Hmmm. Automotive News [sub] gives us insight into GM Car Czar Bob Lutz's confidence in his not-yet stillborn baby, the Chevy Volt. An odd choice of words to be sure. But hey — this is Maximum Bob we're talking about. Speaking in Detroit, Lutz told his assembled fans reporters that GM is confident in the 2010 Volt launch date and that GM's close to picking a battery supplier. Lutz claimed that the Volt-drivetrain-equipped Malibu mules have been hitting the target EV-mode 40 miles and beyond. "They've routinely had it to the high 30s, low 40s and they go up hills with it and everything," said Lutz. Of course he also referred to global warming as a "crock of shit" and called yours truly a pinhead. (Full disclosure — we were picking out XL racing helmets and he commented that we both have big heads. "7 5/8" I told him and he yelled, "Ha! 7 3/4 — Pinhead!") As for the Volt, as far as we can tell, those batteries don't exist yet. But what do we know?

Ford is accustomed to leaving products to die on the vine: Crown Victoria, Lincoln LS, Ranger, etc. Apparently, no more. Speaking to Automotive News [sub] about the Flex, Ford's design director Horbury found it "odd" that the design team is already working on a reworked design while the vehicle is still brand new. "To be working on the next one immediately is quite unnerving. It is strange, really." According to Horbury, the Flex's doors, greenhouse and glass are staying put; everything else is up to the designers. As those three elements are especially trick, we think this is the right kinda bold movement. And if you consider the money-making Mustang's countless iterations as mid-cycle refreshes, this type of thinking is doubly true. It sounds as if we can expect big changes, especially as Ford's internal research has shown that small changes aren't enough to bolster sales. Proof, pudding, time, tell. 

I'm paying $4.99 a gallon for premium. I'm not looking for sympathy (though feel free). After all, we're living in a new golden age of the automobile. Chatting with an autojourno friend I found myself saying, "435 horsepower? That's it?" Which is ridiculous. But now that gas is now horridly expensive, things are apt to slow down. And by apt I mean they will. Lots. We're already starting to see the cracks. Audi's next S4 will have six cylinders instead of eight. Which means that the RS4 might (gulp) only have a V6. Some of you no doubt remember how much I enjoyed the RS4. Which got me thinking: is Audi's four-door supercar the best vehicle I've ever driven? I get to drive an awful lot of fancy metal. The RS4 is better (if not much better) than most. But the best? No. You're going to have to wait a couple of days for my actual answer (review pending). Until then, how about you?

One of my stated goals in life is to never spend a minute in a courtroom. However, if I had a child at El Camino High School in Oceanside, CA, I would be suing the teacher's lounge out of the district and the donut holes out of the CHP. On a Monday morning last month, 20 classrooms received visits from uniformed California Highway Patrol officers who informed them that 26 of their classmates had been killed in drunk driving accidents over the weekend. As was to be expected, many of the students became hysterical. But here's the catch — it was a joke. Ha ha, fooled you! The plan was to keep the hoax up all day and announce the deception at a lunchtime rally. The best laid plans of mice and men… Turns out the students were so traumatized by the hoodwink, many teachers began telling them the truth. Though, not all. Especially students who weren't in the one of the twenty classrooms "participating" in the "lesson" — these students heard about their fellow classmates' deaths in the hallway between classes and had all day to ruminate on them. One 15-year-old, who I am sure speaks for both the school district and the cops, puts it this way, "You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust. But then I felt selfish for feeling that way, because, I mean, if it saves one life, it's worth it." Oh yeah, totally worth it.

Today is Friday so I'm keeping this one short. Reading through the Ask the B&B from earlier, I noticed that the person asking was leaning towards a Subaru Tribeca because it's safe. Yes, but it's also hideous!! For certain, one of the very ugliest cars made during an ugly time. I might opt for a lacerated spleen rather than be seen in one of those. I really might. And it's an SUV, too. As the reader was asking about a vehicle for her two kids, she's probably thinking that SUVs are safer. They aren't, as you're more likely to lose control and fall off a mountain in an SUV than a car. Sure, if you run head-on into a Brink's truck the larger bulk of the SUV will insulate you more than a car. But in a car you can proactively avoid the accident, rather than reactively absorbing the impact energy. And finally, just to kick it up a notch, have safety ratings ever influenced your purchases? Put another way, you like one car better than the other but the former gets four safety stars to the latter's five — what do you do?

