Toyota’s Chairman, Takeshi Uchiyamada, all but confirmed my suspicion from a few weeks ago – Toyota is planning to stick with Hybrid technology and wait for the next generation of battery technology, or fuel cells, before making a big push in vehicle electrification. Speaking last week at the Economic Club…
Last night we drove a fair way to visit with some relatives who are in town. It was far enough that I wanted to do a bit of recharging to ensure enough safety margin in the battery pack to make it home. According to the EV charging station map in…
Opening the door to transportation fuels other than gasoline or diesel means considering not just electricity, but other fuels, like natural gas. I personally want to see electric vehicles because that’s the best long-term solution. However there’s an aspect to this where the companies that supply other energy sources, like…
BMW says it is planning to make plug-in hybrid electric versions of every car they build, following the BMW i3 and BMW i8 with a plug-in hybrid version of the newly revamped BMW X5 SUV. Speaking at the Australian launch of the BMW X5 this week, BMW’s head of production…
At first blush it seems ludicrous to think GM would be afraid of Tesla Motors. GM manufactures a zillion vehicles a year, has operations in dozens of countries, and a long history of automobile and truck manufacturing. But, in an interview with the Detroit News last week, it seems that…
Nissan as well as Tesla Motors is pledging to develop autonomous driving. In Nissan’s case the pledge is to develop a “commercially viable” autonomous driving system by 2020 and to marry this with their pledge for zero emissions. The two pledges together are “zero emissions” and “zero fatalities”. The technology…
As I noted a couple weeks ago, Tesla Motors is looking to hire engineers to develop automated driving features for their cars. That was based on finding a job posting that flat out said, Tesla looking to develop autonomous driving. Since then the job posting caught the attention of the…
Tesla Motors recently filed for a patent on a hybrid battery pack design that enables joining metal-air and lithium-ion battery cells into one battery pack, to implement a much larger total energy capacity and therefore a longer driving range. The idea is “just” a patent at this moment, and metal-air…
It’s been a long time since Americans have thought of Farmers Markets as a normal way to buy food. On my recent trip to Eastern Europe I had the chance to experience Farmers Markets in a different way, with huge market operations that are open every day as opposed to…
In early August I noticed a job listing on Tesla’s Careers area looking for RADAR expertise in the kind of systems (LIDAR etc) used in autonomous vehicles. Now the company is flat out looking for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Controls Engineer to develop fully autonomous driving. I’ve written up…
The Scion iQ EV exists after all, and is going to be used in a car sharing program in Pleasanton CA. A few days ago I’d asked whether Toyota is going to be canceling its electric vehicle programs, thanks to a press release playing up their hybrid cars, portraying fuel…
A significant demonstration of electric vehicles at a charging station interacting with smart grid protocols was just made, showing significant vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities. First – it’s talking about a new DC fast charging station that uses the SAE Combo Charging system a.k.a. SAE DC Fast charge. This is the newer…
Hydraulic Fracturing is what’s allowing us to keep the game of modern civilization going for a while longer without fearing the effects of Peak Oil. Fracing (a.k.a. Fracking) has made it possible to tap otherwise uneconomical oil and natural gas supplies and get fossil fuels out of them. Without Fracing…
You may have heard – there’s some sabre rattling in the Middle East, and this time there’s a serious risk of International War thanks to multiple countries deploying naval forces into the region, and the U.S. trying to act as a quasi-unilateral police force. President Obama is threatening the Syrian…
Audi A3 e-tron Sportback plug-in hybrid We don’t really think of Volkswagen as producing any kind of electric car, despite having shown a few electric concept cars. However the Volkswagen group includes some other companies like Audi and Porsche, and between the companies they’ve been making some interesting moves towards…
