Toyota launched their hybrid Prius in late 1997. 13 years later, Toyota has sold a total of about 2.6m hybrids, says The Nikkei [sub]. That mostly because it is the top selling car in Japan. And also “thanks to government subsidies that favor hybrids over other fuel-efficient cars,” as Automotive News [sub] remarks. Toyota doesn’t want to rest on its laurels. Read More >
Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen/Audi are all moving inexorably towards a major downmarket expansion, as they develop a new generation of compact and subcompact cars based on front-wheel-drive architectures. Though Volkswagen has played in this space for some time, the move is a major cultural shift for BMW and Mercedes, which are typically associated with rear-drive luxury cars, particularly in the US market. But the truth is that the German luxury brands have always sold products in the German and other European markets that don’t match their premium overseas brand images (see, among other examples, the ubiquity of Mercedes taxis in Germany). But the strange thing about this next push towards smaller cheaper cars is that it’s not not aimed at Germany at all.
It seems unlikely: Canadians prefer smaller cars and those with high fuel efficiency, but they’re shunning hybrids. Monvolant, via autoblog, reports that Honda will be dropping the Insight and Civic hybrid models, due to poor sales. Only 748 Insights have found Canuck buyers, and even fewer Civic Hybrids. Honda had planned to sell 10k Insights in Canada this year. Pop!
The Insight has been a major sales disappointment stateside too. But here’s the real shocker: Only 2,272 Toyota Prius have been sold in Canada through July of this year. Are the Canadians hybriphobic? Or just genuinely frugal? (The two top selling cars in Canada are the Civic and the Corolla)
After numerous delays and a lawsuit by Mahindra’s US distributor, the Indian firm’s diesel-powered compact pickups have been approved by the EPA, reports the WSJ [sub].
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Why build the sexiest-looking “green car” to date, only to advertise it using cobbled-together promo clips and a royalty-free techno beat? Other than the fact that several production delays indicate that every available dollar should go towards actually making the Karma production-ready, of course. [via Jalopnik]
The core consumers would be interested in technology and kind of early adopters
Coda Automotive senior VP for sales and distribution Mike Jackson (yes, the former GM marketing whiz) describes the market for his firm’s forthcoming electric car. So what is Jackson’s “kind-of-early-adopter” Californian consumer looking to get out of the Coda? A redesigned Mitsubishi platform, built and bodied in China for one thing. Chinese lithium-ion batteries delivering “90-120” miles of range, and guaranteed for eight years or 100k miles (3 years, or 36k miles for everything else) for another. 134 HP and 221 lb-ft, good for a top speed of 80 MPH. An 8-inch navigation screen with real-time traffic updates. And for you, they’ll throw in 17-inch alloy wheels. But the Coda EV’s most striking feature (at least in terms of appealing to tech-oriented Californians) is best summed up in the measured prose of AutoWeek
It has fairly bland, universal styling and is roughly the size of a Chevrolet Cobalt.
Holy unfortunate comparisons, Batman!
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No, it’s not a Mel Gibson joke… Scientists at Edinburgh Napier University have developed a formula for making butanol biofuel out of byproducts of the Scottish whiskey industry, reports Sky News. Apparently researchers
combined so-called pot ale – the liquid from the copper stills distillery equipment – and the spent grains used to make whisky, also known as draff
to create Butanol, an ethanol-like biofuel. Unlike the corn juice, however, Butanol can run in any gas-powered engine and does not degrade components over time.
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According to The Global Times, China’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile is maturing nicely: though sales have slowed in the Middle Kingdom, the engines are getting bigger.
In July, smaller cars accounted for only 65.38 percent of overall passenger vehicle sales, which totaled 946,200 units, declining 1.42 percentage points month-on-month and dropping below last year’s average of 69.5 percent for five months in a row.
“Small cars,” it should be pointed out, means cars with 1.6 liters displacement or less. This despite a 3,000 yuan ($443.37) government subsidy on 71 qualifying “small car” nameplates. And if an uncooperative market weren’t enough to cause some head-wagging in Beijing, only one Chinese-brand car made the China Association of Auto Manufacturers “ten best-selling sedans” list: the BYD F3. And no, not the plug-in hybrid version.
Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.
That’s the thesis of UCLA professor of urban planning, Daniel Shoup’s new book The High Cost of Free Parking. Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen explains Shoup’s line of thinking in an NYT Op-Ed.
Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.
Cowen points to San Francisco’s market-based parking meters as one potential solution for the waste and stealth subsidies of automotive overuse caused by free parking (which Shoup reckons amounts to a staggering $127b annual subsidy). But will market-based parking pricing be any more politically palatable than other green behavior-modification efforts like, say, a gas tax? On the other hand, if municipalities can get rid of speed cameras due to increased parking revenue, perhaps the compromise might be more worth it to motorists. Either way, one gets the feeling that the free parking phenomenon isn’t going to disappear overnight.
In its first public appearance, the Porsche 918 Spyder prototype delivers an aural experience that its cousin, the GT3 R Hybrid, just can’t match. In fact, at this point it’s probably safe to say that the 918 is already the best-sounding hybrid yet created.
See the picture above? It’s a lady in a white car. Nothing unusual there, right? Well, not quite. For starters, the lady is a queen. A real one.
Before I clarify the picture, let me set the scene. Spain is in the middle of economic turmoil. Its credit rating was cut to AA, it pushed through a €15b austerity plan with just one vote and is having trouble overhauling its labor market (which is considered to be one of the most inflexible in Europe). So, suffice to say, money’s too tight to mention, as someone once said. Unless … Read More >
Not long ago, we explored the possibility of Audi taking out Tesla with its forthcoming brace of e-Tron electric sportscars. What we didn’t realize fully at the time, is how directly VW is going after Tesla. At a recent visit to Volkswagen’s Silicon Valley Electronic Research Lab though, I was shown the slide above, which represents the battery packs for the forthcoming e-Tron and e-Up EVs… and it suddenly hit me that Tesla founder Martin Eberhard was applying Tesla’s multi-cell strategy at Volkswagen, essentially duplicating Tesla’s work with the backing of a major OEM. Now, Eberhard is talking to Autocar, and he says that his Tesla-style multi-cell powerpacks could offer 500 miles of pure electric range within ten years. If he’s right, the other OEMs who are focusing on prismatic Li-ion cells are in for a rude surprise… and Tesla had better start making some progress.
What about battery production? It’s one of the most popular criticisms of the green halo surrounding battery-electric vehicles, and one that’s widely circulated in anti-EV circles. Battery production, it is argued, requires the mining, transportation and processing of minerals which puts EVs at an environmental disadvantage compared to ICE vehicles. Needless to say, quantifying the impacts of ICE and electric drivetrain production is extremely difficult, due to the complexity and global supply chains required to produce both (not to mention the inherent difficulty of quantifying environmental impacts). But a study by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology [via Green Car Congress] took on just that question, and indicates that
the impact of a Li-ion battery used in BEVs for transport service is relatively small. In contrast, it is the operation phase that remains the dominant contributor to the environmental burden caused by transport service as long as the electricity for the BEV is not produced by renewable hydropower.
Range anxiety. The performance angst and penis envy of the new millennium. So you want to be nice to the planet. You no longer want to desecrate dead dinosaurs. You want to plug in and tune out.
But you also want visit grandpa and grandma who live 150 miles away, and you don’t want to overstay your welcome with an orange cord dangling out of the window. What to do? It’s so simple, that we wonder why nobody has thought of it: Read More >
It’s difficult to compete globally when governments try to pick the winning technologies and the direction changes from administration to administration… the U.S. government is going a bit too far in trying to dictate the powertrain technologies of the future.
BorgWarner CEO Tim Manganello tells Green Car Advisor what he really thinks of the billions of government dollars that have gone into the electric car industry of late. And though the supplier boss clearly has a personal interest in non-EV efficiency solutions (namely dual-clutch transmissions which require some kind of combustion engine), he’s also got a point. Why is the government lavishing unproven (luxury) startups like Tesla and Fisker with hundreds of millions in federal largess, while doing next to nothing to increase the market penetration of proven technologies like clean diesel or natural gas?
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