Say what you want about oil tycoon-cum alt-energy evangelist T. Boone Pickens, the man has some instincts on him. Wal-Mart has been studying ways to reduce its energy usage (for purely altruistic reasons, of course) and Pickens smells blood in the water. Reuters reports that the Texan CNG honcho has convinced Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to consider retrofitting its entire diesel truck fleet with CNG power as an energy-saving, cost-cutting measure. Wal-Mart currently operates some 8,500 diesel trucks in its supply-chain network, and a presentation by Pickens to a Wal-Mart associates meeting has convinced Scott to consider the retrofit. According to a weekly Pickens email, Scott was “impressed by the Pickens Plan.” The email continues, “to have America’s largest retailer looking into shifting their trucking fleet to run on natural gas is a major step towards our country’s energy independence.” And a major step towards making Mr Pickens a boatload of cash. Pickens has invested his oil fortune in wind power and CNG, and a Wal-Mart retrofit could mean a huge contract and increased media exposure for CNG as a transportation alternative. Like Pickens though, every decision at Wal-Mart comes down to dollars and cents. We still don’t know how much a CNG fleet conversion would cost or save Wal-Mart. Until we do, there’s no telling whether Pickens’ CNG revolution will get off the ground.

From a crowd-pleasing chant at the Republican National Convention to op-eds at the New York Times, the refrain “Drill, Baby, Drill” is looming large in the American psyche. In the Gray Lady’s pages, Robert Hahn of the American Enterprise Institute and Peter Passel of the Milkin Institute (motto: Milkin’ The Issues) investigate the idea of penetrating mother Earth for more of that sweet, sweet dino juice. Opponents of drilling offshore and oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve (ANWR) argue that the benefits would be marginal. Hahn and Passel don’t necessarily disagree. They reckon 7b barrels could be pulled from ANWR, with another 11b available offshore, Hahn and Passel estimate the U.S. could thusly increase output by six percent, resulting in a 1.3 percent drop in worldwide prices. Meh. But the two argue that at $100/barrel, that oil would be worth nearly $2t not including the benefits of reduced pump prices for consumers. Development costs including environmental clean-ups would cost only $400b, making drilling an “economic no-brainer.” Hahn and Passel estimate the “non-use value” of ANWR at “only” $11b. The authors could “imagine a political bargain in which several hundred billion dollars went into a fund with a charter to preserve wilderness in the United States, or climate-stabilizing rainforests in Africa and Latin America.” In short, to protect the environment we must defile the environment. In reality, drlling is one of those idealism vs. pragmatism issues where win-win is a no-no. As long as the “Drill, Baby, Drill” refrain is still echoing out of St Paul, this kind of compromise is a long way off.

It was only a matter of time until someone had something negative to say about the ever-expanding fleet of hybrid taxis in New York City. While I’m not in the hybrid car fan camp generally, they make perfect sense for a place like Manhattan. Driving takes place nearly exclusively short of 30 mph (except for costly interboro trips), meaning the electric motor really gets a workout. They’re quieter, and considering the traffic density in Manhattan, the reduced emissions actually are appreciated. Not to mention, hybrids need high intensity field testing. What better than 24-hour a day abuse? Well, not everybody agrees with me. C. Bruce Gambardella, P.E., an engineer that claims to be nothing short of a world renowned expert in the field of taxi cabs, thinks the hybrids totally suck (paraphrasing). Mr. Gambardella’s report was funded by a lobbyist organization called the Metropolitcan Taxicab Board of Trade. We’ll give you one guess who they represent – the taxi owners. The report claims that the modifications required for hybrid taxis make them inherently unsafe. Among the charges: plexiglass partitions between the drivers and passengers will interfere with side airbag systems (how often do those go off when everybody drives under 20 mph?), that hybrids are unsafe as taxis because they aren’t built for heavy duty driving (Manhattan potholes apparently better the Rubicon), and because hybrids are horrible, terrible vehicles. Also, Gambardella reports, hybrids are for grandmothers and liberals. Taxicabs need to be robust Panther platform cars that get 11 miles per gallon. Oh, and the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade filed a lawsuit yesterday against the City of New York, fighting the requirement that all cabs switch over to hybrids in the next several years.

