Author: Nick Chambers

According to Edmunds.com’s Green Car Advisor blog, ever since the news about potential Prius braking problems broke in the mainstream media, shopper interest in the Prius on Edmunds.com has risen significantly. “Both consideration and purchase intent for the Prius have risen about 10 percent among car shoppers doing research on Edmunds.com since the Prius brake story became news earlier this week,” said John O’Dell in a post on Green Car Advisor.

Edmunds.com’s CEO, Jeremy Anwyl, speculated that the increased interest is due to bargain hunters hoping to cash in on an opportunity for a better price due to incentives or “distress sales.”

Whether or not this “increased interest” actually leads to increased sales of the Prius remains to be seen. As Anwyl points out, “We saw the same reaction from consumers when Chrysler and General Motors declared bankruptcy.” So far that increased interest hasn’t resulted in any increased sales for those two companies. But with Toyota, it’s a bit of a different story. Hundreds of thousands of people still trust in Toyota’s overall quality and wouldn’t bat an eye at a chance to scoop up a deal on a Prius.

What do you think, are any of you looking to cash in on Toyota’s current bad press?

Source: Green Car Advisor | Image Credit: Toyota

Last summer Chicago upped the ante on next generation EV charging stations with the nation’s first solar powered one, and now they’ve done it again, but this time with wind. For a town known as the windy city, it only seems to make sense, but how they decided to go after solar before wind is beyond me.

The players this time around are the same as the ones who made the solar deal go through: Coulomb Technologies has again supplied the charging equipment through their Midwest distributor Carbon Day Automotive. The station is located in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park and the wind power comes from a law firm that has partnered with MC Squared Energy Services to get all of their energy from wind.

Hal Emalfarb, one of the partners at the law firm who also drives a plug-in Prius conversion, said “By integrating renewable energy, in this case, the prairie winds of Illinois, to power our office and our cars, we have seamlessly accomplished the goal of a cleaner grid that leads to a reduction of greenhouse gases.”

Good on the windy city for taking the bull by the horns—or the wind tower by the blades, in this case.

Source: Green Car Advisor | Image Credit: Coulomb Technologies

Toyota’s certainly been having a hell of a time recently. Millions and millions of cars recalled, public relations disasters, seemingly aloof executives—the scope of the whole thing is so mind-boggling to me that it’s almost hard to imagine that this is the same Toyota I grew up with. So I’ll admit it, I’m a Toyota fan boy. My family owned way more Toyotas than anything else and my first car was an ‘84 Tercel hand-me-down I got from my parents.

But none of that stops me from objectively evaluating the company and judging for myself if there really is a reason to stop buying Toyotas. Certainly now that even their untarnishable Prius seems to be tarnishing, my trust in Toyota is more shaken than at any point in my life. On top of the stuck accelerator pedals, the Prius braking problems threaten to put a stake through the very heart of a car company that hundreds of millions of customers worldwide hold so dear.

But when I take a step back, I’m left wondering what this is actually all about.

Late last year I wrote a piece in which I questioned whether or not the current Toyota quality issues would actually translate to customer dissatisfaction or a cognizance of some bigger overall quality issue. In that post, I also talked about how if a flagship car like the Prius were to go down in flames it could irreversibly damage Toyota’s reputation. Well, based on what we’re all hearing in the mainstream media, it now seems that all of that is coming to pass.

But is it really? Is this whole situation more of a result of a disproportionate mainstream media feeding frenzy than a truly vast and conspiratorial implosion of Toyota? Truthfully I’ve been kind of disgusted by the foaming mouths within the mainstream media on this issue. Toyota’s been a quality brand for decades. This is the first time in what, 40 years, that anything serious has happened?

The vast majority of Toyota owners are still happy with their cars. And you know what? If it weren’t for Toyota, other automakers wouldn’t have had any impetus to make better cars. We wouldn’t have the super quality Fords of the last 3 years without the quality Toyotas of the last 40. Toyota has been a consistent innovator and has single handedly made hybrids a household word—something the world owes a great debt of gratitude for. Not only that, Toyota is on the cusp of using their market leverage with the Prius to spread the cult of hybrid across all market segments, from subcompacts to minivans.

Certainly Toyota has been kind of doltheaded in their slow-witted response to the current quality issues, but I feel like that’s more of a result of the fact that even Toyota themselves couldn’t believe they were witnessing a quality issue of this scope… just as to consumers, to Toyota execs it was unfathomable that it could be happening. Can you blame them? They’ve been bulletproof for decades.

