Dear Visitors,

Some of you may have noticed the lack of activity on this site in recent weeks. I feel the need to let you know why.

The Great Recession is causing much pain around this great country. Millions of Americans are unemployed through no fault of their own. Many millions more are under-employed, forced to accept pay and hour cuts. I am very fortunate to still have my job, however, some of my now former co-workers are not as lucky.

I used to have the luxury of being able to update his site on slow days, during my lunch hour, or at home when the day is done. Unfortunately, staff cuts have increased my workload to the point where I have almost no time or energy at all to give this site the attention I feel it deserves. I’m hoping things turn for the better sooner, rather then later. But for the time being, I have several more pressing matters that require all of my attention.

America has a responsibility to lead us all out of these hard times, and the good news is I think we finally have the right people making the hard decisions to make that happen.

My thoughts are with all the families struggling to make ends meet. Better days are ahead.

Thank you for visiting, please check back regularly. I intend to get things going again as soon as I can. After all, once an addict, always an addict.

~joe

via autobloggreen:

It’s been a few years since we’ve seen electrified versions of the Campagna T-Rex, a 3-wheeler with a 1,352 cc four-cylinder engine with nearly 200 horsepower. In late 2007 at the Electric Vehicle Symposium, a company called Silence Inc. showed off an electric vehicle based on the T-Rex called the PT2 that was capable of hitting over 125 miles per hour with a range of 125-250 miles.

Similarly, a company called Optamotive has entered the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize with another electric Campagna T-Rex. Codenamed Surge, this 3-wheeled vehicle doesn’t quite manage the same type of performance as the aforementioned gas-powered T-Rex, but in this case, we’re more interested in the the 150 mile per gallon equivalency that the team expects to achieve.

Boasting over 100 horsepower from its electric motor, which is fed a constant stream of electrons courtesy of a lithium ion battery pack, Optamotive estimates its EV can hit 60 mph in under 10 seconds and travel over 100 miles on a single charge.

via autobloggreen:

There’s just 45 days until the running of the world’s first zero emissions motorcycle time trial, and a number of the teams that plan to compete in the Isle of Man’s carbon-free Grand Prix are hard at work testing their creations. One such machine, the Mission One from Mission Motors, has recently been testing at Infineon Raceway in California, and here’s a series of images to prove it. Good news: everything looks exactly as we’d expect from this potential front-runner.

Judging from these shots, the electric bike is obviously being ridden hard, and that bodes well for its chances at the upcoming event. The rider seen in these shots is Tom Montano, a man with 25 years of motorcycle racing experience who also happens to hold the title as the fastest American to ever lap the famed Isle of Man time trial.

via wsj.com:

Chrysler LLC will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Thursday, President Barack Obama said, kicking off what the administration predicts will be a 30- to 60-day restructuring of the third-largest U.S. auto maker.

At the same time, Chrysler entered into a partnership with Italian auto maker Fiat SpA, Mr. Obama said in a noon address. Mr. Obama said the partnership would not only let Chrysler survive “but to thrive.”

The U.S. government will provide up to an additional $8 billion in aid, including up to $3.5 billion in so-called debtor-in-possession financing, to ensure Chrysler survives the historic reorganization process.

The administration had hoped to keep the car maker out of court but decided it was the only option after a deal to cut the company’s debt was rejected late Wednesday by several of the company’s lenders, a senior administration official said.

President Obama said that Chrysler has been “a pillar” of the industrial economy but that the company moved too slowly to adapt to a changing market.

An administration official said Thursday a “stronger” Chrysler would emerge “with a balance sheet and a set of liabilities that are sustainable.”

“Our goal is to have this bankruptcy be short and completed quickly,” with a stronger Chrysler emerging, the official said. “The court in New York has a vast amount of experience in this area and we felt that that would be the most effective.”

In exchange for the aid, the U.S. government will take a “small equity” stake in the new company, which will be partly owned by Fiat. According to a White House fact sheet, the U.S. Treasury will hold 8% of the reorganized company, while Fiat would hold 20% and the governments of Canada and Ontario would receive 2%.

The U.S. government would have the power to appoint board members at the new company but would not get involved in day-to-day operations, the administration official said…

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Read the entire article.

via autobloggreen:

Details are still very sketchy, but it appears that Phoenix Motorcars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, April 27th. Not surprisingly, the global economic downturn is cited as one of the main reasons for the filing, but another major contributing factor was a recent $5.3 million arbitration apparently won by former drivetrain supplier UQM.

We’ve placed two separate calls with Phoenix Motorcars, which have so far gone unanswered. If we do happen to hear something back, we’ll be sure to share it with our readers, but we’re not holding our breath.

Assuming this is all accurate, which does seem to be the case, we’re not terribly surprised by the news. Still, we hope that the struggling automaker is somehow able to land on its feet.

via autobloggreen:

Tesla Motors’ charismatic frontman, Elon Musk, will be showing up on the Late Show with David Letterman tonight to dazzle America’s TV audience with his gorgeous all-electric sedan. Tesla says that when the Model S goes on sale at an undefined point in the future, the cost for the base model will be just under $50,000 – $49,900 to be exact – after a $7,500 government tax break. Business Insider has a word for that: Horsefeathers.

