it conducting "extremely wide-ranging and thorough analysis of a variety of safety scenarios for cars with electric power.
"Through advanced automatic monitoring of battery status and by encapsulating the battery and protecting it effectively in a collision, the result is a comprehensive safety package of the very highest class."
Volvo's safety tests take place in several different stages. First at component level, then for whole systems and finally the complete car is safety-tested -- both virtually in the computer, and physically in Volvo's technically advanced crash-test center.
At present Volvo is conducting tests at component level to see how the electric-vehicle's battery is affected by harsh braking and the subsequent collision.
"We are also carrying out, for the first time, advanced crash tests in full scale to evaluate the technology in electrically powered cars," Volvo Cars' safety expert, Thomas Broberg, said.
One week after Volkswagen made a splash at the Frankfurt Motor Show with the world debut of its E-Up! electric vehicle (pictured), the German automaker has announced that it will likely sell a larger version of the cute compact in the U.S.
"The reason we are working on an electric vehicle is the American market," Ulrich Hackenberg, board member in charge of product development at Volkswagen AG, said today.
Hackenberg said a production version of the plug-in battery-electric zero-emissions E-Up! will go on sale in Europe in 2013. He said U.S. sales would start later.
The E-Up! is based on VW's new modular small-car family, scheduled to debut in 2011. The four-seat E-Up!, which measures 125 inches long (or 19 inches longer than the tiny Smart ForTwo), has a range of up to 80 miles on lithium-ion battery power.
For the United States, Hackenberg said, he envisions a front-drive model about 146 inches long (the 2009 MINI Cooper is 145.6 inches long). Electric versions of the Smart ForTwo and MINI Cooper are planned for the U.S.
VW will launch its first hybrid vehicle next year -- a version of the Touareg SUV. Hackenberg said the Touareg hybrid will debut at the 2010 Detroit auto show in January.
To date, very few details have been released regarding this vehicle.
Maxwell Technologies Says It Also Is Working on Ultracapacitors for Hybrids, EVs
Much of the EV discussion these days - when not focused on which companies are building what cars - is about batteries, but there's another electrical energy storage device out there that's making inroads.
---------- Maxwell Technologies' "Boostcap" ultracapacitors will be used in Continental stop-start system component. ----------
It's the ultracapacitor, a device that is quickly charged from an engine generator or regenerative braking system and has a very high energy density that is rapidly discharged.
That makes them less than optimal as the main energy source for an electric vehicle, but ideal as a sort of supercharger good for quick bursts of energy. And that makes them ideal for engine start-stop systems - also called micro hybrid systems - that shut down an internal combustion engine instead of letting it waste fuel and pump out emissions while idling.
Start-stops require a big energy boost to instantaneously restart the engine when its time to go again, and that's prime territory for ultracapacitors.
That's been the belief of Maxwell Technologies, a San Diego-based energy storage systems developer that has just announced a deal to supply its proprietary "Boostcap" ultracapacitors for a critical piece of stop-start system componentry manufactured by global auto supply giant Continental AG.
Maxwell said its ultracapacitors are to be used starting next year as the energy storage element of a Continental voltage stabilization system (VSS) for start-stop systems in new cars.
Its first car hasn't gone into production yet, but already Fisker Automotive is well on the way to introducing a second plug-in hybrid, thanks to a $528-million federal loan.
----------
Fisker Automotive specializes in plug-in hybrid cars.
Fisker, based in Irvine, Calif., said today that the bulk of the money will be used to develop its next-generation plug-in hybrid with some being used to complete development of the company's first car, the Fisker Karma PHEV (left) slated to go into production later this year.
While the Karma is an $87,900, 408-horsepower exotic built under contract in Finland, Fisker's next cars will be more modestly priced and powered, will be built in the U.S., and will start at around $47,400 before the $7,500 federal tax credit.
The new plug-in is being developed under the code-name Project NINA - named, the company says, for one of the three ships in explorer Christopher Columbus' tiny fleet, and symbolizing the auto industry's "transition from old world to new."
System Initially Will Benefit Tesla Roadster Owners With Access for Other EVs to Come
California's hydrogen highway appears to have gone into hibernation as the state struggles with mounting budget woes, but battery-electric vehicles are getting a boost from a newly announced rapid charging network.
----------- Solar panels atop bank building (right) will power EV chargers in bank parking lot (below) as part of 322-mile charger network. ----------
What is being billed as the nation's first rapid-charge electric vehicle charging network, linking Los Angeles and San Francisco along the state's Highway 101 corridor, under a plan unveiled this morning by a private coalition led by a major solar systems retailer.
Funding to equip the network of five fast-charge stations - each costing from $7,000 to $12,000 - has been provided by EV-manufacturer Tesla Motors, using grant funding form the California Air Resources Board.
Owners of the Tesla Roadster EV will be the first beneficiaries of the network, which initially is equipped only with Tesla-compatible charging hookups.
But the network will be opened to other EVs as they come into the market.
It has been designed "to give new travel opportunities for electric vehicle owners and gives further momentum to the renewable energy movement," said Marco Krapels, co-chairman of the social responsibility committee at Rabobank N.A., one of the networks sponsors.
The federal government has awarded $100 million in grants to 43 metropolitan transit agencies that had submitted plans to cut emissions and create so-called "green" jobs.
The grants mark the Obama Administration's continued investment in reducing the environmental impact of transportation vehicles by using technologies that boost fuel efficiency and cut pollution.
Many of the green grants are for agencies to replace diesel transit buses with diesel-electric hybrid and battery-electric buses, but a number also involve increased use of solar energy.
California-based transportation agencies such as the Bay Area's AC Transit and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be given more than $17 million for projects such as boosting solar energy capacity to make hydrogen with clean electricity, installing photovoltaic panels to offset electricity use at maintenance yards, and installing a flywheel energy storage system, the U.S. Transportation Department said in a statement announcing the grants.
BMW plans to being selling its own electric city car in the U.S. sometime after 2010 ad is studying the ins and outs of an EV launch with its ongoing Mini E trial ( we have one of the cars in the Edmunds long-term fleet and if you haven't been following its ups and downs you can get enlightened here).
It looks like the biggest issue, other than cost - the Mini Es come with an $850 monthly leasing fee and no mass-market EV is going to succeed with that kind of a price tag - is going to be infrastructure.
Our own experience with the Mini E has been that and EV with 90 or so miles of range - at best - makes a great runabout for local driving but for most people will never be more than a second, or third, car.
Mini's first big problem with its EV test, already well-documented, is that the cars were supplied with European-spec cords for the fast-charge system and hadn't yet been blessed with the Underwriters Lab seal that is required by electrical inspectors in most U.S. jurisdictions.
Silicon Valley's venture capitalists believe the Detroit 3 automakers cannot become competitive again unless they scrap their traditional business model and embrace new, innovative ways of doing business.
