The irrational electrification exuberance  claims another victim: Battery maker A123 Systems Inc is running out of money. A lot of it is your money. Says Reuters: Read More >

Associated Press writes (via the Clarion Ledger) that a company called GreenTech will today roll out a “two-seat neighborhood electric vehicle, a cross between a golf cart and conventional car, with a 115-mile range.” It won’t do more than 35 mph, and will cost around $10,000. The “car” might be unremarkable, the guest list of today’s event is not. The party in Horn Lake, Mississippi,will be attended by a lot of formers. Former President Bill Clinton and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will attend, with former Democratic National Committee Chairman and now chairman of GreenTech, Terry McAuliffe, doing the honors. The CEO is Chinese businessman Xiaolin “Charles X” Wang. Read More >

Despite accounting for an incredibly small percentage of new car sales in America, the EV is all the rage in California. Rather than starting from scratch and designing an all-new car from the ground up (like Nissan), Honda chose the more economical route and electrified the second-generation Honda Fit. On the surface, the recipe sounds like a slam dunk, since the Fit is one of Honda’s most attractive and most fun to drive models now on sale. To prove to the masses that Honda has what it takes to go green, they flew me out to Pasadena to sample the all-new, all-blue Fit EV.

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Today, Germany’s Spiegel Magazin reports what we suspected since last December: “BMW and Toyota edge closer.”  Both, says the magazine, will “enter a close partnership that transcends the projects that were agreed in the past.” Read More >

A hitherto unknown Chinese business man who leads a shadowy “consortium” buys the assets of Saab. The media eats it up. Dalong “Kai Johan” Jiang takes the microphone and says what everybody wants to hear: “Electric cars powered by green electricity is the future and electric cars will be built in Trollhättan.” Jiang says there is a huge market for these made-in-Trollhättan EVs, waiting in China.

Nobody dares to say that it does not make sense at all. We say it. Read More >

Rattled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and reminded by smaller quakes that are a daily occurrence in Japan, every large Japanese automaker entered  the smart home business. We have seen smart homes from Toyota and from Nissan. Today, we went all the way to Minamiyono in Saitama to visit the smart home from Honda. Read More >

To the people in the room the buyer of Saab the remaining assets of bankrupt Saab was known before the press conference started today at 1pm at the Saab showroom in Trollhättan. When Dalong “Kai Johan” Jiang takes a seat in the audience, and is joined by his Chairman Karl-Erling Trogen, it is clear what bankruptcy administrator Hans Bergqvist will announce minutes later:

“The buyer is the National Electric Vehicle AB.”

Jiang takes the microphone. He knows his audience and says what everybody wants to hear: “Electric cars powered by green electricity is the future and electric cars will be built in Trollhättan.” Read More >

In Japan, drivers of Nissan’s all-electric Leaf plant trees while they drive. Nissan started a Zero Emission Fund. Carbon credits are paid into this fund by converting the CO2 emissions prevented by individual Leaf owners in Japan. Read More >

We have a new winner in the MPGe brawl: Honda’s new all-electric 2013 Fit  can go 118 miles on a gallon of imagined gas, measurement brought to you by your tax dollars and the EPA.  Chevrolet meanwhile tweaked battery and electronics of its range-extended Volt for four miles more on the MPGe scale (95 to now 98, combined), and a slightly better electric  range of 38 miles. The perception of customers remains conflicted. After all, they wanted to escape gas, and now they have to contend with simulated gallons. That’s just the beginning of the plug-in perplexity.

The electric leaderboard now looks like this: Read More >

While on the Infiniti JX launch event, I met a gentleman who now works with Nissan. He had a number of interesting stories about his tenure at GM, and what it was like to work on the EV1 program, as well as the technology that he swears was the forerunner to the Chevrolet Volt.

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In the days and weeks after March 11 2011, when a giant fist wiped out large swaths of Japan’s northeastern coast, and sent the power grid into a near-coma from which the Japanese patient has yet to recover, electric and hybrid vehicles were pressed into a new mission as emergency power supplies. People in the stricken areas used the batteries of their Toyota Estima hybrid minivan, or the much bigger battery of the Nissan Leaf, as a power source for cell phones and laptops when the regular power was out.  Ever since, Japanese became infatuated with the idea of rigging a car to a house – to power the house, if needed. One year later, houses are ready to take charge from a car. Read More >

“A disconnect is emerging between the White House and the auto industry over the short-term future of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids,” says Automotive News [sub]. The White House wants to go forward. The auto industry is backpedaling. Read More >

Pictures of a burning BYD e6 sent the already beaten down BYD stock on a nose-dive yesterday.  The e6 is one of the rare BYD electric cars, used in a taxi test in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. A Nissan GT-R had crashed into two taxis, one a conventional Santana, the other an electric e6. The e6 immediately did burst into flames. Two female passengers and the driver were killed. Read More >

Walking across the exhibition floor of the annual conference of the Japan chapter of the SAE, one gets the impression that the internal combustion engine is an endangered species. Read More >

Over dinner with our beloved Editor-At-Large two weeks ago, Ed and I discussed what we felt was the coming “post-car” era; rampant consolidation, the death of beloved brands and the subsequent widespread love for classic cars, the adoption of other forms of mobility and a fierce anti-car backlash. A nugget of information buried at the end of a Ward’s Auto report instantly brought all my fears and apprehension to the forefront, a mere fortnight after Ed and I concluded that things weren’t going to be that bad after all.

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