BI teamed up with Mark Boyadjis, an auto analyst at iSuppli, and they did some math based on actual numbers used in the auto industry and a lot of educated guesses. The result? They didn’t exactly find a lot of room for profit if the car sells for $57,400. Their math is based on at least one error – they say the replacement battery for the Roadster is $36,000, but that’s a carry-over mistake from Edmunds – it’s actually $30,000. Still, that’s the equivalent to the base price of an entire “near luxury” sedan – one that conventional automakers have trouble making margins on. That big, sexy touchscreen? Estimated to cost $4,000. Add everything from chassis and body panel costs to in distribution, marketing, further engineering, and lest we forget – building a factory, and Musk’s price target starts to look more and more implausible.

BI has a good point here – Tesla needs to be careful with their pricing predictions. The ambitious startup made big financial mistakes when pricing the original Roadster – which didn’t make everyone happy – and there’s not a lot of room left to goof up a second time.

UPDATE: TESLA RESPONDS:

Wild guesstimates from ostensible experts unwilling to identify themselves have little credibility. Perhaps the biggest flaw in their alleged reasoning is that Tesla has the same cost structure as an enormous automaker; in fact it’s probably the leanest and most efficient in the industry.

via popularmechanics:

When Tata Motors teased the market with a car powered by compressed air, the buzz around the Web was palpable. The momentum continued when Zero Pollution Motors told PM that it expects to sell the world’s first air-powered car in the U.S. by early 2010. Now the AirPod, ZPM’s three-person working prototype, has made global headlines. The company plans to market the vehicle to tourist destinations in the U.S. So what is all the fuss about an air-powered car? CO₂ emissions. Or more precisely—a lack thereof. 

The company’s name, Zero Pollution Motors, alludes to the perception that its cars run on air and nothing but air—and wisely so, as that’s its big sell. A tiny car powered by compressed air probably isn’t all that highway friendly, and the AirPod isn’t likely to get you much farther than the distance of the average commute (if that). But the prospect of a radically low-emission vehicle is appealing to automakers, given increasing political pressure to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in a sector that accounts for about 28 percent of all greenhouse gases in the United States. (Only the electric power industry produces more emissions than transportation.) Of course, air needs to be compressed and stored before it can be used to power a car—and that requires electricity. And right now, in the U.S., that electricity comes predominantly from coal. 

So is using the grid to compress air and, in turn, run an engine any more efficient than a hybrid’s gas-electric powertrain or even a conventional internal-combustion engine? We crunched the numbers on six vehicles that already have solid environmental bragging rights to find out. Note that this is, in no way, a cradle-to-grave comparison. It takes an enormous amount of energy to build a car and all of its components as well as transport that car to its dealer—not to mention to dispose of it at the end of its lifetime. And, let’s be clear, the vehicles with conventional powertrains are vastly superior in terms of real-world capability. But there is evidence that the air car, should it make production, might be a superstar when it comes to reduced CO₂ emissions. Let’s take a closer look…

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Bold text my emphasis.

via economist.com:

BEING green can be expensive, as any driver of a Toyota Prius can tell you. The car is a hybrid, combining an electric motor that powers it at low speeds in the city with a petrol motor that is useful for accelerating and cruising at high speeds. It is the most efficient car sold in America, but it costs upwards of $22,000, a price that can wipe out the savings on fuel. One reason for the price is that the car contains expensive batteries. Another is that the transmission system had to be completely redesigned. But there may be a cheaper and altogether simpler way to make a hybrid that avoids this—using air power instead of electricity.

Using compressed air to power a car has one obvious disadvantage: compressed air has a low energy density, so the stored energy gets used up quickly. However, in urban driving, this may be more than compensated for using regenerative braking. One of the most important roles of the batteries in a hybrid is to store energy recovered when the car brakes. The idea with a pneumatic hybrid is to store this energy as compressed air. Such a vehicle would run on petrol but would use its reservoir of compressed air to boost the power when needed. This would not demand a serious redesign, because every car already has a makeshift air compressor in the form of the engine itself. Building a pneumatic-hybrid car would thus be relatively cheap.

When the driver of a pneumatic-hybrid car applied the brakes, the fuel supply to the engine would be shut off while the pistons that normally propel the vehicle would help to slow it, pumping pressurised air into a tank as they did so. According to Lino Guzzella of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who has built a prototype pneumatic-hybrid engine, this sort of set up could reduce fuel consumption by 32% compared with a normal engine. It would thus offer 80% of the fuel savings of an electric-hybrid vehicle at a lower price.

Using this set up would also allow smaller, more efficient engines to offer the “driving experience” of the large engines currently used. These engines are large so that they can accelerate a vehicle rapidly: their power is not needed for pootling along. It would be more efficient to have small engines that used turbochargers to provide the extra power for acceleration. Today’s turbochargers, however, take several seconds to deliver the extra oomph. In a pneumatic hybrid engine, compressed air could act as an immediate turbocharger, forcing more air into the combustion chamber during acceleration. This would allow more fuel to be burned (since there is more oxygen available to burn it with) and would thus generate power for acceleration…

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