A couple years ago, the VW Group promised that by 2018ish VW would be a electric vehicle major player. With the Audi e-tron quattro concept electric SUV, and the Porsche Mission E, and the VW e-Golf, we may be seeing the opening stanza’s in what may become a fully electrified automotive…
Tonight was the second of the 2016 Republican Presidential Candidates debate. While I didn’t watch it in person, it appears the R’s were just as insane as one would expect. Bernie Sanders, a candidate on the Democrat side, live-tweeted the debate using the #DebateWithBernie hashtag. It was great – and…
Porsche is joining its sister company, Audi, in unveiling a concept car that’ll be called a “Tesla Killer” by the press. The Porsche Mission E, as it’s called, is aiming at the luxury sports car side of the Tesla Motors appeal. With the Mission E, Porsche is promising specs which…
A month ago Audi announced preliminary information on the Audi e-Tron Quattro concept car, an all-electric SUV with a 300ish mile electric range. The press went goo-goo thinking that Audi is launching a Tesla-killer, when in fact this car (if it goes to production) will be several years behind the…
Along with details on the 2016 Nissan Leaf, Nissan published a video showing us details of the battery pack factory in Smyrna Tennessee. This video happens to show construction of the new 30 kiloWatt-hour battery pack, which we know simply because of the shape of each module. And it happens to…
Syria’s fossil fuel resources are dwindling fast, making that country an unattractive place to fight a war over crude oil supplies. Yet, a war is being fought over the future of Syria, and a side effect of that war is the huge refugee crisis in Europe. Earlier I’ve made the case…
At a tactical level the high drama of the Refugee crisis in Europe is caused by many in Europe refusing to take in the refugees. It might simply be the cost of supporting refugees once they’ve arrived, or it might be racism. As I’ve written over the last couple days,…
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke in Prague (a very beautiful city) today saying “What NATO as an organization is doing is to address the root causes of the migrant crisis.” That sounds cool, but reading on in the radio.cz report it’s clear that Stoltenberg’s idea of addressing root causes will…
Today, the competition for longer range electric cars just heated up Nissan announced details on the 2016 Nissan Leaf. Thanks to a 30 kiloWatt-hour battery pack in the 2016 Nissan Leaf SV and SL, the Leaf now has the longest EPA certified electric car rage, 107 miles, of anything short…
This week Toyota unveiled the 2016 Toyota Prius at a large press event in Las Vegas. The catch phrase pushed by Toyota, “Beyond Possible”, makes me wonder why Toyota is so stuck on Hybrids and not moving forward into the future with battery electric vehicles. Sticking with their tried-and-true puts Toyota not…
Refugees from wars in Syria, Yemen, North Africa and elsewhere are suffering unimaginably. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, some making it as far as Europe, some drowning at sea, others stuck in war-torn areas for one reason or another, all of them bereft of home and livelihood. In…
I’m learning about Bitcoin and now know that it’s not a piece of techno-fluff that won’t amount to anything. It has serious technical depth, and the capability of transforming the monetary system. Maybe. One possibility is to solve for the supposed necessity of charging station networks. If applied correctly, Bitcoin based charging…
Russia and Europe just signed a pair of deals that will bolster Russia’s presence in and influence over Europe. One deal is an asset swap with chemicals giant BASF that had earlier been delayed because of political pressure, and the other is an expansion of the NORD STREAM gas pipeline…
Until now the only electric car to have caught on fire in the wild was the Tesla Model S. In that case road debris punctured the battery pack, short circuiting some cells, causing a fire, in two situations. A couple other Model S’s were in extreme wrecks, such as torn…
This week Pres. Obama is visiting Alaska ostensibly to push for Climate Change awareness as part of his Administration’s push on mitigating the threat with new policies like the recently announced Clean Energy Plan. While the Obama Administration has enacted a bunch of great ideas for renewable energy, increased fuel…
