Carbon fiber doesn’t have remain in the realm of the high end race vehicles, it could come to mass production cars. Carbon fiber doesn’t have remain in the realm of the high end race vehicles, that is if GM and Teijin’s plan works out. Carbon fiber materials are stronger than…
GM to provide their fuel cell technology, which GM and BMW will jointly work on. BMW’s latest collaboration agreement on clean vehicle technology appears to be a deal with General Motors on fuel cell systems. The deal would give BMW access to GM’s fuel cell technology, and in turn they’ll…
Electric cars are more efficient and use less actual energy to move the same distance than do the gasoline cars, shows the Consumer Reports testing of Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf. On Thursday, Consumer Reports released figures from testing the Leaf and Volt showing that both have lower per-mile operating…
There are a pair of competing needs in America. One is for JOBS – the other is to transform the transportation system. Many are offering rehabilitation of the transportation system as the key to providing JOBS. The rush to create JOBS via infrastructure development could make us miss out on…
ExxonMobil predicts mainstreamed use of electrified vehicles by 2040 leads to efficiency improvements and a leveling off of emissions. The 2011 edition of ExxonMobil’s yearly Energy Outlook report predicts that by 2040, nearly 50 percent of light-duty-vehicles (cars) will be electrified (hybrid or electric). This mainstreaming of electrified light-duty-vehicles will…
In the wake of the, uh, firestorm over Chevy Volt battery fire safety, a group of Volt owners have published an open letter to GM saying they feel safe, and that GM will get their cars back over their dead bodies. There’s a little, if you will, firestorm concerning a…
At the core of electric cars is the electricity storage technology being used. Most commonly electricity is stored in chemical batteries, which store electricity as chemical bonds in a soup of specific elements. The key thing which is enabling the wave of electric vehicle advances is advances in battery pack…
The normalthink for air travel would have you driving to the airport, and paying long term parking fees, or else paying through the nose for a taxi/shuttle ride. There is another way, a way to avoid the costs or hassles by using public mass transit. It works even where I…
A group of children are playing with a ball. They lose control of the ball, and it rolls across the street. It’s an innocent daily occurrence sometimes resulting in a dead child, a driver facing criminal charges, outrage over a needless death, anguished parents, and so on. Who’s really at…
The other day Ford and Toyota announced a partnership to develop hybrid drive train technology for light trucks and SUV’s. That nice announcement filled my mind with images of contractors, construction workers and farmers driving around hybrid F-150’s or F-250’s starting in 2020ish. But then a couple brain cells…
According to a C|NET News report researchers in Louisana have researched the use of “Alligator fat” to produce biodiesel. This is yet another in a long string of researchers developing a method to convert animal fats directly into biodiesel. Some people will go “eeewwww” over this. While others might…
A group of researchers at the U of Michigan and Ford Motor have concluded there is sufficient resources of lithium for the next 90 years, enough to supply a large-scale global fleet of electric vehicles through at least 2100. Lithium is a key element in electric vehicle batteries though by…
It always seems that fuel cell cars are 5-10 years away. Honda to Put Hydrogen FCX Concept into Production in 3–4 Years So, to have the announcement be a 3-4 years time frame is very interesting. That short of a time frame indicates to me they’re getting the tooling and…
Back a few years ago when California was mandating zero-emission-vehicles with a hard deadline, the automakers came forth with a few models. As a rule the automakers did a piss-poor job of marketing them, but even so there was huge demand for the cars (long waiting lists, etc) but the…
Honda CEO Outlines Three-Year Powertrain Technology and Fuel Economy Targets: This is an article summarizing a presentation by Honda’s CEO concerning their plans for further fuel efficiency gains. For whatever it’s worth, it shows they (Honda) have a lot of positive focus on fuel efficiency and the “emissions” problem. (Have…
