Earlier this month Navistar announced it had begun production of the first Class 2c-3, 2-ton, medium-duty commercial electric truck in the U.S. — the eStar. It’s also the same vehicle that FedEx has announced it will be testing for fleet use in LA this year.
Now Navistar says that the first market the eStar will be commercially available is in “one of the nation’s most environmentally sustainable cities and a leading advocate for energy-efficient transportation,” Portland, Oregon.
Mark Perry (left) next to the Nissan LEAF battery mock up
Nissan shocked everybody a bit earlier this week when they announced they had developed a DC fast charging station that had the capability of getting a Nissan LEAF’s 24 kWh battery pack from zero to 80% full in under a half hour. It wasn’t so much the fast charging capability — also known as Level 3 charging — that shocked. We’ve all known Level 3 charging was coming. No, it was the price of their charging station.
At about $17,000, it represented an astounding departure from the $60,000 to $150,000 prices that have been quoted for the better part of a year and a half for a fast charging station. I had a chance to ask Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning and strategy for North America, about just how Nissan had pulled it off and what kinds of plans Nissan has for bringing their Level 3 charging station to the U.S. (more…)
At the Nissan LEAF battery plant groundbreaking yesterday in Smyrna, Tennessee, I made it a goal to squeeze as much detailed information as I could out of Nissan regarding the LEAF and what kinds of equipment it will ship with.
To this point — as is usually the case in the echo chamber that is the internet these days — nobody (including myself… mea culpa) seems to have been able to get it right about two things: whether or not the LEAF will have a Level 3 fast charge receptacle when it ships and if it will be able to use a Level 1 standard 3-prong outlet.
Driving in a Daihatsu Mira equipped with a huge 74 kWh lithium-ion battery and a brushless DC motor, the Japan EV Club has achieved a new world record for an electric car: 1003.184 kilometers (623 miles) without recharging.
Although the team didn’t exceed 25 mph and was on a racing oval at a constant speed, the 8.4 miles traveled per kWh (mpkWh) statistic is an amazing achievement in-and-of-itself.
The hot, sweltering Tennessee sun baked us under a big white-top tent this morning as Nissan dedicated the future site of their $1.7 billion dollar, state-of-the art Nissan LEAF battery plant in Smyrna. Encompassing 1.3 million square feet (22 American football fields), when the plant comes online in late 2012 it will be one of the largest battery facilities in North America.
The Nissan LEAF is the world’s first truly mass-market, affordable electric car and there are plenty of folks who’ve plunked down the $99 reservation fee with plans to be one of the first to own one when they start going on sale at the end of this year. But, from those intrepid early adopters, I constantly hear a deep-seated worry that dealers will try and squeeze some extra dollars out of them because of the incredible groundswell of demand.
Given the lack of clarity on the subject to this point, the worry is justifiable. After all, we saw it with the Prius back in the day, no? There must be something Nissan can do to stop dealer price gouging. Well, yes, yes there is.
The plug-in hybrid Porsche 918 Spyder was the best concept to come out of the Geneva Motor Show this year. With a claimed 0-60 time of about 3 seconds, the ability to return a fuel efficiency of 78 mpg, and a 15 mile electric-only range, it quickly became an object of lust for millions.
And now it appears the car is being readied to race in next year’s Nurburgring 24 Hours.
In the brave new world of electric cars, charging is perhaps the most critical element of the equation. For early adopters, almost all of it will be done from the comfort of your own garage in the wee hours of the morning, and it will take no more effort than plugging in your cell phone at night.
But when it comes to “fast charging” while on the road, the charging world gets more than a little murky.
Think electric cars are great? Well, they’ve been great for the better part of a century now — a fact that most people seem to be unaware of. Before Big Oil got its greasy paws in a death-lock stranglehold around our puny little necks, electric cars were the way of the future. Everyone from Ferdinand Porsche to your garden variety backyard inventor saw the simple beauty of the electric drivetrain.
Witness the above 1920 Milburn as a great example of this. While doing a bit of lazy Internet surfing last weekend, I stumbled upon a post over at Plugin Recharge! highlighting this beauty of an antique car with features that would be considered modern even by today’s standards.
Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs) have been touted as a low-cost way to quickly electrify much of the daily driving that people do. They typically don’t go faster than 35 mph and are increasingly showing up in cities as a way to make short commutes and run errands in a fuel-less and environmentally beneficial way.
But after a series of crash tests that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) conducted on a few popular models of them, including Chrysler’s GEM brand, the consumer watchdog group is making stern warnings that NEVs have very few safety features and could easily lead to fatalities in even moderate accidents at medium speeds.
