All may not be as it appears with Jeremy Clarkson's test of the Tesla Roadster for Top Gear.
As we mentioned yesterday, Clarkson raved about the EV's sublime acceleration, but ultimately decided the Roadster doesn't live up to the hype because the two cars Tesla sent over for the test ran out of juice after 55 miles, needed 16 hours to recharge and broke down.
Or did they?
Solar pioneer Greg Johanson set a world record for the fastest speed in a sun-powered car way back in 1986. That car, Sunrunner, has since been retired and its solar array relegated to some California rooftop, but Johanson is still building cars fueled by the sun. Now you can too.
Johanson and the guys at Solar Electrical Vehicles will slap a solar panel on just about anything, and they've developed a DIY kit for the Toyota Prius that he says provides up to 20 miles of range and boosts fuel economy up to 29 percent. The company is testing its first solar energy system exclusively for hybrids in four "PV Prius" prototypes and a "PV Highlander."
"Designing solar modules to be hooked up to cars has always been one of Greg Johanson's pet projects," company spokesman Billy Bautista tells us. "He has now finally developed that idea, and SEV hopes to be making sales deliveries by early next year."
Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson beat the snot out of a pair of Tesla Roadsters, and while he was blown away by the EV's ungodly acceleration and technological prowess, he ultimately decided the car looks better on paper than it does on the track.
Clarkson couldn't contain his glee as he stomped on the accelerator for the first time, exclaiming "God Almighty!" as the Tesla smoked a Lotus Elise off the line. "Not bad for a motor that's the size of a watermelon," he said. The car's ample acceleration - 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds - was enough to make him forgive the car's somewhat clumsy handling, something Clarkson attributed to the huge battery pack.
Things were going swimmingly until the cars ran out of juice after 55 miles, needed 16 hours to recharge and broke down. That was it for Clarkson.
"The Tesla is an astonishing technical achievement - the first electric car you might actually want to own," he declared. "It's just a shame that in the real world, it doesn't seem to work."
Like a friendly foreign embassy in an unstable land, the Swedish government came to the rescue of two fellow countrymen with cold hard kronor for carmakers Saab and Volvo. Far from a bailout, the Swedish aid comes with some assembly required.
The Wall Street Journal's Ian Edmonson calls the 28 billion kronor ($3.44 billion) aid package "a lifeline" for the two carmakers (who together employ more than 150,000 in Sweden) but fears the bailout "may not be enough to ensure their long term survival." Should Ford finally sell Volvo or GM dump Saab, neither company is attractive enough to survive without a strong foreign owner. Right now, China's Changan Auto Group looks like a likely buyer for Volvo, while Saab might go to BMW, Renault or Tata.
We'd hate to see Nils Bohlin's legacy dashed by bad moves in Detroit, but we think it seems unlikely if Saab and Volvo get matched up with the right buyers. Saab could add further quirkiness to Renault, act as an in-house front-wheel drive foil for BMW, or complement Tata's Jaguar as an entry-level luxury brand. If Changan ends up buying Volvo, the partnership might assuage the fears of American buyers wary of the Chinese car industry's downright lousy safety record.
Continue reading "Sweden Rescues Volvo and Saab from Fjord and Generål Mötors Woes" »
December 15, 2008 | 4:25:44 PMCategories: Concept Cars, Electric Vehicles, Fuel Cells
Hybrid? Electric? Hydrogen? Why choose when you can have all three?
Mercedes-Benz has developed a modular design that can accommodate a gas-electric, battery electric or hydrogen fuel-cell drivetrain in a compact five-seater it calls Concept BlueZero. By using a common architecture based on the A- and B-Class subcompacts, Mercedes says it can diversify its drivetrains without developing a slew of new models.
"Our modular system allows different drive configurations for every customer requirement," says R&D chief Dr. Thomas Weber. "The modified sandwich-floor platform provides the perfect basis for a wide range of electric drive systems."
Although the three BlueZero cars coming to the Detroit auto show in January are just concepts, they are guideposts to the company's future. Mercedes says it will produce its first fuel-cell cars "on a small scale" next year and offer a "small-scale production" of EVs in 2010.
As if there weren't already enough evidence proving regular exercise is good for you, a new study suggests ditching the car and walking, riding a bike or using mass transit can help prevent obesity.
In what might seem like a "Duh!" moment, David Bassett of the University of Tennessee and John Pucher of Rutgers University found a strong link between "active transportation" and obesity rates in 17 industrialized nations.