But even though they were slow to start responding, the current level of response certainly has shown that Toyota wants to please their customers and takes safety seriously. And you know what, the braking problem with the Prius is not something singular to Toyota’s hybrids. It now turns out that Ford has quietly admitted design flaws in the new Fusion Hybrid brakes that they have subsequently issued a software fix for—just like Toyota.

These types of braking problems are a result of the fact that all cars are more and more dependent on software, and that hybrids present a special challenge with regenerative braking versus mechanical braking and when to make the switch between the two. It’s a balance between fuel efficiency and performance that hybrid designers are still tweaking. Of course, because Toyota has so many more hybrids on the road than any other manufacturer, their customers were the first to notice. And in case you missed it, Toyota’s already issued a software fix for the Prius braking problem, showing just how easy it is to tweak.

So what is it? Why are we so intent on tearing down a company that has been so good to us for so long? When it comes to quality issues, why would we expect a company with such a good track record to all of a sudden start building crappy cars? The fact of the matter is they aren’t. This is a bump in the road… A wake up call to Toyota that even they can mess up sometimes. In those immortal words, “This too shall pass.” Toyota is not crumbling. They still make good cars. If you have one that needs to be fixed, take it in to the dealer and move on. Ten years from now we’ll all be in love with Toyota again. Huggy, huggy. Kissy, kissy. And we all went down the road feeling warm and fuzzy again.

But seriously, I feel like something about this Great Recession makes the public hungry to tear down even our immortals. Tiger Woods. Toyota. It’s as if we, as a society, are so collectively upset that we’re worse off than we were 2 years ago that we want even the good guys among us to suffer just so that everybody is miserable. We can’t have anybody else be successful or better off than the rest of us now can we? This type of reactionaryism is so petty. For a rational guy like myself, it just makes me sick.

As for the mainstream media’s response to Toyota’s quality issues, it’s so obvious that they feel impotent when compared to the bloggers because the bloggers started covering these Toyota quality issues months ago. It’s as if the mainstream media has to make up for their growing redundancy with volume and quantity. Meanwhile, here I am, a blogger doing blogger work and I want nothing more than traditional media outlets I can depend on for well-reasoned and critical reporting—taking the blogger leads and sussing them out, not taking the blogger leads and making them louder and less informative.

A cornfield at dusk on the Great Plains (Photo: James Jordan/flickr)

Last year the U.S. produced 11.1 billion gallons of biofuel. Obama’s new plan states that by 2022, 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels will need to come from so-called advanced biofuels.

[Ed. Note: Yesterday, Tim Hurst over at Ecopolitology asked me to break down the recently released Obama administration plan to increase the amount of renewable fuels produced in our country from the current 11.1 billion gallons per year to 36 billion gallons per year in 2022. I happily obliged. The following is an excerpt from the post on Ecopolitology with a link at the end to read the full post.]

This decision has been a long time in coming. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) actually started the whole process. Until now, however, the strategy to get to the goals set forth in the EISA were terribly murky. With yesterday’s announcement, the Obama Administration has set clear goals to achieving the required 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. Last year the U.S. produced 11.1 billion gallons of biofuels. The new plan announced today states that by 2022, 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels will need to come from so-called advanced biofuels—biofuels that have at least a 50% reduction in GHG emissions when compared to their gas and diesel counterparts.

In addition to the 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels, requirements set forth by EISA dictated that any new renewable fuel facility constructed after enactment of EISA had to have at least a 20% reduction in GHG emissions when calculated on a lifecycle, cradle-to-grave basis—this includes any new corn ethanol facilities.

Read the rest of the post over at Ecopolitology…

Phill—Honda's home CNG refueling station

If a bill currently working its way through the Utah legislature becomes law, the installation cost of compressed natural gas (CNG) conversion retrofit kits in gas-powered vehicles would drop by about 57% in the state—from a current average of $14,000 to a much more reasonable $6,000.

CNG powered cars hold a ton of promise as an alternative to gas and diesel due to their extremely low emissions, low wear and tear on engines, low cost of fuel, and the abundant availability of natural gas from domestic sources.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the legislation came about as a direct result of frustration by Utah residents and lawmakers with the perceived burdensome regulations imposed on CNG conversion kits by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to CNG conversion advocates, the current EPA rules surrounding the kits are too stringent, leading to inflated prices and a dearth of kits for a tiny selection of vehicle models.