First and foremost, in terms of Nissan, four times more EV range equals 250 miles. This according to Mitsuhiko Yamashita, Nissan's executive VP of R&D. That's slightly more distance than the all-new Toyota Land Rover can cover with a single tank of gas. Nissan's first-generation lithium ion packs are good for just 75 miles. The second-gen batteries will arrive in that most magical of years (2010) to propel an unspecified vehicle a bit over 100 miles. Third-gen lithiums will show-up right when the Mayan calendar ends (2012), and propel a car 185 miles on a charge. As AutoblogGreen's Dom Yoney points out, it's best not to compare these (hypothetical) numbers to the Tesla Roadster's (hypothetical) numbers. Apparently there's a metric called "watt hours per kilogram" involved, but my brain is too small and lizard-like to comprehend. Nissan lithium ion battery production will begin in earnest next year at 13k units before ramping-up to a 65k units. Eventually. 

Twenty-four hours after Ford's PR man Mark Fields declared battery research a "national priority," the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced it's giving $30m in research money to General Motors, Ford and General Electric. (Don't despair Mopar fans, as GE is already working with Chrysler on a plug-in hybrid.) Each company will work on a different aspect of battery technology. GM will focus on lithium ion packs and their integration with vehicles and homes. Ford will attempt to tackle the manufacturing process. GE will concern themselves with "dual-battery" technology, whatever that may mean. While the DOE's grant isn't exactly the $500m Fields declared necessary to secure our technological borders, it's still a hefty chunk of change. Expect the initiative to bear PHEV fruit in 2016, some six years after the plug-in electric gas hybrid Chevrolet Volt's supposed debut.

Ignoring completely how they got to 2.8 children, once a family is a family of 5 (or more) third rows become almost a certainty. Look, I only have one sibling, and we would have beaten each other to death on road trips if not for the third row of my family's various full-size GM wagons. I bring this up because 1) gas is over $4.00 a gallon (just about $5 per here in LA) and is never going down and 2) the Ford Flex will be on the market real soon. Let's get the numbers straight. The FWD Flex is rated at 17/24 and the AWD version will deliver 16/22. Comparable to the competition and a words better than the essentially dead body-on-frame goliaths Americans have loved so dearly for the past decade. But, is it enough? Will large families just be cramming the brood into the back of Aveos and Yari? Or are the Flex and similar vehicles (CX9, Pilot, Acadia) still viable as family haulers?

TTAC burned a lot of metaphorical midnight oil trying to make heads or tails of plug-in EVs. Thankfully Ford's mouthpiece Mark Fields is here to set us straight about our energy independence, via the "It's important to note most battery supply is currently being developed in Asia," Fields told the Detroit News. "For those looking to plug-ins to answer our energy security concerns, we must ensure a domestic battery supply. Moving from imported oil to imported batteries clearly would not address this growing concern." I'm struggling to remember if that's a masked-man fallacy, a package deal fallacy of just plain old Ignoratio elenchi. Luckily (for Ford) politicians are completely immune to all forms of logic. If Fields keeps making arguments like this, Detroit might get the $500m of our tax dollars they so desperately crave for battery R&D. But, spades being spades, he's confusing the issue. At least.

The Scotts invented Free Masonery, Scotch and Golf. They then kicked back, cursed the English and watched their American cousins play with the world. Until now. Edinburgh-based Artemis is claiming that they've doubled an internal combustion powered car's mileage. Their new tech– officially launched in 2005– replaces the port and swash plates in a typical slushbox with hydraulics and a computer-controlled solenoid valve system. According to cleantech.com, a "third party" compared a brace of BMW 530is. One sported a five-speed manual, the other Artemis's hydraulic hybrid system. The HEDDAT equipped Bimmer achieved 41.1 mpg (Euro city cycle) and 39.6 mpg on the highway (Euro highway cycle). The system also reduced all-important CO2 emissions by 30 percent. Instead of storing regenerative energy in a battery, hydraulic hybrids store the power hydraulically. That makes "charging" faster. Discharging, too. Also, the harder you drive, the more energy gets stored for later. Exactly the opposite of an electric hybrid, where hard driving tends to create much more energy than can be fed into the battery. Artemis is also claiming their HEDDAT system is cheaper and more durable than an electric hybrid. Artemus has already inked a deal with Bosch to get the Digital Displacement system into on-highway vehicles.