Speaking of the Detroit 3, Ray Lane, a managing partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Buyers, said that "for years they have been led by accountants and lawyers, not engineers and entrepreneurs. That's OK if the industry isn't changing."
So what do Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group need to do to regain marketplace dominance?
"Start over," said Marc van den Berg, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, which backs upstart electric carmaker Tesla Motors and electric-vehicle infrastructure firm Better Place.
The only way the Detroit 3 can succeed is by completely overhauling the business model, moving beyond just designing attractive cars, Silicon Valley venture capitalists say.
"There is room for business model innovation and technology innovation," said Vinod Khosla, managing general partner of Khosla Ventures.
Khosla said U.S. automakers need to embrace innovation at all levels. He pointed to Better Place, which is building charging infrastructure and battery-swapping stations for electric vehicles.
"Better Place is saying,'Don't let the consumer buy the batteries,' " Khosla said. "That's a business model innovation."
Japan's GS Yuasa Corp. said it is in talks to supply overseas automakers with lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, and GS Yuasa's venture with Mitsubishi Motors may begin sales next year, Reuters reported today.
In an interview with the news service, GS Yuasa President Makoto Yoda said his company, the world's third-largest car-battery maker, aims to boost annual lithium-ion battery sales more than 30-fold to $1.1 billion by March 2016.
The company is banking on strong growth for gasoline-electric and pure electric vehicles amid concerns about climate change and as government subsidies offer consumers subsidies.
"Demand for electric vehicles is particularly strong in the United States and Europe as they have stringent regulations against carbon-dioxide emissions," Yoda told Reuters in an interview.
He reportedly said the company was in talks with automakers in the United States, Europe and Japan.
The venture, Lithium Energy Japan, is 51 percent owned by GS Yuasa, with trading house Mitsubishi Corp. holding 34 percent and Mitsubishi Motors holding 15 percent. Mitsubishi Motors launched i-MiEV, the world's first mass-produced electric car in July.
GS Yuasa, which also runs a joint venture with Honda Motor Co. to make lithium-ion batteries for gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles starting late next year, said it may begin sales of such batteries to other carmakers beginning April 2012.
GS Yuasa is reportedly planning to build a lithium-ion battery plant in Kyoto Prefecture of Japan for Mitsubishi's i-MiEV car, which is expected to produce batteries for 15,000 vehicles a year from the second half of 2010.
The American safety testing and certification company Underwriters Laboratories announced today that it intends to release a new set of requirements for large batteries in electric vehicles, UL Subject 2580.
UL said in a statement that with interest in electric vehicles on the rise, the "new requirements will help mitigate the potential risk of fire and electrical hazards and enhance the overall safety of batteries for electric vehicles."
In other words, the company is hoping that once it creates a set of requirements for EV batteries, the government will require battery-makers to obtain UL certifications for them. UL has conveniently come up with a name for the certificate: Subject 2580.
"Before becoming a standard, these requirements will undergo a comprehensive review process by a global Standard Technical Panel (STP). An STP is a consensus body of individuals representing consumers, government agencies, regulatory authorities, manufacturers and other knowledgeable interested parties that develop and maintain effective product safety standards," UL said.
According to the international consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the estimated number of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) that will be on the road globally over the next decade range from 1 million to 5 million new vehicles per year.
Embittered former Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard has settled his defamation lawsuit against the electric-car company and its current chief executive, Elon Musk.
The terms of the settlement are confidential, but in a joint statement released today it would appear that Eberhard and Musk have ended their public display of animus -- as well as come to an understanding regarding who founded Tesla Motors, maker of the Tesla Roadster (pictured) and Model S zero-emissions plug-in electric vehicles.
"Elon Musk and Martin Eberhard, two of the co-founders of Tesla, announced today that they have resolved their dispute," the statement reads.
In his defamation suit, Eberhard claimed that Musk was stealing his thunder by declaring himself the founder of Tesla in interviews. Eberhard even tried (unsuccessfully) to have a judge declare that he founded the company.
The suit, filed last May, also accused Musk of wrongfully blaming Eberhard for production delays, failing to pay Eberhard's severance and many other misdeeds. Eberhard went so far as to have accused Musk of lying on his resume about his education and employment history.
But today the men sang each other praises, with Eberhard saying, "As co-founder of the company, Elon's contributions to Tesla have been extraordinary," and Musk stating that "without Martin's indispensable efforts, Tesla motors would not be here today."
Eberhard's lawyer, Yosef Peretz, said he could not discuss the terms of the settlement. But, he said his client was "very pleased" with the result.
It's amazing what a pile of money can do to improve one's mood. Of course, we can only assume a pile of money was involved, because both parties are prohibited from discussing it.
Britain's first government loan under new program to help boost automotive production and manufacturing goes to India's Tata Motors, for an assembly plant for its new line of electric cars.
Tata, which is preparing to launch European sales of a battery-electric version of its 4-seat Indica hatchback (right), has said earlier this month that its first factory would be in Norway with a British plant to follow if a government loan could be obtained.
This week, Britain's business secretary, Peter Mandleson, said Tata would get a loan of 10 million pounds ($16.3 million), the first from the 2.3-billion ($3.7 billion) loan fund.
Tata hasn't announced a plant site for the Indica EV, but analysts at IHS Global Insight say it is expected to choose a locale in central Britain near its existing Tata European Technical Center at the University of Warwick.
Global Insight reports that the U.K. automotive assistance program is in funding talks with 17 other companies.
REVA, the Indian automaker with big electric plans, reportedly is negotiating to bring its NXR 3-door compact EV (right) to the North American market and hopes to set up an electric-car manufacturing facility in the U.S.
A report in Syracuse.com, the Syracuse (N.Y.) on-line "newspaper," cited unnamed local government and development sources Friday as saying that "almost all of the pieces are in place to make the deal, including state and federal incentives."
REVA, which introduced the NXR at the Frankfurt Auto Show last week, has sought a $40 million federal loan guarantee - possibly through a U.S. partner or partners, the report said - to finance an assembly plant in the U.S.
The report says that the Syracuse region of central New York is a "leading contender" for the factory if the financing comes through
German model-car maker Herpa Miniaturmodelle, which announced last month that it would debut an all-electric version of the Trabant compact car at this week's Frankfurt Motor Show, kept its word and unveiled a baby-blue electric vehicle concept it calls the Trabant nT (right).
Company officials said a single 64-horsepower motor turns the front wheels and a lithium-ion battery pack supplies the juice. The plug-in EV can go approximately 155 miles between charges and has a top speed of 80 miles an hour, the officials said.
The company is hoping to bring the vehicle to market in 2012. No further details were available.
The old Trabant was a smog-spewing, two-stroke icon of communist East Germany. Exactly 3,096,099 of them were built between 1957 and 1991.
The photo at left shows the very last of the original Trabants being assembled. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, thousands of the smoky, boxy four-seaters streamed into West Germany.