"Countries with the highest levels of active transportation generally had the lowest obesity rates," Bassett and Pucher conclude in the study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. "Walking and bicycling are far more common in European countries than in the United States, Australia and Canada. Active transportation is inversely related to obesity in these countries."
Nowhere is this more obvious than the United States, where 12 percent of the population walks, rides a bike or takes mass transit, and as many as one in three people are obese.
NEW YORK - Hybrids are finally hitting the water, proving electricity and water do mix.
The 145 Hybrid from Scout Boats combines a 20-horsepower Yamaha outboard engine with two 36-volt Lenco Marine motors to create what Scout calls the industry's first fiberglass hybrid vessel.
The 14 1/2-foot fishing boat is one of several green vessels getting a lot of attention at the New York National Boat Show, where there's an entire section called the "Green Zone" showcasing eco-friendlier boating technology, from hybrids and electrics to environmentally conscious and EPA certified cleaning products.
Continue reading "Scout Brings Gas-Electric Power To The Water" »
NEW YORK - Retire the filthy two-stroke outboard motor hanging off the back of your boat and go green(er) with an electric motor so small it fits in a backpack.
The Torqeedo Base Travel 401 electric motor featured at the New York National Boat Show is just the thing for dinghies or small sailboats. The 12-volt motor uses a lithium-manganese battery that provides one hour of travel. When the battery dies, simply remove it from the motor for recharging or bring the whole motor with you - it weighs just 25 pounds.
Continue reading "Torqeedo Motor Makes for a Greener Dinghy" »
Of all the reasons people gave for opposing the latest automotive bailout bill, the dumbest came from an aviation-industry trade group that said the legislation "sets a bad precedent" by requiring the Big Three to — gasp! — fly commercial.
The National Air Transportation Association objected to a minor point in the bailout bill (which was since rejected by the Senate) that would have required the Big Three to surrender their corporate jets. It was a moot issue because the automakers had already decided to get rid of their planes, but that didn't keep association President James K. Coyne from freaking out. He called the no-jets proviso "an unreasonable restriction" that could deliver a crushing blow to America's general-aviation industry.
"The aviation businesses represented by NATA will all suffer financially if Congress approves this legislation with its underlying precedent that the use of private aircraft by corporate America is not acceptable," Coyne warned ominously in a letter to Senate leaders.
And how, exactly, would general aviation suffer?
Continue reading "Oh No! Big 3 Bailout Would Ground Corporate Jets" »
Apparently averse to using the word "pimpable" in a press release, voting members of the automotive media selected the Ford Flex and F-150 as the Special Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Design Awards most "accessory-friendly" rides for 2009.
Far from being a badge of factory-built inadequacy, the SEMA award is proof to potential buyers that their car purchase has customization potential that's only limited by their own creativity and finances. "Anything that can increase or improve the multidimensionality of a truck or SUV gives the owner that much more reason to keep the vehicle," said Truck Trend editor Angus MacKenzie. "There will be big opportunities for those who can give a big personality-changing bang for a truck owner’s buck."
Even though this particular group of writers didn't get the chance to vote on the contenders, we're not at all surprised about the choices. A low-slung slab-sided box like the Flex has been the ultimate automotive canvas since the '50s, and Ford has twisted the F-150 into more special and limited editions than even the Danbury Mint could manage.
Tired of sitting in traffic doing glute squeezes to no avail? Wish Carlates provided a better cardio workout? Then check out the Gym Car. This human-electric hybrid packs an entire health club into a single seat.
The cockpit of the Gym Concept is stuffed with exercise machines that charge the batteries and keep that carbon-fiber body (the car's, not yours) rolling. We have no idea how he did it, but designer Da Feng managed to get a step machine, rowing machine, bench press, pull-up simulator and weights into the car's tiny confines.
It's practically a Gold's Gym but without the Old Joe tank tops.
British steampunks have successfully tested a steam-powered car they want to see race across the California desert at 170 mph. They aim to break a record that has stood for more than a century.
The British Steam Car made several low-speed runs last week before uncorking the car's 12 microboilers and 360-horsepower turbine Thursday. There's no word on how hard driver Dan Wales pushed the car, but early reports indicate everything went well.
The campaign continues a British tradition for speed that dates from the 1920s and '30s, when Sir Malcolm Campbell set several records on land and sea. Of course, speed is a relative term in a steam-powered car. The goal is to hit 170 mph, which is nothing for a Ferrari but more than enough to shatter the record Fred Marriott set in 1906 when he reached 127.659 mph behind the wheel of a Stanley Steamer Rocket.