Londoners know (because a fleet of almost 100 is already running): the electric Smart fortwo is an big improvement on the original. It’s economical and smooth, without the wheezy engine and the miserable, jerky transmission of the gas-powered (or God forbid, Diesel) version. Greeny Berliners think: electric cars would be the zero-emission way to go, if you could just charge them somewhere (who has a garage in the city?) Bringing both factors together and hoping that they gel, the German government has started a project with the generic-sounding name “e-mobility Berlin”. It will be the world’s biggest e-car pilot project, involving Daimler and RWE, a utility, which will install 500 public charging stations. The charging stations will have token solar cells, but are basically about coal-derived electricity (take that, global-warming activists!) Daimler’s main motivation is to field-test its e-Smarts, scheduled for massive roll-out in the magic year (guess!) On TV, I saw Angela Merkel, Germany’s often dour, physicist-by-training head of government talk about the project with bright eyes: “It only takes two hours to re-charge the batteries? Just the time you need to go shopping!” As they say, some ways of thinking die hard.

Automakers should start taking a page from the survival strategies of other easily-maligned industries, starting with the slogan “fuel-efficient cars don’t save the world, people save the world.” This blame-deflecting maxim encapsulates the lessons learned by researchers at UC Davis’s Institute For Transportation Studies while studying options to reduce California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80 percent (of 1990 levels) by 2050. Green Car Congress has all the technical minutiae on the study (as usual) for those who care much and work little. Bottom line: the “reference scenario,” which projects current trends forward, predicts a 50 percent reduction in average vehicle fuel economy. But a doubling population projected for the 1990 – 2050 period will cause GHG emissions to rise by 62 percent. Several “silver bullet” scenarios centering on large-scale shifts to biofuels, fuel-cell vehicles, electric vehicles and ICE efficiency improvements all fail to meet the ambitious 80in50 goal. The 80in50 goal can be met, albeit through either second-gen biofuel breakthroughs or a new hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure. The only way to meet the goal with only hybrids and EVs: a radical reduction in miles driven. Even then, hitting the goal exactly is only possible if you exclude inter-state transport. As the report notes, “advances in other vehicle subsectors are largely erased by activity growth in air travel and domestic and international shipping by sea and air.”

You might remember Henrik Fisker as the man whose SoCal coachbuilding company was trying to rebody BMW 6-Series and Mercedes SLs for ungodly price premiums (they sold about 15 total). Or perhaps you’ll think of Fisker Automotive, a would-be electric car company, which was sued by Tesla back in April. Today, Fisker Automotive has announced that they have raised $65 million in venture capital funds for the development of their Karma electric performance sedan. While some more “standard” Silicon Valley investors had been on board with the Karma project, the final investor that put the fundraising over the top is the Qatar Investment Authority, the investment arm of Qatar’s government, with $60 billion in assets. According to the same press release, initial deliveries of the Karma sedan are expected to begin in the 4th quarter of 2009, with eventual sales of 15,000 a year. Uh, whatever you say fellas.

The “Solar Taxi” has arrived in Philadelphia a year, two months and 27k miles after it left Switzerland. A substitute high school teacher from Lucerne named Louis Palmer built the contraption, with help from four universities. The three-wheeled cluchtless, gearless gizmo weighs 1,000 lbs, including 500 lbs of sodium-nickel-ceramic Zebra batteries, manufactured by MES DEA in Stabio, Switzerland. The latter give the car and its 500 lb trailer toting 6 square meters of PVs a range of nearly 200 miles at night. Top speed is an electronically limited 55 mph at 1800 rpm. The 20 hp motor pulled the car up the Rockies at 40 mph. Though billed as 100% solar, Palmer tells TTAC the trailer produces half the car’s energy, the “other half” produced by solar cells on a collaborator’s rooftop in Switzerland that feeds the grid with power equivalent to the supplement the car requires from the grid. In any case, the car’s top speed sinks to 10-15 mph when powered by direct sunshine alone. But Palmer’s goal is to show the world that solar-powered automotive transportation is feasible. He says that $5,000 worth of rooftop solar cells in the US Mid-Atlantic could provide enough electricity for 10,000 miles/year.

Or the concept version of it, at least. Honda says what you see here (and what they will show at the Paris auto show) is 90% of what we can expect when they roll out the production version – on sale in the US next spring. While Honda has said it will be the best priced car in the segment (what segment? It’s the Prius and nothing else), many have estimated its price will be below $20,000. Unlike the first generation Insight, which was a 2-seat bicycle, this new one very much follows the Prius layout: 5 passenger, 5 door (that means hatchback), and lots of high-tech gadgets. Making those gadgets optional should help to add high-profit margin items to the sales sheet, as well. While we have no information on engine or mileage, I’d be willing to bet that the all important MPGs will be very impressive. Honda is hoping to sell 100,000 of these in the US per year, and another 100,000 per year worldwide. Something tells me that won’t be a problem at all.