To get around the EPA rules, the proposed state law would create a process whereby a CNG conversion kit would not have to be certified by EPA to be considered a legal conversion. Instead the kit would simply have to be approved and installed by a Utah Division of Air Quality certified technician and checked for safety every 3 years or 36,000 miles. According to the bill’s sponsors, the law would make much less expensive kits available to a larger selection of cars. And, get this… apparently the EPA is okay with this approach!

As the bill’s sponsor, Republican State Representative Jack Draxler said that the main goal is to get as many clean burning CNG vehicles on the road as possible in a short time. “This winter we’ve had red-air days going into red-air weeks and … almost red-air months,” Mr. Draxler said in the Salt Lake Tribune article. “We will never get enough vehicles on the road running on compressed natural gas if we wait for the EPA.”

I’m generally resistant to taking pot shots at big federal agencies for a calculated political gain. I mean it’s certainly easy enough to bash an agency like the EPA for doing something wrong, but really the core problem lies with our ridiculously out-of-whack political process—part of which is due to our politicians making the very institutions we depend on look like idiots even though those institutions are simply implementing the laws the politicians created.

However, in this case it seems the EPA needs to re-evaluate their CNG kit policies… especially if a state can figure out how to get around the regulations and, in the end, the EPA is fine with that loophole. Just make the loophole the actual policy and problem solved. If this is a problem nationwide, it seems that Utah’s solution could be a template for other states looking for ways to reduce the emissions of cars already on the roads.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune | Image Credit: Nick Chambers

Over the last year, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has been aggressively seeking partners in their zero-emissions mobility quest—stitching together a veritable patchwork quilt of cooperators from a diverse variety of sectors. Now they can add one more feather in their cap in the form of a partnership with the All Japan Ryokan Association of hotels.

According to the press release, the partnership will not only seek to install charging stations in about 18,000 Japanese hotels, it will go further to promote such things as “eco” travel packages that include zero-emissions EV tours. The agreement also lays the groundwork to provide extended test drives to potential EV buyers as well as educate hotel guests on the “environmental performance” and “attractiveness” of EVs.

Certainly having a network of charge stations at places you are already planning on spending the night while on vacation makes a ton of sense. Given that Japan is so compact—with the largest island being only about 900 miles long from tip to tip—a network of 18,000 charge points would seem to more than satisfy the needs of a vacationer who was willing to take their time every now and then to recharge the cars’ battery. I mean really, that’s what vacationing is all about anyways, right? While you’re waiting for your car’s battery to recharge you could recharge your own as well.

Source: Nissan

Image Credit: Nick Chambers

A group of scientists from both the public and private arenas has announced that they’ve successfully engineered a microbe that contains all the bits required to turn raw plant matter directly into diesel without any refinement or intermediary steps required.

The microbe is a modified strain of E. coli (that’s right, the same type of bugger that’s responsible for some nasty gut infections) that has been enhanced to produce tailor-made diesel molecules, alcohols and waxes directly from hemicellulose—one of the main components of plants. Not only can the microbial products be used for fuel, but the team is also setting their sights on directly producing environmentally-friendly—and industrially-necessary—surfactants, solvents and lubricants.

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With a theoretical storage capacity more than 10 times higher than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, it’s no wonder lithium-air batteries are being touted as one of the types of batteries that could make electric cars truly mainstream.

Now, as part of a US Department of Energy program to provide large amounts of supercomputer time to advance cutting edge, real world research, IBM scientists are partnering with government scientists from both Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to model and develop the materials needed to make lithium-air batteries a reality.

The award provides up to 24 million hours of computer time on two of the world’s fastest supercomputers–which, you guessed it, are housed at the two national labs. To give you some perspective, this only represents about 1.5% of the total time available on both computers, but considering how many other scientists use these computers, the fact that one project got 1.5% of the total time is pretty amazing.

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In a move that clearly signals Toyota’s future intentions, the auto manufacturer, acting through an intermediary, has secured a deal with Argentinian lithium mining company, Orocobre, to supply a large amount of the lithium required for advanced electric car and plug-in hybrid batteries. The deal was shuttled through one of Toyota’s sister companies and main suppliers, Toyota Tsusho Corp, which is 22% owned by Toyota.

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