A buck seventy is nothing compared to the the current land speed record of 763.035 mph, but the challenge is no less daunting. Engineers are trying for a modest speed, but the technology they're using is no shrinking violet.
Continue reading "British Steam-Car Team Sets Sights on 170 mph" »
Aspiring scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period. There isn't much of an application for it, but it sure is cool to look at.
While the map may look complex, Dr. Karl Rege tells us he and his team found it surprisingly simple to assemble using data readily available on the internet.
"We used a commercial website called FlightStats to gather global flight and schedule information," he says. "So there was no need to contact the different airlines."
The team mined FlightStats for the departure and arrival times of every commercial flight in the world, then plugged it all into a computer to assemble their simulation. For the sake of simplicity, they assumed every plane traveled at the same speed and every flight took the most direct route to its destination. Then every flight was assigned a position on a Miller cylindrical projection, which is similar to a Mercator Projection but doesn't distort the poles so much.
"After that we drew it, that was it," Rege says. "It was that easy. We are astonished that nobody did it beforehand."
Well, others have done it, but on a much smaller scale...
Continue reading "Video Shows Every Flight on Earth in 72 Seconds" »
The Big Three aren't the only ones having a tough time of it. The German auto industry is in crisis too.
Sales in Germany have crashed to their lowest level since 1990, so automakers are halting production and shutting down factories to save money. BMW and Daimler have seen their stock plunge 25 percent and are doling out "extended vacations" to employees. Even Volkswagen, which has a strong product line generally regarded as best suited for surviving the crisis, has extended the Christmas break by five days to cut costs. The situation is hardly comparable to what's happening in Detroit, but still the outlook for German car manufacturers isn't good.
"Export and production will drop significantly," Mathias Wissmann, president of the German Association of the Auto Industry, told Reuters. "The situation on global passenger car markets is dramatic."
Unlike Washington, Berlin has so far refused to step in, and some say its refusal to grant significant aid to ailing industries is exacerbating the problem.
The summer of 2008 will go down in iTunes history for the record number of iPhone apps released that addressed the high cost of filling up. Now that fuel prices are lower than Rod Blagojevich's approval rating, the remaining apps must fight for survival.
We predict that App Cubby's Gas Cubby (links fixed!) will outlast competitors. Its cost-tracking features and maintenance reminders are of great importance to those trying to squeeze every last mile out of their cars before trading them in -- not to mention those people who just enjoy keeping track of things. "Our app may have been a bit more popular in July, but overall we're doing quite well," App Cubby founder David Barnard told Wired.com. "It seems as though the high gas prices of this last year have permanently changed the way most people view transportation."
Want to see how much your last oil change cost? It'll be there. Total cost of ownership? It's in a tally at the bottom of the screen. "Since we were already collecting odometer data to calculate MPG, it seemed quite obvious to use that data to trigger the maintenance reminders," Barnard said. We like that feature best, mostly because we'd rather a reminder to have our car inspected come from our iPhone's screen than from a police officer's pen.
Continue reading "Gas Cubby iTunes App Will Survive Low Fuel Prices" »
The European Union is miles ahead of the United States in making airlines pay for their pollution, proposing all sorts of taxes, fees and a carbon trading scheme to curb emissions. Airbus and the European carriers absolutely hate it and haven't been afraid to say so. Their objections have largely been ignored, so they're starting to issue threats.
Emirates has been making the most noise. It recently told delegates at an emissions trading summit in London it would be forced to throttle back its expansion into Europe and may cut routes should the EU insist on including commercial air travel in its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Low-cost carrier Ryanair and others warn that putting the screws to their industry could have "devastating" effects on regional airports and "devastate" tourism.
ETS would force polluters to pay for excessive emissions by purchasing credits from cleaner companies. Backers of the proposal say it would add just a few Euros to the cost of an airline ticket. Not so, says Andre Parker, head of public and environmental affairs at Emirates.
"All our modeling shows that on a typical flight from Dubai on our most popular routes to Paris, Frankfurt, and London, the price we would have to pass will be 10 times that amount, closer to 30 Euros," or about $38, he told GreenAir Online.
Continue reading "EU Emissions Rules Have Airlines Threatening To Pull Out" »
If the Big Three want Uncle Sam to bail them out, they might have to put up with a nanny looking over their shoulders as they try to turn things around.
The latest word out of Washington is Congress and the White House are inclined to throw Detroit a $15 billion lifeline, but the plan includes the appointment of a federal "car czar." The autocrat — who, depending upon the final plan, would act independently or as the head of a board of financial experts — would have broad authority to reshape the automakers. Detroit is so desperate for cash that it's willing to let Washington put someone in the driver's seat if it means they'll stick around past the holidays.