It's always fun to see analysts justify their way to a predetermined conclusion, especially when the facts do not come close supporting it. At the usually on-point SeekingAlpha blog, Tim Plaehn tries his hand at another round of corn juice justification, this time with a new twist: cobs, baby. Claiming that high food prices create incentives for "efficiency and innovation" rather than say, cutting the cord, Plaehn lays out the roadmap for the ethanol industry's next big thing. Since everyone and their senile grandparents know that cellulosic, not feedstock-based, ethanol is the future, Plaehn appropriates what little future the biomass-based fuel has into the ethanol farm subsidy racket. He points to a company (POET) that uses cellulosic ethanol extraction to squeeze some extra juice from corn cobs, rather than non-feedstock biomass crops, arguing that the expensive technology will extract 27 percent more ethanol per acre of corn. If we're talking about investing in cellulosic extraction, it makes far more sense to base it off of such low-impact, high-efficiency crops as switchgrass. Except that this far more logical approach would mean the end of government ethanol subsidies to corn producers. So what other miracles does Plaehn forecast to allow ethanol to reduce dependence on foreign oil? More expensive technology of course, only this time we're talking blending pumps which could dial in the exact amount of ethanol consumers want in their gas. Choosing between E20, E30, E40, etc sounds great, but at what cost an all-new infrastructure? That's precisely beside the point for the ethanol lobby, who know that infrastructure-building is just another great way to get the government to subsidize their marginally-viable product. But this is exactly what you should expect from a heavily criticized, multi-billion-dollar pork project that claims to be chasing "efficiency and innovation" without ever truly exposing itself to market influences.

If business and government both agree that hydrogen is the future, they must be right, right? Well, the "Hydrogen Road Tour 08" has just completed the first hydrogen-powered, cross-country road trip despite the fact that there are only 60 hydrogen stations in he country. So how did the public-private publicity tour manage this feat? Well, they didn't actually. "There were stretches without hydrogen fueling stations when the vehicles were carried on flatbed trucks," reports Reuters. The longest was a 937 mile jaunt from Rolla, Missouri to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But wait, cries DOT Administrator For Research and Innovative Technology (really) Paul Brubaker, all those hydrocarbons were not combusted in vain! One of the goals of the tour was to actually demonstrate the need to build more fueling stations. So, y'know… failure is success. Not to be out-Orwelled, the Department of Energy put out its own fawning "Suggested Talking Points For The Hydrogen Road Tour" (PDF) . There you can learn that the DOE has purchased a fuel-cell Chevy Equinox, and that it is refueled at a Shell station. Furthermore, "data collected from this effort will be integrated with data from the National Hydrogen Learning Demonstration to validate real-world performance." Which is important, because you'll want to know how often you'll have to be towed in a flatbed truck between fueling stations. Unless the hydrogen-producing firms behind the tour get their fat government checks to build an expensive new infrastructure. And all this despite the fact that in a best-case scenario, automakers will only sell about 2 million electric vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells by 2020 according to the National Research Council.

Wesson veggie oil, lye, high quality methanol, an old margarita mixer, and some patience; thats all you need to create your own batch of pure biodiesel, suitable for use in your average two-year old, raceworthy Jetta TDI. Sure, it looked more like something you would dip your bread in at Olive Garden, but I was not only going to be driving like a hooligan at the local SCCA event, I was saving the planet (I should sell some carbon credits)! Using directions I found on-line, I planned to whip up a five-gallon batch of biodiesel (to see if I could) in the 11th-floor confines of my apartment. Not knowing what to expect, I ended up with a huge mess, a ruined margarita mixer, and about three gallons of biodiesel of dubious quality (it was supposed to be nearly translucent). Turbidity issues aside, I put a single gallon in the tank of my Jetta, along with five gallons of regular diesel, and ran around town. No issues, so the weekend's race was on! The other two gallons were then thrown in, and the race commenced. One hundred bhp aside, the Jetta performed admirably with mild body lean, communicative steering, decent brakes, monster torque, and laughable grip. The oppressive Oklahoma heat erased all perception of driving a commuter sedan; no, I was piloting the Audi R10 TDI down the Mulsanne straight in the Le Mans! But unlike Audi, I couldn't claim victory, as I was the only one in my racing class. But my adventure in going green shall not end there. Stay tuned as I attempt to make ethanol for my Porsche!

