Author: Christopher DeMorro

I’ve only visited Detroit once, half a lifetime ago. Even though it was so long ago, I can still remember some of the urban decay and the sense of desolation that permeated the city. Still, I like Detroit. It is home to America’s car culture, and it used to be a bastion of the middle class. But it is in desperate need of revitalization, and lots of ideas are being proposed to save the city, like urban farming.

Before these radical ideas can transform Detroit though, baby steps need to be taken to better the present state of the city. To that end, the Motor City is planning to add 30 miles of bike lanes to its vehicle-centric grid.

As it stands, Detroit has a few disjointed bike lanes across the city, but nothing of the sort to encourage biking en masse. For decades Detroit has emphasized roads at the expense of pedestrians and bikers, and with good reason. Detroit thrived during the 1950’s and 60’s due to its car culture. But times have changed, many jobs have left and are not coming back. People are trying to get away from cars and save money on other ways of commuting. Biking is one of those ways out, and Detroit seems to be listening.

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I am lucky to live in the Northeast, at least when it comes to trains. We’ve got the only “high speed” rail service in the country, and I can hop a train to just about anywhere in between Boston and Washington D.C. It is cheaper and less aggravating than driving during rush hour, though it isn’t what I’d call a smooth ride.

But that hasn’t stopped riders from taking to the rails in increasing numbers. Amtrak posted an overall 4.3% increase in ridership for the first half of their fiscal year in 2010, and they say they are on the path to beating their annual ridership record. One of the biggest jumps was seen on the Acela “high speed” rail service, which posted a 14% jump in ridership. Are Americans ready to take back to the rails en masse?

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It is really disheartening to consider how many false starts the electric car has had in America. Some of the first vehicles on America’s roads were electric cars, but for one reason or another (but mostly cheap oil) the electric car has never managed to break into the American mainstream. The closest we ever got was with the GM EV-1, the Toyota RAV4 EV and other cars brought about by the short-lived 1990’s California EV mandate, and those cars didn’t exactly have a happy ending.

Now we’ve got a new President and new policies pushing for electric cars, but so does the rest of the world. One of our biggest rivals in the coming years will be China. The Chinese government has just initiated a new policy to help boost domestic production of electric vehicles. So could we be driving Chinese-built electric cars in coming years?

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Some of our readers got mildy defensive about my post regarding extreme commuting. They made some valid points; sometimes you just don’t have a choice, especially if you switch jobs, or your partner works in the opposite direction requiring a compromise. But I still have a hard time imagining that all the driving could ever be worth it. And I love driving… just not to the same place, every day, for hours on end.

Apparently Ray LaHood, the Secretary of Transportation, agrees with me. Last month right before he announced a new policy regarding equal consideration for cars, bikers, and pedestrians, he told the National Bike Summit that “People want out of their cars”. Do they really?

I hope the car never disappears. That said, I think there are just too many cars on the road. It can really ruin the driving experience when you have to spend hours in gridlock, fighting traffic into and out of cities just to make a living. Driving should always be an option, but LaHood seems to think that given other options, people would choose public transportation. He is probably right.

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My father once had a VW Beetle, as did much of America. He loved the car for its reliability, and hated just about everything else about it. Believe it or not, they were still making old style Beetles in Mexico up until 2003. When they finally shut down the last assembly lines, over 21 million of the little buggers had been built. That’s just how popular “the People’s Car” was across the world. VW, of course, has the New Beetle now and, well… meh. It seems popular with high school students and secretaries, and not much else. The coolest New Beetle I have ever seen had a rocket attached to it.

But the New Beetle is getting old, and a replacement is due soon. Volkswagen has its sights set clearly on MINI, and the new New Beetle could get both a turbodiesel and a hybrid drivetrain to lure customers looking for more fuel efficiency.

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I try to stay out of politics. It is an ugly, ugly arena, especially these days. I like cars much more.

But so far I have liked Obama’s stance on automobiles. He is pushing for alternative fuels, electric cars, and better fuel efficiency. I can definitely dig that. But in my mind, the best leaders lead by example. Although the Presidential limo is already powered partially by biodiesel, Obama had been pushing to get a hybrid drivetrain fitted to it as well, but the Secret Service seems to have nixed the idea. I just don’t think they are trying hard enough.

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Lots of people have lots of ideas for how to resolve our current transportation woes. Some ideas are impractical and wacky, while others could potentially solve all our problems and then some… if they are ever implemented. But whether or not certain ideas are feasible, I still find it interesting to see what other people come up with when it comes to transportation solutions.

This solar-powered personal monorail falls somewhere between “keep dreaming” and “maybe… some day” in terms of practicality. It could even ship cargo as well as people. How is that for versatile!

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I do not enjoy commuting, which is why I don’t do it. Here in Connecticut we have terrible traffic… pretty much every day, despite my state being so far spread out. Actually, that is the problem. Most people have relatively long commutes for such a small state, and since there are only a few highways, they get clogged rather quickly.

But to commute an hour and a half or more to and from work every day? That seems insane… and yet, according to one study, almost 3.5 million Americans are doing this every week, a number that has almost doubled in the past twenty years.

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The 2011 Ford Mustang is without a doubt my favorite petrol-powered car out right now. At least among those I can afford… I mean, who wouldn’t want a Bugatti Veyron if they could afford it? It has gotten more powerful, and more fuel efficient, and as many media outlets are reporting, it can also handle in the twisties quite well.