Several reports put Kenneth Feinberg, the attorney who doled out $7 billion as special master of the Sept. 11 Victim's Compensation Fund, at the top of the list of candidates. He's made a career out of mediating complex disputes, and although he drew some criticism for his handling of the 9/11 fund, he also won support for his adept management of what was a difficult task.
If he doesn't want the job, we have some suggestions of our own.
Researchers from the University of Warwick and Harvard Medical School have proved what anyone who has tried to close a deal from behind the wheel already know: Intense conversations are a dangerous distraction for drivers.
Warwick's Dr. Melina Kunar (above) and Harvard's Dr. Todd Horowitz examined the response times of test subjects engaged in conversations and found that they made significantly more errors and were markedly slower than those who were focused on the task at hand. The problem wasn't the phone itself, but the fact that the subjects were distracted by their conversations.
"Our research shows that simply using phones hands-free is not enough to eliminate significant impacts on a driver’s visual attention," Kunar said, because for all our love of Bluetooth headsets and speaker phones, we humans simply aren't biologically advanced enough to drive and talk simultaneously. "Generating responses for a conversation competes for the brain’s resources with other activities which simply cannot run in parallel. This leads to a cognitive 'bottleneck' developing in the brain."
That's the same kind of bottleneck that forms behind you on the highway after you rear-end a car while yammering away on your hands-free.
When new hybrids from Ford and Honda roll into showrooms this spring, drivers will find flashy dashboards that turn hypermiling into a videogame.
Ford and Honda's next-gen instrument clusters feature trees (a vine in Ford's case) that grow more lush as drivers learn to hypermile — the fine art of maximizing fuel economy. Leaves grow like crabgrass in springtime if you use a light touch on the accelerator and go easy on the brakes. Drive like Jimmie Johnson and they'll wither faster than General Motors stock.
The idea, says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, is "to help drivers improve their efficient driving skills by making the hybrid experience more fun and rewarding."
It's easy to dismiss the LCD displays as gimmicks — and some have — but we're going see more of them. Auto designers, academics and industry watchers say it won't be long before everyone's offering green gauges in an effort to make us all greener drivers. Some automakers are even thinking about using emerging technology in in-car internet development to let people compare stats and compile "top score" leader boards to make green driving a social activity.
"That kind of eye candy has huge appeal to consumers," says Eric Noble, president of The Car Lab, an auto industry consulting firm. "They'll provide huge amounts of information regarding fuel economy. There already are prototypes that are 3-D."
Continue reading "Next-Gen Dashboards Teach Leadfoots How to Hypermile" »
Japan wants to make recharging electric cars as easy as filling a gas tank. The country is hosting the EV evangelists from electric-vehicle startup Better Place, encouraging them to build battery-exchange stations that might bring cars with cords into the mainstream.
The California company joins Subaru and Mitsubishi in helping the Japanese government get on the road toward toward its goal: half of all cars sold by 2020 will be electric. The pilot program announced Tuesday will allow consumers to swap depleted batteries for fresh ones easily when they don't have time to plug in. Limited to municipal fleets, the program is the first step toward electrifying Japan's vehicle fleet.
"Better Place is honored to participate in this groundbreaking program in a country with so much auto-manufacturing expertise," said Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur behind the venture. "Japan is moving one step closer to the next-generation, Car 2.0 model of electric cars fueled by renewable energy."
The deal comes one week after Hawaii said it will work with Better Place to roll out as many as 100,000 EV charging spots by 2012. Better Place demonstrated the technology for the first time Monday in Israel, and the first battery exchange stations could appear in Japan early next year.
Continue reading "Japan Moves to Become Electric Vehicle Testing Ground" »
EDITOR: Joe Brown | email
Autopia Blogroll
tomfoolin’ : jalopnik
straight-up : autoblog
green : autoblog green
two-wheeled : hell for leather
propaganda : gm fastlane
inside baseball : the truth about cars
energy : the oil drum
detroit : detroit news online
rambling : auto extremist
curmudgeonly: cranky flier
fanboys : gmvolt.com
more green : green car congress
airborne : Flight Global
hybrid : hybrid car blog
space : bad
astronomy
dangerous : danger room
smart : boing boing
30,000-feet-green: greenair online
peeps: WiSci
Stay connected with Wired Mobile Tech News, Gadget Reviews, and Special Offers - all delivered to your mobile device.
web sites:
