Author: Nick Chambers

At the 2010 New York Auto Show today Hyundai unveiled its brand new 2011 Sonata Hybrid Bluedrive. The car will be Hyundai’s first hybrid offering when it goes on sale later this year.

Sporting a bunch of firsts on a mass market hybrid including a set of next generation lithium-polymer batteries and a 6 speed automatic transmission, the Sonata Hybrid is a true competitor right out of the gate. As a full parallel hybrid, the Sonata can operate solely on its electric motor or its combustion engine, or a combination of both.

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With the 2011 Lincoln MKZ, Ford has officially entered uncharted territory: competing against Lexus luxury hybrid dominance.

Today, at the 2010 New York Auto Show, Ford officially unveiled the previously rumored Lincoln MKZ Hybrid. Touting its expected 41 mpg city fuel economy and a laundry list of standard features, Ford claims the MKZ Hybrid is a much better value than its closest Lexus competitor, the HS 250h.

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Over a morning conference call for just a few members of the media — of which I was happy to be a part during my layover in Seattle on my way out to the New York Auto Show — Brian Carolin, Nissan’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, spilled the long-awaited pricing beans on the upcoming Nissan LEAF electric car.

Contrary to some of the recent rumors, at a base price of $32,780 it is relatively affordable… so affordable, in fact, that, after the $7,500 federal tax credit, Nissan is able to offer the LEAF for a lease price of $349 a month not including generous state incentives. When you add in some of those — like a $5,000 tax credit in California, up to $6,000 in Colorado, $5,000 in Georgia, and $1,500 in Oregon — all of a sudden you might be talking a final price of around $20K.

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The Detroit News is reporting that “according to people familiar with the company’s plans,” Ford Motor Company’s Lincoln brand will use its press conference at the NY Auto Show this week to unveil a luxury hybrid Lincoln MKZ based on the same hybrid platform as the Ford Fusion Hybrid.

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Today FedEx took the wraps off of its latest alternative vehicle endeavor, unveiling four purpose-built electric delivery trucks for the US market. The four EVs will enter service in the Los Angeles area this June and will take their place among 1,800 other alternative-fuel and -propulsion FedEx vehicles that the company currently has deployed and in testing around the world. (more…)

For the second year in a row, a student team from Laval University in Canada has won the prototype category of the Shell Eco-Marathon competition in Houston, Texas. Last year the team achieved a mind-blowing 2,757.1 mpg, and this year — even with the addition of an actual street driving challenge — the team still managed to pull off 2,487.5 mpg with their Alerion Supermileage combustion engine powered vehicle (pictured above).

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GM had already planned three variants of the upcoming, and fuel efficient, 2011 Chevrolet Cruze — an LS, LT, and LTZ — the same labeling scheme that Chevy has for lots of its vehicles. But Chevy plans to unveil yet another Cruze model at the New York Auto show this week: the Cruze Eco.

Using a variety of innovative techniques, including a 1.4 liter Ecotec engine, various aerodynamic improvements, weight saving features, and low rolling resistance tires, Chevy claims to have squeezed at least 40 MPG out of the Cruze Eco on the highway.

Having broken the 40 mpg barrier, GM is using these stats to claim “the Cruze Eco delivers hybrid-like efficiency without the price tag.” That’s according to Jim Campbell, Chevy’s vice president of marketing. (more…)

Some interesting tidbits are coming out of the American Chemical Society conference in San Francisco this week. First we heard about a product made from renewable materials that could substitute a large portion of the crude oil currently used to make tires.

And now comes word from a scientist at the University of Orleans in France that he has constructed a compact, relatively inexpensive, low tech plasma gasifier that can take all sorts of waste materials and turn them into a variety of different drop-in fuels, including diesel, gasoline and kerosene.

The plasma gasifier is based on what is known as “gliding arc” technology. During the process, a gliding arc of electricity creates a plasma inside the reactor. The plasma then creates a cauldron where low temperature chemical reactions can occur that change waste materials such as used cooking oil or agricultural biomass into clean fuels.

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Hyundai’s Sonata Hybrid — the first hybrid from the company to reach market — will be unveiled next week during the New York Auto Show. We’ll be covering that live, so watch out for more info, but in the meantime, Hyundai has released a teaser shot of the completely redesigned front end.

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In the ongoing saga of California’s embattled “Cool Cars” regulations that would have been finalized on May 7 of this year, the public safety argument has trumped the environmental argument.

The regulations — which would have required automakers to put a layer of reflective material on most of the glass in cars to reduce air conditioner use and increase fuel economy — first came under a barrage of fire from half a dozen or so public safety, police, and transportation associations claiming the reflective layer would disrupt everything from tracking of GPS-braceleted criminals, to dropped 911 calls, to an inability to track EZ-Pass customers. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) followed up on this criticism by sheepishly saying it would reconsider the impending final rules.

And now CARB has decided decided to scrap the “Cool Cars” rules entirely and start over from scratch trying to to get the various stakeholders to buy in much earlier in the process.

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There are about 1 billion tires made each year; each and every one of them uses 7 gallons of crude oil to produce. Although 7 billion gallons is just a small blip (0.5%) of the overall global annual use of crude oil (~1.3 trillion gallons), figuring out a way to make tires from something other than crude oil will, nonetheless, clearly help us in our goal to a sustainable transportation future.

At the American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco yesterday, Joseph McAuliffe, a scientist from biotech company Genencor, announced that he and his team have discovered a method to produce one of the key ingredients for tires from sugars derived from sugarcane, corn, corn cobs, switchgrass and/or other biomass.

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According to a report on the Top Gear website, the much-anticipated Infiniti performance electric car won’t arrive until 2014. This comes even after previous suggestions from Nissan that we might see it as early as 2012. Top Gear is also reporting that the Infiniti EV will be based on the Nissan LEAF platform but have completely different styling and upgraded performance.

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Already the largest market in the world for sustainable, cost-competitive ethanol production, Brazil may be setting its sights on another interesting biofuel: biodiesel made from the leftover entrails of the Tilapia farming industry.

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Luxury and supercar makers the world round are trying to find ways to remain relevant in a world ever more obsessed with going green. Ignore, for a moment, that all the luxury and supercars sold each year make up an insignificant fraction of all cars sold worldwide and that somebody who has $300K to plunk down on a car likely doesn’t worry about how fuel-efficient their new car is.

The fact of the matter is, in the wake of the econopocalypse, luxury and supercar makers have faced some of the worst sales numbers ever and even their largely real-world insulated clientele are starting to show a preference for sustainable technologies.

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This ain’t yo daddy’s Flux Capacitor. A “stealthy” (read: “completely unheard of” — stealthy would imply actively trying to stay under the radar) itty-bitty start-up company from down under has come up with an in-wheel electric motor that might just make electric cars the outright kings of speed.

The “Axial Flux 3-Phase AC Induction Wheel Motor,” as Evans Electric calls it, not only has an important sounding name, its inventors are coming up with some pretty ballsy claims that cars equipped with them could get from 0-60 mph in under 3 seconds. That’s the kind of acceleration that could, quite literally, rip your eyeballs from their all-important perch in front of your brain.

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Nissan, looking for a way to trim production and development costs, is reportedly in talks with Daimler AG — the parent company of Mercedes, Smart, and others — to trade their coveted electric car tech for diesel and V-8 gas engines as well as develop future green automotive technology.

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From the moment it was unveiled to a surprised world at the Geneva Auto Show, the 918 Spyder concept super-eco-sports car has been building a head of steam to actually reach production. The 78 mpg, 0-60 mph in 3 seconds, plug-in hybrid certainly has built up a large cult following in the few weeks since its introduction. I don’t think Porsche will have trouble finding the firm orders necessary to make a case for building it.

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“World’s cheapest car” it’s been called, and unquestionably the Tata Nano has brought about a revolution in India. In carving out a niche as an affordable, simple, and incredibly fuel efficient car for the average folk in poorer nations like India, it has also sparked a change within the global auto industry to the point where Toyota, Nissan, Ford and many other major players are now trying to compete with the Nano in this new ultra-cheap minicar segment.

But along with that, the Nano is also, quite literally, sparking something else: Over the last year, a list of Nanos that have an apparent bad habit of spontaneously combusting has been growing in India — the latest one involving a minutes-old Nano being driven home by its proud new owner. And as you can see in the above pic, that car is toast.

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The whole EEStor/ZENN saga is getting so ridiculous that I often find myself debating whether or not I should even cover it anymore. The (so far) mythical EESU energy storage unit that’s supposed to revolutionize personal mobility by providing instantaneous charge times in a lightweight “battery” that can take a car 700 miles on a charge has yet to see the light of day.

EEStor missed its deadline of introducing a working EESU to the world by the end of last year. When that happened I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it. It just seemed, well, pathetic.

Now ZENN Motors, the company with a huge stake in EEStor, has said they have “successfully” ceased actually building cars and laid off 15 people so that they can stop bleeding cash. All of their eggs are now in the EEStor basket.

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On the heels of an announcement that Chrysler will be releasing an all-electric version of the Fiat 500 in the US in 2012, the company has also just let drop that the US Department of Energy (DOE) will be giving them up to $48 million to build a test fleet of 140 Ram plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs).

Chrysler claims that these Ram PHEVs will get up to 65% better fuel economy than a standard Ram pickup and have 20 miles of electric-only driving range.

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