(Source: Edmunds.com,  Green Car Congress & Federal Times)

Image Courtesy: via Apture

The US government’s General Services Administration (GSA) this summer took delivery of the first of more than 5,600 hybrid vehicles ordered earlier this year, and will make the vehicles—almost all of which are Ford Fusion hybrids—available to various federal agencies under GSA lease agreements as they are delivered.

GSA previously purchased 1,600 hybrid vehicles using revenue from the sale of older vehicles that agencies exchanged last year when they received funds for new vehicles through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009.

GSA director of Motor Vehicle Management Bill Toth noted, however, that each Fusion hybrid costs $11,214 more than the fleet’s “non-hybrid alternative” sedan, a 2010 Chrysler Avenger.

But due to the $11,214 hybrid premium of the fuel-efficient Fusion, Toth said, he doesn’t “know that we’ll see the numbers we’ve seen in the last two years continue at that pace without some sort of infusion of capital.

“They’re very expensive vehicles and when you look at meeting your mission … and one [vehicle] is $10,000 cheaper than the other, capital’s limited. It’s tough to make that jump,” he said.

Almost all of the hybrids the GSA purchased are 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrids , a mid-sized sedan that’s second in class in fuel efficiency only to the Toyota Prius. The Fusion get 39 mpg in combined city and highway driving and emits 4.8 tons of carbon dioxide annually, or 2.7 tons less than the nonhybrid version.

The vehicles will be placed in clusters near where manufacturers are delivering them to ensure that the vehicles can be serviced by mechanics trained in the new technology, Toth said.

Charging stations will be installed where the vehicles will be housed, and GSA is exploring the potential to partner with industry or other users to share the expense of installing the stations. GSA also hopes to pilot different energy sources for the stations, including solar and wind power in addition to standard electric power, he said.

Click here to read more.

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(Source: Free Insurance Quotes.org)

Can the U.S. replace 100 percent of its gas consumption with electricity? By this math, yes, we can:

Image Courtesy: FreeInsurancequotes.org

(Source: via Transportation Research Board Weekly E-Newsletter)

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has released a report that explores the components of plug-in electric vehicle infrastructure, challenges and opportunities related to the design and deployment of the infrastructure, and the potential benefits.

(Sources: Wired; RTTNews, Associated Press, The Detroit News GM Press Release)

Image Courtesy: GM

General Motors always dreams big, no matter how much money they have in their bank account.  Now that Uncle Sam’s treasury is backing up the financial future,  GM continues its tradition of dreaming big and the latest outcome of this is a future where people navigate crowded cities in big Segways that look kinda like a Dyson vacuum cleaner and can drive you home when you’ve had one too many after a long day at work. . Seriously.

Today, GM unveiled a trio of electric “urban mobility vehicles,” built with help from the über-geeks at Segway, today in Shanghai. They’re called Electric Networked Vehicles (EN-V) and they’re designed for cities bursting at the seams with traffic.  The EN-V, pronounced “envy,” is GM’s latest effort to burnish its credentials as a future-focused, environmentally friendly company and shed its image as the bastion of the gas guzzling Hummer. The automaker is in the process of winding down Hummer after a deal collapsed to sell it to a Chinese heavy equipment maker. The helmet-shaped two-seater vehiclesunveiled today in Shanghai will be now showcased at world expo 2010 to be held in Shanghai starting May 1 through October 31. The pavilion will be shared by GM with its Chinese partner SAIC Motor Corp.  There will be three models on display in Shanghai:

• Red – Jiao, or Pride – Created by designers at GM Europe, the vehicle was influenced by bullet trains and Chinese opera masks.
• Black – Miao, or Magic –  Sculpted by designers at GM’s Advanced Design Studio in California and influenced by the consumer electronics industry’s sleek, masculine looks.
• Blue –  Xiao, or Laugh –  Created by GM Holden’s designers in Australia, who took a more lighthearted approach to the vehicle’s “gumball blue” paint and nautical design.

Shanghai is the perfect place to show the funky runabouts because China is the largest automobile market on the planet. A lot of thought is going into figuring out how all those people buying all those cars will get around. Sixty percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2030 and there will be 2 billion cars on the road. Automakers are looking for ways to build cars that pollute less and take up less space.

