Brilliant… and everything about Tesla Model S sounds better when the narrator sounds like Jason Statham (or is it Jason himself narrating it?). A bit of research showed that it is a part of NatGeo (UK)’s Megafactories Show, which has a ton of more such awesome things.. Check out the program’s website.
Slowly but steadily coast-to-coast travel in an electric vehicle is inching closer to reality. Though not as ubiquitous as the gas stations on the highways and arterial, the growing number of charging stations indicate a big shift coming our way. An interesting data nugget – more than half of the nation’s 8,051 electric-vehicle charging stations have opened since 2012.
Data Source: Alternative Fuels Data Center, U.S. Department of Energy; Image Courtesy: Popular Science
Legend:
(via autobloggreen)
It is always an awesome sight to see how machines build another machine. As it happens, I can’t help but think if this venture succeeds, that would mark the first time Detroit really faced a serious challenge from Silicon Valley.. June 22nd, the announced delivery date for first batch of customers (other than the ones who got the Founder series) is just few days away and let’s see what is going to happen.. Hit or miss, you gotta love the boldness of Elon Musk to enter into this venture and fight the carmarking heavyweights of Detroit and other global auto industry powerhouses.
(Source: AASHTO)
Recently found this nice 62-page report on vehicle electrification via an AASHTO e-mail and felt compelled to share. Here are some excerpts from the AASHTO Journal:
Plug-in electric vehicles can lessen U.S. dependence on imported oil, address rising gas prices, enhance air quality, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but their full potential will only be realized through a broad-based group of stakeholders working together, concludes a report released Tuesday by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and co-sponsored by AASHTO’s Center for Environmental Excellence.
The report presents several recommendations from a coalition that includes automakers, electrical utilities, environmental groups, and state officials. Coordinated public and private actions at the state and local levels can help ensure that plug-in owners are able to more readily charge their vehicles without overburdening the electric grid, the report states.
Recommendations include encouraging state public utility commissions and other policymakers to set up a consistent regulatory framework across the nation to better synchronize technical standards; streamlining the establishment of changing stations in both home and commercial settings; leveraging electricity rate structures to promote charging at off-peak times; helping local policymakers and other stakeholders in the appraisal of needs in their jurisidictions; strategically targeting public and private investments in related infrastructure; and providing credible information on the costs, benefits, and choices involving plug-ins.
[scribd id=85636602 key=key-2n0xv981yvwrrne389q8 mode=list]
Whatever be the alternative, it has to get here quickly for two reasons — first is the economic factor (reliance on foreign oil is costing a lot for us) and the second is the environmental impact factor.. Glad to see the public and private sector working hand in hand to bring these solutions to the consumers.. I’m betting big on battery technology, which has the potential to revolutionize the way we travel.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Most research on renewable energy has focused on replacing the electricity that now comes from burning coal and natural gas. But the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the reliance on Middle East imports and the threat of global warming are reminders that oil is also a pressing worry. A lot of problems could be solved with a renewable replacement for oil-based gasoline and diesel in the fuel tank — either a new liquid fuel or a much better battery.
Yet, success in this field is so hard to reliably predict that research has been limited, and even venture capitalists tread lightly. Now the federal government is plunging in, in what the energy secretary, Steven Chu, calls the hunt for miracles.
The work is part of the mission of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, which is intended to finance high-risk, high-reward projects. It can be compared to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, which spread seed money for projects and incubated a variety of useful technologies, including the Internet.
The goal of this agency, whose budget is $400 million for two years, is to realize profound results — such as tens of millions of motor vehicles that would run 300 miles a day on electricity from clean sources or on liquid fuels from trees and garbage.
(Source: Washington Post)
It was dark and rainy, and the battery on his nifty Mini E electric car was almost gone.