Despite its mediocre performance and dreadful emissions, the car is regarded in Germany today with derisive affection as a symbol of the failed former East Germany.
The vast majority of U.S. federal subsidies for fossil fuels and renewable energy from 2002-2008 supported fossil energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases when used as fuel, according to research released today by the Environmental Law Institute in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Applying a conservative approach, the respected organizations found that the U.S. government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewable fuels.
Subsidies to fossil fuels -- a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed government support for many years -- totaled approximately $72 billion over the study period, representing a direct cost to taxpayers.
Over the same period, subsidies for renewable fuels -- a relatively young and developing industry -- totaled $29 billion, the study found. What's more, of the $29 billion, more than half -- $16.8 billion -- went toward corn-based ethanol, the climate effects of which are hotly disputed.
The study also found that most of the largest subsidies to fossil fuels were written into the U.S. Tax Code as permanent provisions. By comparison, many subsidies for renewables were time-limited initiatives implemented through energy bills, with expiration dates that limit their usefulness to the renewables industry.
Toshiyuki Tabata spent 30 years as a Nissan Motor Co. engineer trying to make gasoline-powered cars quieter. Now he's consulting music composers to make electric cars noisier -- and safer.
An article published by Bloomberg news service today addresses the efforts Tabata in particular and automakers in general are making to make electric and hybrid cars, with little or no engine noise, safer for pedestrians.
Some of the automakers are simply seeking sounds that resemble conventional engine noises. But as we learn from Tabata, Nissan is doing something completely different.
The company consulted Japanese composers of film scores. What Tabata and his six-member team came up with is a high- pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in "Blade Runner" (pictured), the 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott portraying his dystopian vision of 2019.
"We wanted something a bit different, something closer to the world of art," Tabata said.
The article is well worth the time it takes to read it.
In Los Angeles County, where police struggle with illegal street racing, "The Jay Leno Show" tonight will air the first in a season-long series of races featuring an electrified Ford Focus and a string of celebrities who hope to finish year one of the show with the fastest time.
In a statement issued by NBC, the network emphasized that the vehicle used in the "Green Car Challenge" and pictured here is a battery-electric Ford Focus, suggesting that, perhaps, the energy needed to fuel the product- and celebrity-promoting joy ride did not in any way contribute to global warming.
But, hey, this is late-night television and the first celebrity is actress Drew Barrymore (below left), who famously exposed her breasts to David Letterman during a videotaped segment of his show and who immediately won the hearts of various male talk-show hosts -- not, say, Paul Hawken, the well-read environmentalist who has devoted much of his life to speaking out against wasting energy.
At the risk of raising reasonable doubt against what's supposed to be a light-hearted (and albeit light-brained) scheme to promote electric cars, we are reminded to inform that Leno's new show airs Monday through Friday from 10 till 11 p.m. Eastern.
The car pictured here is the very same one Ms. Barrymore will be driving. NBC would like us to emphasize that it is a one-of-a-kind Focus EV "tuned to perform on a racetrack that was specifically designed for 'The Jay Leno Show,' " so don't you be trying this at home.
Lest you not focus on whether Ms. Barrymore will flash Leno, we remind you that "Celebrities who accept the challenge will be at the wheel, driving quickly to establish a fast lap time that future guests will try to beat." And, "the 'Green Car Challenge' will be a regular segment on 'The Jay Leno Show.' "
Although the car is one-of-a-kind, NBC and Ford would appreciate it if we mention that the Focus appearing in the smackdown is based on the European five-door production Focus ST and modified into a battery electric vehicle, or BEV, as part of Ford's BEV test fleet.
That said, "The Focus BEV foreshadows many of the same systems that Ford will begin selling to consumers in an all-new electric Ford Focus, scheduled to go on sale in North America in 2011. The new Focus BEV is one of four electrified vehicles Ford is introducing now through 2012."
We commend Ford for the EV development. And our thoughts, prayers and dreams are with Ms. Barrymore.
GOTHENBURG, Sweden - Volvo Cars unveiled its new C30-based prototype electric car today and said that Indianapolis-based battery maker EnerDel is supplying the lithium-ion battery pack for the vehicles, which will be used in a series of on-road test programs in Europe over the next year.
The deal is EnerDel's second with Volvo, following this summer's announcement that the subsidiary of New York-based Ener1 Corp. was teaming with the Swedish automaker to supply batteries for a pair of plug-in diesel-electric hybrids.
The C30 BEV, or battery-electric vehicle, uses a 24 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack with 22 kilowatt-hours of usable energy and a predicted range of 75 to 93 miles depending on driving conditions.
Test Track Trial
Green Car Advisor got a chance to take one of the two existing C30 BEVs on a short spin around Volvo's demonstration track outside Gothenburg in southwest Sweden earlier today and found the four-seater - based on Volvo's smallest car - to be a sprightly, well-mannered package.
The nearly 700-pound (estimated) battery pack, made of hundreds of flat lithium-ion cells for easier cooling, is tucked beneath the C30's sporty body, fitted between the frame stiffeners to give the small car a low center of gravity and to protect the battery from damage in an accident.
Volkswagen AG this week rolled an electric car it calls the E-Up! onto the world stage, and told onlookers that the never-before-seen plug-in EV will likely enter production in 2013.
---------- Above and below: Volkswagen's E-Up! battery-electric vehicle debuts in Frankfurt. ----------
Furthermore, the German carmaker said it expects the zero-emissions compact car to approach production level on par with it other compact cars by 2020.
The company said the front-wheel-drive vehicle's lithium-ion battery will have 18 kilowatt hours of energy capacity enabling a driving distance of around 130 kilometers, or about 80 miles, depending on driving style.
"One of the basic milestones on this timeline is the mass-produced electric car," Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn said in a statement.
He said only in high volumes and on all continents could one truly speak of the beginning of the electric age in automobiles and a perceptible reduction of their environmental impact.
"The concept car now being presented in Frankfurt very realistically shows how we envision such a Volkswagen with pure electric drive --- technically, visually and with regard to a practical size," Winterkorn said.
Targeting more federal money to support the auto industry, the House on Wednesday approved an expansion of government-led research into making cars and trucks more fuel-efficient.
The House plan would allow the Energy Department to spend up to $200 million more each year on research and development for advanced-technology vehicles and auto parts.
Lawmakers' aides said the additional $200 million would boost government-supported research in this area to around $550 million if Congress, as expected, funds the request later this year.
The measure passed on a 312-114 vote, attracting dozens of Republican votes, even though some GOP lawmakers questioned its cost.
Wednesday's House action represented the latest move by Congress and the Obama administration to aid the auto industry. The White House stepped in with billions of dollars to rescue General Motors and Chrysler and led the companies through bankruptcy, and Congress approved $25 billion last year to help the industry retool assembly plants to meet tougher fuel economy standards.
