At The Long Tail Pipe, we’re all about clean energy stuff and getting into the middle of technology to understand how to improve all our lives. With that in mind the last couple months I’ve been studying how to do solar design, and recently wrote a resource page on…
Tesla Motors electric cars use a proprietary charging plug. Adapters are available from Tesla Motors allowing owners of their cars to use public charging stations built with standard charging plugs (J1772, Mennekes, CHAdeMO). Tesla Motors is also deploying charging stations, both fast charging and destination charging, to locations around the…
Toyota today announced their 2016 Toyota RAV4 lineup, and instead of reinstating the RAV4 EV (as many of us want Toyota to do) the company added a RAV4 Hybrid to the line. It means Toyota now has eight hybrid cars in its complete car line. While this results in a…
The Obama Administration has (finally) rejected the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, in a hollow victory for environmentalists who’ve staged this as a key battle in preventing climate catastrophe. While this is an important victory, other news from today’s news feed demonstrates that the oil companies plan to simply take the…
Electric Vehicle adoption should make a big contribution to reducing the urban heat island effect, significantly lowering temperatures in big cities during the summer, causing a large decrease in electricity consumption because there’ll be less need for air conditioning. That’s the claim of a research paper published in Nature in…
In a statement today from BMW’s top management, the company said clearly – electric vehicles are the future. Oh, and “digitalization” meaning the integration of advanced computer systems and networked connections into cars. The statement by Harald Krüger is attributed to a quarterly conference call dated Sept 30, 2015. As we’ll see…
The first Tesla Model S theft in Canada results in a quick capture of the thief, thanks to technology built into the car. The car’s owner had been at a concert with a friend, but found the car missing when they returned. Using a smart phone app for the car…
Poking around the Plugshare & ChargePoint maps it’s clear that a long-awaited West Coast inter-city deployment of fast charging stations has begun. Last January, ChargePoint, BMW and Volkswagen jointly announced a project to deploy two strings of fast charging stations, one on the West Coast the other on the East Coast.…
Earlier this week Nissan unveiled a preview of its autonomous car technology with the Nissan IDS. Now, according to the Daily Kanban website, it’s likely that large chunks of the IDS will make up the 2018 Nissan Leaf. The writer of that piece, Bertel Schmitt, was invited to…
How good is the Tesla Autopilot feature? This feature was rolled out to Tesla Model S owners over the last couple weeks, and marks a large advance towards fully autonomous vehicles. Since then some Model S owners have posted videos of the autopilot system doing amazingly good things, and also…
At the 2015 Tokyo Auto Show, Honda showed the Clarity Fuel Cell car that’s planned for production and lease-only deliveries starting in March 2016. According to Honda, the new Clarity FCV gives all the convenience of existing gasoline cars but it’s a fuel cell vehicle and therefore has zero…
Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller announced today five steps that Volkswagen will take to rehabilitate itself from the Dieselgate scandal. In reading through the proposal, I don’t quite grok how it’s going to fix the problem. There are some aspects which may help, but nothing in this indicates that upper management…
An issue raised our investigation of the Dieselgate scandal is whether independent researchers are allowed to investigate the inner workings of our cars. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was originally enacted to protect the music industry from wholesale copying of digital media, but its application was broadened to protect software…
Yesterday, Nissan unveiled a bold new concept car fulfilling the “zero emissions zero fatalities” promise made a couple years ago. It’s an all-electric car with self driving autonomous features galore. Its story is told with an enticing image gallery and a series of video’s demonstrating usage scenarios that aren’t quite the challenges…
Bob Lutz is prognosticating the death of Tesla Motors, saying the company is badly run, its costs are too high, it should be working through dealers, it should add a plug-in hybrid model, and oh-by-the-way he likes Elon Musk. Coincidentally, I see from my calendar that in exactly one…