Paul Heitmann rolled quietly through the suburban New Jersey gloom, peering through the rain on the windshield, not sure what he was looking for, anxiety turning into panic. He needed juice. He spotted a Lukoil gas station, which was closed, and beside the point, anyway. But beyond the pumps, there was a Coke machine, and it was lit up.
“I thought ‘Finally!’ because I knew if there was light, there would be electricity,” he said. “I managed to find the outlet behind the Coke machine and plugged in.”
As many of the auto companies tell it, next year may be the year that the massive U.S. auto industry really begins to go electric.
The all-battery Leaf from Nissan is scheduled to go on sale in November. General Motors will begin selling the Chevy Volt, a primarily electric car (with a small auxiliary gasoline engine that kicks in to boost the car’s range). Ford has plans to produce an electric commercial van. The Obama administration has doled out $2.4 billion to companies involved in producing batteries and other parts of electric cars.
“We have to get on with the electrification of our industry,” William Clay Ford Jr., chairman of Ford, said during a visit to Washington on Monday.
“I know we have to have an electric car,” GM Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. told reporters last week.
But overshadowing prospects for the transition of the vast U.S. auto fleet to electric — and the billions of dollars the automakers have invested in the switch — is the question of whether anyone beyond a sliver of enthusiasts will soon embrace the newfangled cars, which force drivers to rethink their habits and expectations of convenience.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: Time)
Q’Orianka Kilcher has never pumped a gallon of gasoline into her car. Never. Then again, she’s never owned a car that needed gasoline. You could say she is at ground zero of the ZE, or zero-emission, vehicle future.
A 19-year-old actress living in Santa Monica, Calif. (she played Pocahontas in the 2005 movie The New World), Q’Orianka (pronounced Quor-ee-anka) is on her second hydrogen-fuel-cell car, a Honda FCX Clarity, a four-door with a 200-mile range. “I don’t think I will ever buy a gas car,” she says. “I can go everywhere I want to go with this. Plus, it’s a guy magnet.”
Auto-marketing gurus take note: the brave new world of ZE cars is here, ready or not, and please make them sexy.
“ZEs are an entirely different paradigm,” says Stephen Ellis, manager of fuel-cell-vehicle marketing for American Honda Motor Co. in Torrance, Calif. Ellis manages the rare $600-a-month leases (including free hydrogen fill-ups) for the FCX Clarity. “Knowing how to integrate these new technologies into existing lifestyles and then building new infrastructures to make it work is the trick,” says Ellis. “It took a hundred years to create the gasoline infrastructure; this will be much faster.”
There are three types of zero, or near zero, emission cars: electric plug-ins, hybrid plug-ins and hydrogen fuel cells (which create power by having oxygen and hydrogen pass over electricity-generating electrodes). But each major automaker has its own take on which advanced technology will win 10 years down the road.
Nissan, for example, is pedal-to-the-metal with pure electric cars, having skipped fuel-cell technology altogether. It considers “interim hybrid technology,” like Toyota’s successful Prius, a mere passing phase. “The market-share winner will be the one that offers affordable, mass-market, zero-emission vehicles with a zero payback period for premium technologies,” says Mark Perry, director of the product planning and strategy group for Nissan North America.
In contrast to Nissan, Honda has passed up pure electrics, preferring instead to bank on lower-cost hybrids (Civic and Insight) and hydrogen fuel cells. Ellis, however, claims no distinction should be made between “FCs” and electrics, since a fuel-cell car is basically an electric car powered by hydrogen-created electricity.
Then there is Toyota, the 800-pound hybrid gorilla. Toyota has yet a third route to success: muscling up on its hybrid strength.
“We believe in not being first to market but being best to market,” says Mary Nickerson, who is in charge of advanced-vehicle marketing at Toyota Motor Sales, also in Torrance. Last year, Toyota reached the 1 million sales mark with its Prius hybrid (gas-powered with fuel-saving electric technology).
“Our strategy is to be the hybrid masters, no pure electrics, and to explore fuel-cell technology,” says Nickerson. “We feel it’s going to take a lot more than one technology to make this new market work.”