Congress also created a $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program of incentives that successfully spurred new car sales over the summer.
Fuel-efficient technology is in great demand because of higher gasoline prices and the expectation of tightening auto regulations. Administration officials on Tuesday released plans to raise the gas mileage standards to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 and link greenhouse-gas emissions and fuel-economy requirements.
Democratic Representative Gary Peters of Michigan, who sponsored the green vehicle technology bill, said "there is no doubt that in the years ahead more Americans will be driving hybrids, plug-in hybrids, battery electric vehicles, and cars and trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells."
"The only question is whether these new technologies will be researched, developed and manufactured here in the United States, creating American jobs, or whether this technology will be built overseas," Peters said.
An article in the current issue of The Economist asks: "After many false starts, battery-powered cars seem here to stay. Are they just an interesting niche product, or will they turn motoring upside down?"
As the smart British weekly is wont to do, it hints at an answer. For that, you will need to read the article -- or at least the last two paragraphs of it. In fairness to the publication, we won't provide them. But the article is just a click away.
That said, here's a brilliantly crafted teaser -- the first four graphs of the article -- which provides a feast for thought:
In 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: "disruptive technology." This is an innovation that fulfills the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.
The example Dr. Bower and Dr. Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.
REVA Electric Car Co. presented the NXG to the world today, and announced the pricing for the 2011 NRX, at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
---------- Pictured, the REVA NXG electric car. ----------
Styled by Dilip Chhabria, the REVA NXG is a two-door, two-seater car with a targa top with a top speed of 80 miles an hour and a range of 125 miles per charge, and it can be fully charged in as little as 90 minutes using an optional fast charger.
The Indian automaker says that the plug-in electric NXG has "an effective range" of 250 miles per day due to the relatively short period of time required to fully fuel the vehicle using one of its fast chargers. The NXG was billed as REVA's 2011 model.
REVA executives took the opportunity to announce that today marked the official launch of the NXR, an electric car that is scheduled to enter production early next year. It will be available with either a lithium-ion battery or a lead-acid battery.
The NXR is a three-door, four-seater hatchback family car. The version with a lithium-ion battery is called the NXR Intercity and it has a top speed of 65 miles per hour and a range of 100 miles per charge. Using the 90-minute fast charge -- normal charging is eight hours -- the NXR Intercity offers an effective range of 192 miles a day.
Prices of the NXR Intercity will vary across Europe depending on taxes and subsidies, and there is the option of purchasing the car and batteries separately, or at an all-inclusive price.
That said, REVA announced the average price for the NXR Intercity in Europe will be around 14,995 euros (or $21,000), plus a monthly mobility fee for the batteries and other services.
French automaker Peugeot today introduced the BB1 Concept, telling a crowd at the Frankfurt Motor Show that the compact zero-emissions electric car was inspired by motorcycle technology.
Peugeot CEO Jean-Marc-Gales said that the BB1 Concept exists "between the two- and four-wheel worlds," adding that its frame is based on a tubular chassis designed by Peugeot Motorcycles.
But instead of one electric motor, the BB1 Concept is equipped with four -- two inside each of the car's rear wheels. These would be Active Wheels supplied by French tire-making giant Michelin.
The electric motors get their power from two lithium-ion battery packs, which are placed under the rear seats.
Gales said Peugeot will decide within the next six months whether or not it makes commercial sense for the company to bring the BB1 to market, adding that he hopes it does.
The car weighs 1,320 pounds, has a range of 72 miles between charges and a top speed of 54 miles an hour.
Ford of Europe has chosen the Frankfurt Motor Show as the venue to introduce the first in a fleet of battery-electric-vehicle prototypes based on the European Ford Focus and specially developed to participate in a study of super-clean cars sponsored by the British government.
Ford of Europe says the study will help the automaker decide whether to use the technology in their European passenger-car lineup.
A consortium of Ford, utility and university employees will use the fleet of 15 prototype zero-emissions Focus BEVs and a charging infrastructure in and around the London borough of Hillingdon starting early next year.
The prototype features a new all-electric powertrain provided the Canadian parts supplier Magna International. Ford says the technology is based on technology being developed for Ford's new-generation C-sized global vehicle architecture and which will be launched in North America in 2011.
Under the skin of the prototype is a state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery pack with the capacity of 23 kilowatt hours, and a 100-kilowatt (134-horsepower) permanent-magnet electric traction motor.
Ford officials say the BEVs will have a range of up to 75 miles and a top speed of 85 mph. Charging the batteries will take between 6-8 hours using 230-volt outlets.
The prototype incorporates key components from Ford's proven North American hybrid technology, including the electric climate control system. The high-voltage air-conditioning compressor is a key feature of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid, recently introduced in the North American market.
Opel debuted the Ampera at the Frankfurt Motor Show this week, but one question lingered when the crowd shuffled off to another unveiling: Would the gasoline-electric hybrid -- the Chevy Volt's European twin -- actually launch?
---------- Pictured, Ampera meets the press in Frankfurt. ----------
Or would it be shelved as a result of a controlling share of Opel being sold to Canadian autoparts supplier Magna International and the Russian financial institution Sberbank?
The answer, we learned today, is that the Ampera program is very much a go.
In an email exchange with Dan Pund, who writes for Edmunds.com's Inside Line, Dave Darovitz said the Ampera is still slated to launch in Europe. As communications manager for the Volt and Chevy fuel-cell Equinox, Darovitz would know.
General Motors last week agreed to sell 55 percent of Opel to Magna and Sberbank in a 50-50 split. GM will keep 35 percent, the biggest single stake in Opel, and Opel workers will hold 10 percent.
The deal still hinges on conditions that could take weeks or months to work out, such as final agreement for government financing and union support for what could be painful cuts.
Additionally, Belgium has asked the European Union to investigate the deal to make sure Germany was not violating antitrust rules.
Kleiner Perkins investor, and former president of Oracle, Ray Lane, said that electric vehicle maker startup Fisker is gearing up to make a major announcement about a $39,000 plug-in hybrid vehicle later this week or next week.
That tidbit from earth2tech.com, which reported today that the venture capitalist, whose firm funded Fisker, let the news slip at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in Sausalito, California, earlier in the day.
Fisker has already developed its inaugural plug-in car the Karma (pictured), which will be sold for $87,900, but as Lane put it on the panel "who would not want to buy a Fisker Karma if you could afford it."
Does that mean that Fisker has received a Department of Energy loan?
In March, Henrik Fisker, founder and CEO of the Irvine, California-based company, said that Fisker plans to refurbish a factory in the U.S. and develop a lower-cost plug-in hybrid car than its $87,900 Fisker Karma if DOE loans come through.
Back then Fisker did not specify how much money the company requested, but said, "If we get the DOE loan we will start the project this year... It could be in the market in as little as 26 months from when we start."