What pistonhead doesn't like a V8 engine? This author has long argued that freedom of choice argues against outlawing gas-sucking automobiles. But I don't venerate the V8 engine as a sacred object, a talisman for those who feel that anyone outside of Motown is an eco-weenie Hell bent on ruining a way of life. But I know a man who does. "You see, the cars that lose money are the rage of the day for automakers — hybrids, electric cars and fuel cell vehicles — and would take even longer to develop if it weren't for the advanced technologies designed for powerhouses such as the Corvette ZR1, the Shelby GT500 or the Challenger SRT8, to name a few," Manny Lopez argues. "But perhaps most importantly, the green that these vehicles generate is of the cash kind, and for three automakers struggling to simply keep their North American operations afloat, that's not something to dispose of lightly." Yeah, and screw those tree-huggers! "Sure the trend is to downsize and the Big Three are developing smaller engines that are faster and more fuel efficient. They should continue that quest. Now isn't the time to create a new V-8, but it's also not the time to bow to public pressure from activists who want nothing more than for the V-8 to wither away." Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck!  

Starting with 2009 models, the California Air Resources Board will require all new vehicles sold in the Golden State to carry a sticker which shows a CARB-determined "Smog Score" and "Global Warming Score." The Toyota Open Road Blog's editor Jon Thompson is all excited over this "because our Prius Hybrid is listed by CARB as one of its top 10 cleanest cars" and "Camry and Camry Hybrid are right behind Prius with scores of 9, and Highlander Hybrid follows closely along with a score of 8." Funny thing, though, he doesn't mention where Land Cruiser, Sequoia, Tundra, Tacoma or any of their other large trucks fall in those ratings. And all he says about the Global Warming score is that it's "based in part on the vehicle's greenhouse gas emissions." The part he doesn't mention, according to the CARB EP Label Fact Sheet (click here to view): the greenhouse gases resulting from "fuel production." So when the Prius PHEV hits the market, will the score reflect the coal and other fuels burned to produce the electricity to recharge it? That could be an eye-opening addition to what Thompson terms the "growing amount of information that's available to help you make a studied automotive choice." So I put Thompson's closing question to our Best and Brightest: "Should this sort of labeling be adopted by all the states?"

Terry's one of the good guys: a plain-speaking auto reviewer/ranter for the Dallas Morning News [full version via The Washington Post] who never loses sight of the common man. Well, at least not until he's behind the wheel of a death car muscle car. And then he's gone baby gone! Despite the fact that the V8-lovin' Lone Star scribe's feeling the heat over global warming, it's one of those cold, dead hands deals. "I know that my days as an unrepentant gearhead may be numbered. Sky-high gas prices, global warming, urban sprawl, maybe even the "oil war" in Iraq, are all being piled on cars. Yet despite the growing drumbeat against them, the allegations that they're melting glaciers and maiming thousands, the claim that we're choking on them, the fear that they're our worst national addiction, I love them dearly." What follows is a poetic paean to profligate petrol consumption. Box ultimately argues against those who argue against gas-guzzling-for-fun thus: I'm a climate killer, you're a hypocrite; I'll stop when you stop. As if. 

Those of you headed to the California State Fair this month can take the kiddies along for brainwashing "a new eco-friendly show" at the "Buick-Pontiac-GMC Rainforest Pavilion." What the division that produces some of GM's biggest and thirstiest vehicles has to do with the rainforest escapes me at the moment, but the "'green' fun" features a "Dr. Greenius Biofuel" as host and "will engage fair-goers with interactive fun while also educating about alternative fuels and how to be more eco-friendly in day-to-day life." The kiddos can participate in "hands-on demonstrations like learning to juggle, piecing together puzzles, and playing with an easy squeezy biofuel tool demonstrating the difference between petroleum and ethanol in a fun-filled way." And then once you're through in the Rain Forest, you can shuffle over to the "Chevy Alt Fuel Magical Biodome" to see "Harry Hybrid-dini" with "an act that incorporates alternative fuel words of wisdom." And of course, "Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac and GMC will present a variety of fuel-friendly vehicles to explore throughout the Fair." If you've managed to hold down your lunch so far, or really do believe that the children are our future, you can read the entire press release here.

Click here for the full press release