Two new hybrids to be precise, in addition to a redesigned Prius. Automotive News [sub] reports that all three vehicles will debut at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show. One of the new mystery hybrids will be a Toyota and the other will be a Lexus. We'll go ahead and speculate that the Toyota will in fact be a production version of the FT-HS sports car hybrid we saw at last year's Detroit spectacle. As for the Lexus, we're stumped. Maybe an IS variant? The massively anticipated third-gen Prius will soldier on with the same old nickel-metal hydride batteries for now. But come the hyper-magical automotive year 2010, the Prius will switch to lithium ion batteries. Panasonic — they build ToMoCo's batteries — will start whipping-up the lithium ion electro-juice containers in 2009. Cars powered by the same tech in your cell phone should hit dealers you know when (2010). Not to be outdone, Honda has promised four all-new hybrids by 2015 (guess they didn't get the 2010 memo). Nissan's gone on record promising to begin making lithium ions next year. Discounting GM and Chrysler's two-mode hybrid behemoths and The General's belt-assisted has-beens, and the Ford Escape Hybrid, it's up to the Hail Mary Chevrolet Volt to meet the hybrid onslaught. What are the chances?

Please read before screaming. Earlier today our man Wilkinson posed a very good question. Can our (in many cases) ailing power grid cope with EVs? Now, I'm lucky. I live in Los Angeles where DWP supplies the juice. DWP's union (wisely) refused to go private when out-on-his-ass former Governor Gray Davis was using Enron to help privatize most of California's electrical production. Long story short, LA has power to spare and was one of the only counties unaffected by the rolling blackouts a few years back. So, I'm confident us Angelenos will be able to handle plug-ins, capacity-wise. But where the hell do we plug 'em in? I live in a classic LA hill home. It's four flights of stairs up me. Meaning street parking. Short of running 200 feet of extension cord down a hill and across a street, I can't charge an EV. Hundreds of my neighbors are in the same outlet-less boat. That's just in my 'hood. In other words, if I had an EV, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Would you?

Dell Computers wants to sell you a car. According to Automotive News [sub], we're talking expensive cars. Even though high gas prices and a crippled economy have put the brakes on the high end car market, Michael Dell re-thinks different. He sees "opportunity all up and down the spectrum." Dell CEO and former Sonic Automotive President Jeffrey Rachor might just be planning to spend $500m on premium and import car dealerships. Why? "When people are panicking and don't really know what to do, that's probably the period of greatest opportunity from an investor's standpoint to make changes and do good things." OK, but why cars? The elephant in the room: Dell's straight to the customer sales paradigm. Is the long-awaited era of B2C mass customization upon us? 

Admirably, y'all responded rationally to BMW's GINA Light Visionary Concept. Instead of just screaming "yucky!" like the rest of the car blogosphere, TTAC's B&B took a step back and said, "Hmmm…." Trust me, as someone who has to think about cars all day, it's nothing but fresh air to see readers take such a cerebral tack. And so the GINA is skinned in fabric. Hmmm… Going on nothing but my observation that in normal usage convertibles seem to have a seven-year life span, this may not be the best idea. But, Bangle's comment about "Function over dogma" got my little brain spinning. Why not fabric? Or plastic? Or anything else? Why always metal? Would you drive a non-metal car? Really?

As goes ToMoCo, so Ghosn Nissan. Once truck-happy, Nissan is shifting its production away from not-so-good-on-gas trucks and SUVs and is instead building more cars. Nearly alone in the industry, Nissan's sales rose 8.4 percent in May. However, sales of the full-size Titan and Armada were off a 50 percent each. Nissan stayed afloat on the back on the Altima; the CamCord competitor saw its sales climb to 34,428 units (up 43 percent). By shifting around production at its North American plants, Nissan feels it can up production of the hot selling Altima, while decreasing production of the not big boys– without laying off any workers. The shift should yield an additional 2k Altimas a month. It doesn't mean Nissan is getting out of the truck business, though. The Titan will be replaced by a Mexican-built badge-engineered Dodge Ram while Nissan rebadges Frontiers as "Equators" for Suzuki. The plant currently building Titans will start building commercial vehicles.