Audi, the German automaker that has repeatedly voiced concerns about battery-electric power while simultaneously touting the benefits of diesel, delighted a crowd at the Frankfurt Motor Show today with the dramatic world debut of its plug-in e-Tron electric-car concept.
The apparent design offspring of an R8 and TT, the e-Tron sports four electric motors, one at each wheel. Combined, they generate 230 kilowatts (or 313 horsepower) and 4,500 Nm (or 3,319.03 pound-feet) of torque -- enough to shoot the lipstick-red two-seater from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.8 seconds.
The zero-emissions vehicle's lithium-ion battery provides enough juice, Audi claims, for the electric ladybug to cover 149 miles between charges. All in 4-wheel drive, of course.
While Audi made it clear that the e-Tron is a concept car, the automaker also said some prototypes will likely be on the road next year and "a small build" of series production models could be jazzing up blacktop in 2012.
Tesla Motors Inc., maker of a plug-in electric sports car that can accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds, received an $82.5 million equity investment from a group led by Fjord Capital Management.
"It was an opportunistic investment," Elon Musk, chief executive officer of San Carlos, California-based Tesla, said today at the Frankfurt Motor Show. "We were not looking for money."
Daimler AG, which invested $50 million in Tesla this year along with Aabar Investments PJSC, the Abu Dhabi fund that's the German carmaker's biggest shareholder, contributed to the offering to keep its stake at just under 10 percent, Musk said.
The money may be used to fund Tesla's establishment of retail stores globally. The company, which introduced its all- electric roadster in February 2008, was profitable in the second quarter, Musk said.
No. 700 Goes to Student
Tesla Motors delivered its 700th Roadster today at the Frankfurt Motor Show, where the chief executive of the EV maker was on hand to present the vehicle.
CEO Elon Musk handed the keys of an electric-blue Roadster Sport like the one shown above to Lennart Hennig, a German law student in Bonn. Tesla has previously delivered cars to customers in England, Switzerland, France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Spain, Monaco and Sweden .
"I am a socially responsible consumer who considers the environmental impact of my purchases," said Hennig, 24. "I plan to drive this car every day so that people can see for themselves that the future of mobility is electric."
The 700th delivery of the zero-emissions Roadster came less than a week after Tesla opened a store in Munich -- its first regional sales and service center in continental Europe. Tesla opened its flagship London store in June and will open a store in Monaco later this year.
The same day Tesla Motors delivered its 700th all-electric Roadster -- to a German law student on the opening day of the Frankfurt Motor Show, no less -- Porsche's new president and CEO Michael Macht (right) announced that his company was working hard on an electric-powered sports car.
Sadly, he had no automobile to display.
Standing in front of reporters Tuesday, Macht said "that one day Porsche will have an electric sports car in its line-up."
Why didn't it?
Available battery technology is not "sufficient to meet Porsche's strict requirements," he said.
Tell that to the German law student.
Macht pointed out that Porsche has a long legacy with hybrid technology as it was exactly 109 years ago that Professor Ferdinand Porsche built the first fully functioning car with hybrid technology.
It was a nice little speech. One that would have gone well with an all-electric 911, and even better with a gasoline-electric hybrid 911. Only Porsche hasn't invented either.
Renault SA today introduced a lineup of electric cars at the Frankfurt Motor Show and committed to making at least 100,000 of them by 2016.
---------- Right, the Fluence Z.E. Concept. ----------
Declaring a break with the long dominance of the gasoline engine, Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn presented four electric cars that he said would go on sale in 2011 or 2012.
They "will bring environmental soundness at a price everyone can afford," he told an audience at the auto show.
The move is a gamble by Ghosn to carve out a big future market for the two companies he leads, Renault and Japan's Nissan Motor Co., which own large parts of each other and share technology. Most other automakers are proceeding more cautiously with electric vehicles.
Underlining Ghosn's remarks were the world debut of four electric vehicles at the Renault display area: the Fluence Z.E. Concept, the Kangoo Z.E. Concept, the Zoe Z.E. Concept and the Twizy Z.E. Concept.
Renault spokesmen said the four electric concept cars provide a preview of Renault's range of vehicles due to be released from 2011. To underscore that statement, they announced that the French automaker and EV-charging-solutions proponent Better Place signed an agreement today whereby Better Place will start importing and distributing Renault's first passenger electric vehicle -- the Fluence ZE, a five-seat sedan -- in the first half of 2011 in Israel and will offer recharging services to customers buying this car from the Renault network in Denmark.
Both companies committed to a volume of at least 100,000 vehicles for both countries by 2016.
EV Services Company Working With Intel, Microsoft for On-Board System
Sample screen shows how Better Place AutOS software would locate and display battery exchange station.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Turns out Better Place is not just about EV charging stations and battery swapping.
The nascent electric-vehicle charging services provider has been working with Microsoft and Intel since its inception in 2007 to develop software that would link charging and battery swap stations and individual vehicles.
The system, which Better Place engineers call an "information train," is to be introduced today at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show, just a few hours after sometimes partner Renault unveils the electric car - with swappable battery pack - that will be sold in Israel and Denmark in 2011 as part of the two companies' previously announced EV-and-battery package program.
Better Place, the California-based brainchild of high-tech entrepreneur Shai Agassi, has shown prototypes of its battery charger for fixed-battery plug-in hybrids and electric cars, and a battery exchange station for EVs, such as the upcoming Renault, that have replaceable battery packs.
The new software package, called the Better Place AutOS, is the third leg of the pyramid.
Mitsubishi Motors Corp. has received pre-orders for all of the 1,400 electric i-MiEV plug-in electric vehicles scheduled to be made this model year, according to someone close to the matter.
The urban electric, zero-emissions i-MiEV launched in Japan in July of this year with the delivery of about 50 i-MiEV four-seaters, running on newly developed lithium-ion batteries, to government, utility offices and companies around Tokyo.
They represent the first of 1,400 of the eye-catching EVs that Mitsubishi expects the sell through the end of this year, when it will ramp up for sales to the general public, first in Japan and then globally. Mitsubishi has said it expects to sell 5,000 i-MiEVs in Japan and export 1,000 in 2010.
Mitsubishi began taking pre-orders for the i-MiEV through its dealer network on July 31 and within one month had received 900 pre-orders, the source said.
The company has said it wants to start selling the i-MiEV in the U.S. sometime in 2011. The automaker sees an opportunity to gain major traction in the zero-emissions-vehicle, or ZEV, arena at a time when many other car companies are focusing on hybrids or fuel-cell vehicles.
Toyota Motor Corp. is sticking with nickel as the preferred battery material for most of its hybrid vehicles after three years of secretly testing Prius hatchbacks with lithium-ion packs, Bloomberg reported today.
Toyota last month ended road tests of 126 Priuses in the U.S., Japan and Europe that began in 2006, Jana Hartline, a company spokeswoman said in an interview with the news service. Details of the program, in which the cars' nickel metal hydride batteries were replaced with more expensive lithium models, weren't released.