But despite all of this, if Ford is truly serious about its “One Ford” strategy of sharing parts and components between different global markets, that means the Mustang won’t be exclusive to America for much longer. But in order to meet stringent European emissions standards, Ford would have to make some drastic changes like… a diesel engine?!?

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Finland isn’t exactly a tour de force in the automotive industry. The small, scrappy Scandinavian country is mostly known for its exports of electronics and ships, as well as the tenacity of its Skiing soliders. But cars? That’s for the Swedes!

Though maybe not anymore. Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences has unveiled its Electric Race About electric car, which will be competing in the Automotive X-Prize competition this fall.

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Mercedes probably has better green cred than most people give them actual credit for. Sure, they are over-complicated, full of production-intense technology and luxury, and they offer V8 engines with pretty much every car. But they also produce lots of clean-diesel engines, and 40% of their models are powered by such fuel-efficient engines.

Still, that might not be enough to meet increasing fuel efficiency standards the world over. So could the brand’s flagship vehicle, the S-Class, become a hybrid-only nameplate… even including the AMG performance models?

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It has been decades since anyone decided to up the fuel economy ante and force automakers to improve their CAFE ratings. Believe it or not, former President George W. Bush got the ball rolling by requiring automakers to reach 35 mpg by 2020. But Obama, swinging the bola of Hope and Change, has pushed those standards up to 2016, while adding in incentives for plug-in and alternative fuel vehicles.

So what does that mean for you and I, the average consumer?

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Scion is something of a success story for Toyota, which has a “reliable but boring” reputation about the industry (despite its recent acceleration woes). The Scion brand was aimed at injecting some youth and fun into Toyota’s portfolio, and it did… for a while. After eight years though, the lineup has grown, well, boring again.

Hoping to kickstart the brand’s image, Scion introduced two cars yesterday… the iQ, and an all-new TC. Well, all new as in mostly-the-same.

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Turbochargers are coming on strong from every corner of the automotive world as automakers scramble to meet the newly-announced CAFE fleet-wide mileage standard of 34.1 mpg by 2016. I love turbochargers, as they represent a compromise between horsepower and fuel efficiency. Plus, they are incredibly fun when you punch your foot into the pedal.

Hyundai really likes turbochargers too. So much, in fact, that they look to be setting a new standard both in power, and fuel efficiency, with their Sonata 2.0T. With 274 horsepower on tap and an MPG rating of 34 on the highway, the new Sonata is going to be the car to beat.

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One of the biggest arguments against electric cars is that all those cars plugging in at the same time will overload our already beleaguered electric grid. And there might be some truth to that. When the flat screen television became popular almost overnight, some local grids were nearly overwhelmed, though eventually they adapted. But an electric car (depending on the battery size and how much it has been depleted) could possibly double home electricity use. With many utilities shifting to variable pricing based on time of day usage, that could start to add up the dollar bills, and fast.

Foreseeing this problem, Ford announced at yesterday’s news conference that they would be partnering with Microsoft to use the Hohm electricity-monitoring software to help regulate and optimize electric car charging.

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Whatever your opinion on the healthcare bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama, the passage of it has at least allowed discussions on other important topics to resurface. Topics like energy reform. Details of the Kerry-Grahm-Lieberman energy reform bill have started leaking out. Among the topics that stuck out: a new gas tax.

The details don’t make clear how much this new gas tax would be, but it would likely be linked to the carbon content of the fuel. A higher gas tax has been bandied about for decades, and has always shot down rather quickly. The Fed’s collect 18.4 cents per gallon, while the average state gas tax is about 27 cents. So 45 cents of every gallon already goes to either the Feds or the state, and while it may sound like a lot, in actuality it is amongst the lowest tax rates on fuel in the world. How much higher should it go?

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High speed rail in the United States is off to a clumsy start. After the Obama administration announced it would be dolling out billions of dollars to high speed rail projects around the country, states started putting together project proposals and the like to get their cut of the funding. Then the numbers came in; California would get a lion’s share of the money, followed by the MidWest, Florida, Texas, and the Northeast.

Unfortunately it looks like the most “shovel ready” of the HSR projects, the proposed line between Tampa and Orlando, is already running into problems. For one, it wouldn’t make the commute between the two cities all that much shorter… so why bother?

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There are lots of ways our government is trying to gently nudge (or coerce) automakers into making more fuel efficient cars. There are of course the upgraded CAFE standards, which demand a fleet-wide fuel economy average for cars of 35.5 mpg by 2016. The Feds have also given out billions in low-interest loans to electric car makers and alt-fuel startups. But what about a tax?

As it turns out, the Peoples Republic of China already imposes a tax on engines with more than 2.0 liters of displacement, and Washington state has also considered just such an idea. But is it a good one?

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I’m not much of a boater. To be entirely honest, open water with no land in sight kind of scares me. But I’ve managed to make it on a few boats, and the one thing I always noticed, and hated, was the noise from the outboard motor. It can be impossible to have a civilized conversation even at half throttle. The other problem is that these engines suck down gas like it is going out of style.

That is why I like this electric boat from Infinyte. It replaces the big, stinky outboard with two 2 horsepower electric motors, resulting in a quiet and civilized journey.

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