Having dipped their feet in the waters of electric vehicle sales in Japan once before, Honda’s president of research and development, Tomohiko Kawanabe, said that they still “lack confidence” in demand for electric cars, according to a report from Bloomberg.
“It’s questionable whether consumers will accept the annoyances of limited driving range and having to spend time charging them,” Mr. Kawanabe is quoted as saying. “We are definitely conducting research on electric cars, but I can’t say I can wholeheartedly recommend them.”
The consequences of our almost hopeless relationship with oil are clearly on everybody’s minds these days — and for good reason. The disaster on the Deepwater Horizon and its incomprehensible effects on both the ocean ecosystem and people’s livelihoods, for likely decades to come, has hit the message home that our oil addiction holds us all at its mercy.
And that’s just no way to live… being at the complete mercy of something else somehow seems un-American, no? Aren’t we the society that sculpts its own destiny? Don’t we ‘boldly go’? If the results from a new survey done by the Consumer Federation of America are accurate, it seems we haven’t lost that mentality.
The Land Rover LRX concept has been a subject of much speculation and critique over the past few years. For a company such as Land Rover, the LRX represents a huge departure from what they’ve been associated with for decades — an attempt to appeal to a younger, broader crowd and meet the ever increasingly strict global fuel economy standards.
Now Land Rover — who still hasn’t officially dubbed the production model the ‘LRX’ — says that both 2WD and 4WD versions of the vehicle will be on sale in 2011… followed in 2013 by a diesel hybrid.
It’s been a whirlwind of EV news for Hawaii recently. As we already knew, they’ll be getting Better Place’s battery swapping technology, an electric car factory and they were just listed as one of the first areas you’ll be able to buy a Nissan LEAF when it goes on sale at the end of this year.
Now potential plug-in customers in the island nation have another huge reason to celebrate: a cash rebate worth 20% of the price of a new, highway-capable, battery electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle… up to $4,500 total.
So any electric vehicle over $22,500 will qualify for the full amount? I’m sold.
Yep. If you’re an American Express cardholder, and you’ve had your sights on brand spanking new Ford Fusion Hybrid (and who wouldn’t?), this Thursday, May 20, 2010, could be your day to shine.
American Express’ “Daily Wish” website will be offering the car for half price at an as yet unannounced time on a first-come, first-serve basis.
In a Recovery Act cabinet meeting yesterday, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Vice President Biden announced a large amount of research funding for three different types of advanced projects directly related to the future of transportation. The funding comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) stimulus funds and will go to 37 different institutions in 17 states.
The projects will attack three goals: using microbes and electricity to directly convert materials into biofuels (“electrofuels”), developing a new generation of low-cost, ultra-high energy density batteries, and creating revolutionary new carbon capture technologies to make coal power zero emissions.
In the last 3 years, car sharing services such as ZipCar have seen tremendous growth. According to some estimates, between 2007 and 2009 the industry saw a 117% increase in the number of users in North America. By 2016, that same study expects there to be 4.4 million car sharing users in North America and 5.5 million in Europe.
So it’s no surprise that the number of players in the car sharing world has been increasing at a breakneck pace. And now the next step in its evolution seems to be coming to fruition: renting your own personal car out to complete strangers for a price you set but through an online service that organizes the whole thing.
Known as personal car sharing or distributed car sharing, the concept is very intriguing… and runs somewhat contrary to how many people view their cars.
According to an AutoWeek article, Tesla’s Elon Musk says that the company will be unveiling an ambitious line-up of EVs over the next several years.
With the $50,000, 4-door Model S sedan already in the works for 2012, Musk says they have even more exciting plans for 2013 and 2014, including introducing 4WD to all of their vehicles and bringing an all-electric crossover to market.
Those of you familiar with the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” know exactly what kind of emotional connection former GM EV1 drivers had to their vehicles. The depth of their outrage and sadness when the EV1 program was killed off and their beloved cars recalled and subsequently crushed has led, in large part, to GM getting a bad next generation vehicle rap and inspiring a decided lack of confidence in their ability to make the upcoming Volt a success.
Recognizing that the final piece to moving forward was making peace with those disenfranchised EV1 owners, GM has has launched an effort to bring them back into the fold. In a kind of simultaneous homage to the past, mea culpa, and effort for atonement, GM is using the opportunity to show just how committed they are to making it work this time.
In a bid to increase capacity for the next generation of small-block, fuel efficient engines, GM has announced that they will be investing $893 million in upgrading 5 existing North American engine-related facilities.
According to GM, the move will preserve or create 1,600 jobs. The upgrades are necessary to meet the increasingly stringent fuel economy and emissions standards just enacted by the EPA.