Automakers are introducing models all or partly powered by lithium-ion batteries holding twice the energy of nickel packs. While Toyota's lithium version performed well and gave "small" fuel-economy gains because of lighter weight, nickel is favored for conventional, mass-market hybrids for its cost, said Kazuo Tojima, the carmaker's senior staff engineer for batteries.
Lithium's "durability, stability and safety are assured," the company's tests showed, Tojima told Bloomberg.
The tests appear to be among the most thorough done by companies planning to introduce the batteries, said Menahem Anderman, president of consulting firm Advanced Automotive Batteries in Oregon House, California.
"We now know that a lithium-ion battery can work; that's not really the question," he said. "Cost is critical, and we still don't know enough about long-term durability."
The maker of the all-electric three-wheeled vehicle called the 2e (right), which is slated to enter production in coming weeks, wants Washington will view the vehicle as an automobile for the purposes of federal funding.
However, Aptera also wants the federal government to continue to classify the 2e as a motorcycle for the purposes of crash testing. That's because the government does not require motorcycles to pass vigorous crash tests as it does vehicles classified as automobiles.
The 3-year-old closely held company located in Vista, California, wants to borrow $75 million from a Department of Energy program created by Congress in 2007 to speed development of fuel-efficient cars.
But the DOE ruled last year that the plug-in electric 2e didn't qualify under the $25 billion loan program. A three-wheeled vehicle doesn't meet the definition of an automobile under federal law as being "any 4-wheeled vehicle," according to a letter to Aptera last December from Lachlan Seward, the loan program's director.
"We were dismayed," Paul Wilbur, Aptera's chief executive, told The Wall Street Journal in an article published today. Wilbur said the absence of a fourth wheel was critical to maximizing the vehicle's aerodynamics.
Aptera's backers include some big-money donors to the Democratic Party, and its quest for help has received a boost from a group of mostly California lawmakers who want to help a home-state enterprise. Allies of Detroit's big automakers are lined up against them.
On the eve of the Frankfurt Auto Show, Mercedes-Benz supplies this peek under the skin of the S 500 plug-in hybrid concept it will unveil there.
The see-though shows the location of the rear-mounted lithium-ion battery pack, the charging port on the right rear flank, the regenerative braking system (and could that be a pair of in-hub wheel motors in the rear?) and the transmission and electric motor with what looks to be the power electronics controller sitting atop. Missing is what we understand will be a V6 engine up front. Also missing: Guidance from Mercedes about the hardware the concept will be packing.
Hyundai Motors' ix-Metro Hybrid city car is one of several dozen 'green' cars and concepts debuting at Frankfurt show.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
This week's Frankfurt Auto Show promises to be the greenest major auto show to date - a showcase for fuel efficiency improvements and alternative powertrains that are coming to the forefront as the mainstream auto industry finally begins coming to grips with the need to begin weaning itself - and us - from petroleum.
Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. and Enova Systems announced today via a video posted on YouTube that they have jointly executed a letter of intent to enter into an all-electric commercial chassis development program.
The development program will involve the integration of Enova's 120-kilowatt and 90-kilowatt all-electric drive system technologies into Freightliner's chassis platforms, including the MT-45 walk-in van chassis shown in the image at right.
Freightliner's highest volume MT-45 chassis offers a gross vehicle weight rating between 14,140 and 19,000 pounds and maximum payloads of 10,000 pounds. The MT-45 chassis is used by a range of customers including UPS and Federal Express.
The strategic agreement consists of four phases that include the development of at least four vehicles and placement into national fleets. Design, engineering, integration and testing activities will be conducted at the Freightliner Custom Chassis plant in Gaffney, South Carolina, and the Enova facility in Torrance, California.
The companies have already begun showcasing their capabilities to potential customers and say they expect positive results from these initial demonstrations. Many national fleet operators currently served by the two companies have stated their desire to deploy all-electric commercial vehicles in 2010, a spokesman for Enova said.
Renault today distributed this teaser drawings and an accompanying press release to whet our appetites in anticipation of the Renault Zero Emission line-up of four electric vehicle concepts the French automaker has announced it will unveil during the Frankfurt Motor Show next week.
Judging from the images, it would appear that Renault will debut the following, from left to right:
A one-seat hyper-urban runabout, a three-door vehicle with capacity for four normally sized people, and then either another three-door car or two four-doors. Renault went to a good bit of trouble to cloak the occupant compartments of the last two vehicles.
In any event, here's the short statement the automaker put out today, which will have to do for a few more days:
RENAULT - THE SPARK OF IMAGINATION AT FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW 2009
* Renault set to shock in Frankfurt with four electric vehicle concepts previewing new Renault Zero Emission product range.
* Renault Press conference 11:45-12:00 (CET) on Tuesday 15th September, Hall 3.1.
Following a raft of unveilings at European motor shows in recent years, Renault's range expansion shows no signs of abating with news today that it will preview the launch of the new Renault Zero Emission product range by taking the covers off of four electric concepts at next week's Frankfurt Motor Show.
The Renault Press conference, hosted by CEO, Carlos Ghosn, will be aired live on its global media site, www.media.renault.com at 10:45 (GMT), with edited video highlights available to view later the same day. Full information on each of the new concepts will be available on www.press.renault.co.uk immediately after the Press conference. Unregistered users for both sites are invited to sign-up now in advance.
When Jon Favreau, director of the Marvel superhero film Iron Man, needed a corporate executive for actor Robert Downey Jr. to use as a role model for the flick's hero Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk.
Like the fictional Stark, an engineering genius who runs a weaponry company and designs many of its armaments, the 38-year-old Musk is the CEO and top technologist for electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors and rocketmaker SpaceX.
The two tech execs even tool around in flashy cars: Stark in a superpowered Audi, Musk in a $109,000 zero-emissions battery-electric sports car that was the first vehicle off the assembly line at Tesla Motors, one of his two companies.
Musk appropriately got a smallish role as a scientist in Iron Man. In fact, throw in Musk's one-third interest in SolarCity, a company started by two cousins that has become a leader in solar panels for homes and business, and you have a guy who is probably as close to an industrialist as the Internet has ever spawned.
The son of an electrical engineer, the South African-born Musk holds both economics and physics degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he was 31, Musk had started and sold off two tech companies -- the second being PayPal, which was snapped up by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
That made Musk worth about $350 million, but over lunch recently he was very cagey about what he's worth now. "I have a very thin net worth outside my companies, maybe 5 percent of that."
That's because Musk has decided to plow much of his fortune into the areas he figures will most transform mankind over the next few years -- and perhaps not so incidentally make him another fortune. The areas are the Internet, space travel, and improving the environment, he says, "and I've already done the Internet."
If you find any of this interesting, go to Business Week. It's where all the above and much more can be found about the always compelling and often controversial Elon Musk.
