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]
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Tag: Green
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!
(Read More…)
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.
(Read More…)
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.
Honda’s Civic Hybrid has always been something of an afterthought in the marketplace, as Honda’s “mild” hybrid system consistently fell behind the Toyota Prius in terms of mileage, electric-only range and green street-cred. Then, late last year, Honda settled a class action lawsuit alleging that the Civic Hybrid couldn’t hit its EPA numbers. And though the weak-selling Insight has replaced the Civic Hybrid as Honda’s problem hybrid of the moment, the Civic Hybrid woes are still piling up. The latest bad news comes from the LA TImes, which reports that Civic Hybrid batteries have been dying before their time, and that Honda’s software “fix” for the problem reduces mileage from 45 MPG to 33 MPG. Since the standard Civic is rated at 30 MPG, a number of Civic Hybrid owners are wondering why they paid extra for what amounts to a 3 MPG improvement on the highway… and they’re accusing Honda of refusing to replace batteries under warranty. In other words, this looks to be one of the first major battery warranty-related fiascos of the hybrid era… and it’s shaping up to be a nasty one. Electric car makers, take notice.
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.
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.
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?
The Honda Civic Type R has become the latest casualty of the new Euro V emissions standard, reports Autocar, and it will be discontinued for the European market at the end of this year. Weirdly though, production of the British-built Civic Type R will continue, and the two-liter “touring car with number plates” will be exported to the South African and Australian markets. To which we say, the Type R is a low-volume model anyway… why not send a few to the US? Sure, if you directly convert the UK price to dollars, a top-spec Mugen Type R costs a whisker under $40k… and we’d guess more Americans would spring for a Volt at that price. And yes, it would certainly suck some enthusiasm out of the all-important CR-Z launch. Still, Honda needs to stop making sense and do something that proves it hasn’t forgotten its roots in the US market. Sending a few hundred Type Rs to the US is worth a thought… or is the whole idea as silly as testing a Type R against an Audi R8?
Earlier this week, Tesla reported a $38.5m Q2 net loss, up from its $29.5m in the first quarter of the year. The good news was that revenue rose by about $8m over Q1, to $28.45m, but development and selling/general expenses rose countering the higher receipts. Other good news came on the Model S front, as Tesla claims that body and powertrain development is complete for the forthcoming sedan. But with the company losing about $5 per share (currently valued at $19.70 each), there’s more bad news coming. In a piece at Wired Autopia, Tesla’s former PR boss Darryl Siry points out that a key revenue stream for Tesla is being closed.
In Europe, hybrids are treated as the work of the devil. In America, hybrids are more a statement of political leanings. Japan is downright hybrid-kichi (crazy). Exhibit A: Toyota’s Prius sales. (Read More…)
Prior to going on television on Monday, I spoke to a GM spokesman in hopes of better understanding the business case for the Volt. Perhaps the most interesting thing he told me was that a major impetus for developing the Volt as an Extended-Range Electric concept was GM’s failure to achieve success with three alt-energy concepts (EV-1, Hydrogen, and yes, E-85 ethanol) due to their need for fueling infrastructure. As we talked, it occurred to me that three other less-than-entirely-successful GM “green car” projects might have helped lead The General down the primrose path to the Volt: GM’s BAS “Mild Hybrid,” the Parallel Hybrid Truck system (PHT), and the V8-based “Two-Mode” hybrid drivetrains. He admitted (somewhat grudgingly) that GM’s hybrid sales had been “disappointing” and that the ambitious Volt project was to some extent motivated by this lack of market success. What he didn’t tell me: GM is bringing back the discontinued mild-hybrid BAS system for 2011.
If you want, and if you don’t feel discouraged by Ed’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, you can go to your friendly GM dealer and pre-order the 2011 Volt for an MSRP of $41,000 (before a $7,500 federal tax credit). A 36-month lease costs $350 a month, with $2,500 down. Bring a cot, we are given the impression that there are long lines at the dealerships. GM’s spokesman David Darovitz told Automotive News [sub], that based on customer reactions, GM expects demand for the Volt to exceed the 10,000 units it will build between its launch and the end of 2011. (Read More…)
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