Some 21% of consumers will not consider a pure electric car because of the need to plug-in at home, according Nickerson. “We believe that 10 years out, the winners will be all new technologies, but hybrids will be the largest winner of them all.”
Then again, as Honda’s Ellis says, “It all depends on the price of gas.”
Click here to read the entire article.
(Sources: Seattle PI via Autobloggreen)
With more and more electric car makers ready to blitz the market with Plug-in Hybrids Electric Vehicles and Plug-In Electric Vehicles, it is time the local communities took a stock of the supporting infrastructure necessary for feed these voltage-hungry vehicles. The Seattle PI takes a look at the readiness of Seattle to handle the surge of electric vehicle. Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:
Is Seattle charged for electric cars? Local electric car boosters think so, event though electric cars — other than such hybrids as the Prius — have not captured the fancies of more than a few people in the past 20 years.
“There’s a perfect storm this time around,” said Steve Lough, president of the Seattle chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association, who drives a 2000 Honda insight gas-and-electric hybrid.
On Aug. 5, the federal government announced that it will provide almost $100 million to install roughly 2,500 electric vehicle chargers each in the greater metropolitan areas of Seattle, Phoenix, Nashville, Portland and San Diego.
Roughly $20 million will go to Seattle for 2,550 chargers, Read said.
About 40 firms, including Nissan and eTec, will match the federal appropriations. Local governments will not be required to provide matching money, Read said.
This experiment is timed with Nissan’s planning to sell a new electric car — the “LEAF” — in late 2010. It hopes to initially sell 5,000 cars evenly split among the five metro areas.
This timing roughly coincides with General Motors’ plans to put possibly 10,000 of its all-electric “Volt” cars on the market in late 2010.
By comparison, Seattle has the nation’s largest chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association — with 230 members.
Local owners said recharging electric cars lead to different habits from refueling conventional vehicles.
“You basically plug it in whenever you park it,” said Dan Davids, owner of a 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV and president of the nationwide Plug-In America organization.
Fulling charging a car with a conventional 220-volt installation could take four to eight hours. So-called “fast” chargers with extra oomph could take 15 to 30 minutes to do the same.
But local electric car owners said those figures are misleading.
These cars rarely need full charges with the accompanying long repowering times, they said.
Electric cars are usually charged nightly at their homes. If recharged at business locations, the new power mostly “tops off” a battery usually containing most of its original charge, they said. The same “topping off” would occur when cars would be recharged at businesses.
Between the small amounts of electricity and the lack of wear-and-tear on moving engine parts, they estimated it costs about 2 cents a mile to operate their vehicles.
The three are optimistic that a major hurdle to owning electric cars could be finally conquered — the initial price tag. The Tesla Roadster — with about 700 sold so far — goes for $109,000. Many models of electric cars have been in the $50,000 to $100,000-plus range. “You’re financing the research and development for the next generation of technology,” Morrison said.
The Volt’s expected price tag is about $40,000 with a federal tax credit of $7,500 earmarked for early buyers. The same tax credits will go to buyers of the first LEAFs, which are expected to go for $25,000 to $33,000.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: via Autoinsane)
Have you ever wondered while sitting inside your car at an automated car wash, what goes on behind the scenes to test and design a vehicle so that it doesn’t leak while your car is drenched with gallons of water? Or have you pondered driving through that pouring rain about how to stop that annoying sound of rain drops hitting the sheetmetal roof and the windshield? Here is a glimpse into that world of designing and testing a car for its “water worthiness”, courtesy of our friends at Auto Insane.
Development on the Chevy Volt continues to progress at neck-break speed and GM has been sharing bits and pieces of the vehicle’s testing and engineering along the way. This new video caught our interest for the sheer fact that it combines the “electric” Volt undergoing leak testing in GM’s Universal Water Chamber.