If it already seems to you that China is positioning itself to exercise substantial control over the green-car market through its natural resources -- and you don't like it -- you're not likely going to like this story one bit.
That's because Bloomberg news service is reporting, and we are relaying, that Alcoa Inc., the largest U.S. producer of aluminum, is speaking with unidentified automakers to develop and supply metal for lightweight, energy-efficient vehicles in China as passenger-car sales in that country surge.
"The automobile sector is a strong consumer of aluminum and I believe it will become more so if you combine lightweight and energy efficiency" needs in the future, Chief Executive Officer Klaus Kleinfeld said today. "There are some companies we're talking to, and that's an area we're seeking to build activities," he said, without giving details.
Passenger-car sales in China soared a record 90 percent last month as tax cuts and subsidies spurred demand, bringing the nation closer to overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest automobile market. Rising vehicle sales in China, as well as building demand, will drive aluminum consumption, Kleinfeld said.
"China is ahead of the curve, and I'm positive of things that are going on," Kleinfeld said while attending the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China.
The Asian nation consumes about seven kilograms of aluminum per capita, compared with 35 kilograms in the U.S., he said, according to Bloomberg. Kleinfeld on Sept. 3 raised Alcoa's forecast for global aluminum consumption because of demand from China.
China's demand will rise 4 percent this year, compared with a previous prediction of no growth, Kleinfeld had said. That changes the company's outlook for global demand to a decline of 5.5 percent from a previous forecast of minus 7 percent.
We love the idea of using existing infrastructure to serve as a basis for electric-vehicle charging stations.
---------- Right, a phone booth n Madrid. ----------
You may recall that Coulomb Technologies last year began experimenting with using existing light poles in San Jose, California, as power sources and props for some of its charging stations.
Now we're delighted to report that Spain is looking at dozens of telephone booths in Madrid, long left dormant by the rise of cell phones, as possibly having a second life as recharging stations for electric vehicles.
That proposal can be found in the Spanish government's plan to establish 546 charging points in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville to serve some 2,000 EVs Spanish officials hope to see cruising the cities' streets within two years.
The telephone booths are often located close to curbs and already have their own electricity supply, making them relatively easy to adapt. According to Madrid's city council, some 30 phone booths could be converted to chargers with little difficulty.
The government has committed $2.2 million to subsidize electric-car charging points over the next two years. Barcelona plans to install 191 points, many of which will be attached to "intelligent lampposts" in the street following the lead of Coulomb Technologies.
Coulomb Technologies, which is headquartered in Campbell, California, near the throbbing heart of Silicon Valley, just this week installed its first ChargePoint networked charging station for plug-in EVs in Germany.
In Madrid, electric-car owners will not only be able to charge for free (at least initially), but they will be able to park for free and have their auto taxes cut by 75 percent. Those would be carrots. The mayor of Madrid recently said thought has been given to limiting access to city centers, including Madrid's, to EVs. That would be a stick if you drive an ICE vehicle.
Mercedes-Benz is expected to debut a Vision S 500 plug-in hybrid concept at next week's Frankfurt Motor Show, looking much like the one pictured here.
Although company spokesmen won't discuss it publicly yet, we've been told the concept will feature a V6 gasoline engine connected to a lithium-ion battery that has a storage capacity of more than 10 kilowatt hours.
That's enough to enable the car to go about 19 miles on electricity only before an onboard gas-powered engine-generator kicks in to feed juice to the lithium battery.
Acceleration is said to be 5 and half seconds from a standstill to 60 miles an hour. Mileage is said to be 73.5 mph, but it wasn't at all clear how that number was reached.
We expect to learn a lot more about this concept next week.
Lithium-ion cells provide the same power at half the weight of the current standard, nickel-metal hydride, so it's no surprise that automakers, battery manufacturers and automobile parts suppliers the world over are racing to develop Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
---------- The first production-intent Chevrolet Volt is fitted with a lithium-ion battery pack. ----------
But as The Wall Street Journalreports today (subscription required), with automakers already sensitive about costs, adoption of the advanced batteries might not be so quick.
Lithium-ion batteries cost three to four times as much as the existing nickel-metal-hydride variety. Moreover, the price of the older technology is dropping fast. In Honda's latest Insight model, for example, the nickel-metal-hydride battery is 40 percent cheaper than the one in the previous model, the Journal noted.
Increased supply should resolve that issue, but it brings a longer-term risk: That the rush to production will overwhelm demand -- driving prices so low that the batteries aren't a money-maker after all.
Unlike flat panels and semiconductors, lithium-ion batteries aren't standardized, which means they won't be commoditized right away. This'll break down soon enough, as the needs of one particularly large buyer, like Toyota Motor, eventually set a standard.
Stock traders aren't thinking that far ahead, the Journal reported. Japan's GS Yuasa, which has joint ventures to supply both Honda and Mitsubishi Motors, has seen its shares rise 62% so far this year. The stock trades at 87 times expected earnings.
Even shares of large companies, like South Korea's SK Energy and Samsung SDI, have surged recently amid hopes for their budding lithium-ion operations. Samsung SDI -- a flat panel maker at heart -- now trades at more than double its historic valuation.
There's no doubt that lithium-ion is a promising advance in battery technology. But at these prices, the Journal reports, investors are surely setting themselves up for a jolt.
Ford Motor Co. will plug a specially made battery-electric vehicle as part of a running gag on comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno's new television program, the automaker announced Wednesday.
The plug-in Ford Focus will be driven by celebrity guests competing in a green-car challenge on NBC's new "The Jay Leno Show," which is set to debut on Monday. A different version of the Focus goes on sale to the public in 2011.
In a statement issued today, Ford said the battery electric vehicle foreshadows elements of the electric Focus that Ford will begin selling in North America in two years.
Basically, it's a high-profile PR move -- and a very smart one. As Lisa Drake, chief engineer of Ford's Hybrid and Battery Electric Vehicle Programs, put it:
"Having our Focus battery electric vehicle on the show is a great way to demonstrate how fun to drive these cars really can be. Beyond the immediate excitement of driving, it demonstrates that Ford is investing in this technology and that we're committed to electric vehicles."
Ford plans to put at least four electrified vehicles on the road in North America by 2012 -- including the Focus BEV in 2011 -- as well as new hybrids and a plug-in hybrid.
Ford's hybrid and BEV program team worked together with Ford Racing to develop the special Focus for Leno's show. It took three weeks to build the car and another couple of weeks to properly tune the suspension so it could be driven fast on a racetrack.
Developed at Ford's Michigan Proving Grounds in Romeo, Michigan, the Focus BEV built for the show has a split battery pack, with one battery in the cargo area and one underneath the car in the space normally occupied by a fuel tank. Because the car was built to race, it is equipped with a roll bar and five-point harness for the driver.
Perhaps motivated by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu's proposal last May to slash more than $100 million in federal funding for hydrogen-vehicle research, nine major automakers today issued a joint statement announcing that they had signed a letter of understanding to develop and launch fuel-cell electric vehicles.
---------- A trio of Ford FCEVs get pumped up. ----------
FCEVs use an on-board fuel cell stack to convert hydrogen and oxygen to electricity that powers an electric drive system.
Today's announcement came one day after Chu said in an interview that he will no longer seek to eliminate federal funding for the R&D of hydrogen cars, but instead will work with lawmakers to ensure the money is "invested wisely."
The automakers' announcement states that they "strongly anticipate that from 2015 onwards a quite significant number of electric vehicles with fuel cell could be commercialized. This number is aimed at a few hundred thousand units over life cycle on a worldwide basis."
It continued: "As every vehicle manufacturer will implement its own specific production and commercial strategies as well as timelines, commercialization of electric vehicles with fuel cells may occur earlier than in the above-mentioned expected year."
Beyond those statements, the announcement -- signed by Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Renault, Nissan and Toyota -- offered little more information regarding the automakers' plans.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated new product categories of recent years, a research firm reported today, with 48 percent of the American consumers surveyed stating that they would be "extremely" or "very" interested in purchasing a PHEV with a 40-mile range on a single charge.
"Plug-in hybrids match the driving requirements of most consumers we surveyed," said Clint Wheelock, managing director of Pike Research, which conducted the Web-based survey of 1,041 U.S. consumers. "82 percent of respondents drive 40 miles or less per day, with an average daily driving distance of 27 miles."
The upcoming Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle and other EREVs under development promise the ability to travel 40 miles on electricity only. Thereafter, a small onboard internal combustion engine-generator, likely fueled by gasoline, would come on and supply electricity to the vehicle's battery, electric motor or both.
Other findings of the survey:
85 percent of consumers stated that improved fuel efficiency would be an important factor when choosing their next vehicle.
65 percent of survey respondents interested in PHEVs expressed a willingness to pay a premium price, over and above the price of a standard gasoline vehicle, with an average premium of 12 percent.
Consumers indicated that the availability of workplace, private, and public vehicle charging stations in their local area would be very important.
79 percent of consumers would be interested in investing in a fast-charging outlet for their home; however, willingness to pay is out of line with industry expectations.
Coulomb Technologies today announced the first German installation of one of the company's ChargePoint networked charging stations for plug-in electric vehicles.
The public utility in Bochum has activated five charging stations installed by distribution partner 365 Energy Group. The ChargePoint charging stations are intended to ensure that in the future battery-reliant EVs can easily be charged in the Ruhr area metropolis.
Germany is not the first European country to install Coulomb Technology charging stations. The Netherlands has that distinction, as we reported in May.
Coulomb, which is headquartered in Campbell, California, said in a statement that Bochum selected Coulomb's ChargePoint charging stations for their advanced networking technology after testing the stations of three other suppliers.
One charging station was installed in the customer parking lot at the headquarters of the public utility. Another charging station was located at the housing association VBW in the Matthias-Claudius-Strabe. The locations of the other three ChargePoint stations have not been determined.
Coulomb Technologies' charging stations are used in homes, municipalities, office buildings and parking garages to allow consumers to charge their EVs wherever they live, work and shop.
Consumers subscribe to the ChargePoint Network and receive a ChargePoint Smart Card that allows them to charge their car at any charging station worldwide. More information can be obtained at the Coulomb Technology's Website.
Tesla Motors, which needs European sales of its $109,000 (base) electric Roadster to keep its cash flow plan on schedule, says it will open its first European store on the continent Thursday in Munich.
The German office follows opening in June of Tesla's London office and precedes an office opening in Monaco later in the year, the company said.
The European offices are part of Tesla's long-term growth plan.
The Northern California car maker said it will mark the opening of the German office by unveiling the production version of its Tesla Roadster Sport at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show next week.
The Sport is a racier version of the Roadster, with a more powerful electric motor and adjustable suspension.
Tesla seems to be pushing the Roadster in Europe as an eco- and performance alternative to sports and performance cars such as as the Porsche 911 and Audi R8, boasting in press releases that it has quicker initial acceleration than either while delivering twice the energy efficiency of a Toyota Prius.
The Roadster starts at $109,000, the Sport model at $128,500 and both are eligible for a number of incentives and tax credits in the U.S. and various Eurpean nations.
Indian automaker REVA announced today that it will debut two plug-in electric vehicles next week at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
The REVA NXR is a four-seat, three-door hatchback family car suitable for urban driving that can be ordered at the show, with production scheduled to commence at the beginning of 2010.
The showcar, REVA's model for 2011, is the REVA NXG (pictured); a sporty two-seater with a targa roof that was designed by Dilip Chhabria of the internationally renowned automotive design company DC Design.
Another world-first for REVA will be the launch of REVive. The technology, which REVA claims has no equal, is intended to address the range-anxiety issue that troubles many an EV owner and prospective EV owner. That would be being stranded after your EV runs out of juice.
As REVA put it in a statement, the technology "acts like an invisible reserve fuel tank. The customer just has to telephone or SMS REVA for an instant remote recharge should they run out of charge."
We're not exactly sure what that means, and a REVA representative was not immediately available to explain; we expect answers next week at the very latest. But both the REVA NXR and the REVA NXG will feature "the REVive telematics technology."
The company said that further details and and pricing announcements will be made at the Frankfurt show. It also said its new Website, Revaglobal.com, will go live when the vehicles are unveiled in Frankfurt.
REVA is the brand of the Reva Electric Car Co., a Bangalore-based company formed as a joint venture between Maini Group of India and AEV LLC of California. It is backed by the U.S. investors Global Environment Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
REVA claims its vehicles are being sold or test-marketed in 24 countries worldwide. It says it is building a new ultra-low-carbon-vehicle assembly plant in Bangalore, with a capacity of 30,000 units per year.
The Fisker Karma will get 67.2 miles per gallon and emit just 83 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer using a respected methodology for measuring the emissions of plug-in extended-range electric vehicles, the automaker announced today.
Calculations developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers estimate the carbon-dioxide output of the four-door hybrid will be less than that of today's cleanest production cars and 75 percent less than that of competing vehicles, on average.
The society is an internationally recognized organization of experts that help drive government automotive policy.
That said, the fuel economy label the U.S Environmental Protection Agency ultimately slaps on the Karma might bear a different estimate than 67.2 MPG, because the EPA is still determining how it will label plug-in hybrids.
Fisker Automotive said the sale of 15,000 Karmas could save some 248 million gallons of gasoline and 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year compared to a convention car of comparable size and horsepower.
And, as Fisker wants everyone to know, the Karma can save all that gas and air pollution while achieving supercar-like torque and six-second 0-60 mile-per-hour acceleration.
Nissan Motor Co. said it will weigh plans to make all-electric cars in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, as the Japanese automaker steps up its electric-vehicle activity in China's fast-growing car market.