Here are some interesting nuggets gleaned from the above sources:

• To that end, the two-seater concepts are about one-sixth the size of a conventional car.
• They’re made of lightweight materials like carbon fiber and weigh just 1,000 pounds apiece. GM says you can squeeze five of them into a single parking space.
• The 1.5 meter by 1.5 meter (about 5 foot by 5 foot) EN-V appears to build on GM’s earlier work with Segway Inc. in developing the Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (PUMA) concept vehicle. It will use the same types of battery cells as the Segway and the same battery supplier, Valence Technology Inc.
• The propulsion technique employed in the prototype was, however, introduced earlier by GM on its Hy-wire concept, introduced at the Paris Motor Show 2006.  The forward-thinking concepts build upon we saw last year in New York.
• Powered by Lithium-ion batteries and enriched with capabilities like dramatically smaller turning radius, the zero-emission vehicle is designed to travel at least 40 kilometers on a single charge.
• GM notes that the operating costs are one-fifth to one-sixth the price of a conventional motor vehicle and one-third to one-fourth the operating cost of a passenger car.
• The EN-Vs are super-connected. They’ll use GPS, distance-sensing technology and vehicle-to-vehicle communications to ease congestion and reduce the risk of accidents. GM says the vehicles can “sense” what’s around them and react quickly to obstacles or changes in driving conditions.
• There’s a motor in each wheel and a lithium-ion battery. It’s got “dynamic stabilization technology” so it can balance on two wheels, and GM says it can “literally turn on a dime.” It also says the vehicles have a range of 25 miles and a top speed of 25 mph, which it says is more than adequate for daily city driving.
• There will be an estimated 1.2 billion vehicles worldwide in 2030. That’s up from 844 million three years ago, according to the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association.
• People living in major cities will have a more difficult time commuting because in 20 years, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, according to GM.
• In major cities, 30 percent of fuel is wasted while drivers hunt for parking spots, which adds to the cost associated with operating vehicles.

Click here for some interesting pictures and a detailed scoop.  If you are interested in reading more about the concept and have the time to enjoy some cool videos that demonstrate the technology and vision, click here.

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(Source: Business Week)

NewDealDesign and Better Place teamed up to create a car recharging tower called the Charge Spot, and won themselves an IDEA gold award

One day, recharging stations for electric cars might be much more common than gas stations. If NewDealDesign has its way, they won’t look at all the same, however. The San Francisco design shop has teamed up with e-car venture Better Place to create the Charge Spot, an electricity outlet that received the gold medal in 2009’s International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA a.k.a. Industrial Designers Society of America). The slender and sleek column looks a bit like a sidewalk traffic barrier with a blue plastic top. Amit calls it a “mini-tower of electric power.”

NewDealDesign, founded and financed by Gadi Amit, its president, borrowed from its experience with consumer-electronics clients such as Dell , Fujitsu, Nokia, and Palm to create the Charge Spot.

Better Place’s goal is to have these electricity outlets built wherever people might park their cars for long stretches—parking lots, garages, and streets. Motorists would plug one end of a heavy-duty extension cord into the top of the Charge Spot and the other into a port on their vehicles. Within six hours, their cars would be fully juiced and good to go. Shown below is an awesome cool video, courtesy of YouTube, demonstrating how the technology works)

The tower also houses digital electronics for recording charges and billing motorists’ accounts. The Charge Spot team, drawn from NewDealDesign’s staff of 12 designers, removed hinges and doors from the first prototypes, simplified the display screen, and changed some internal components, reducing cost to about one-tenth of earlier designs, says Paluska. Each spot can also charge two cars at once.

Better Place, established by Shai Agassi in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2007, is trying to create the infrastructure for battery-powered cars. It is also working with Renault-Nissan to design a new electric vehicle. First-generation recharging fixtures were patterned after gasoline pumps, with a power cord instead of a hose. NewDealDesign chose a different model: chargers for portable devices such as laptops, cell phones, and iPods.

“We want to make the electric vehicle a normal, widespread car, not just for the ‘crazy’ green guy,” says Amit, 46, who started NewDealDesign in 2000. Better Place launched the Charge Spot last December in Israel, where 900 of a planned 100,000 have been deployed in preparation for the upcoming launch of its electric vehicle.  Plans are afoot for  massive, worldwide deployment of these charging stations in many car-huggng cultures, including the US, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Austrlia.

Click here to read the entire article.

Image Courtesy: Nissan via Tree Hugger

(Source: Tree Hugger)

In the days leading up to the unveiling of its flagship Leaf EV, Nissan also unveiled this contact-free charging technology. At the same demonstration where folks got to test drive the EV platform and took-in the iPhone interface, they got to see a working example of induction charging in action.  Induction charging is already a common technology in products ranging from electric toothbrushes and razors to kitchen cooktops and artificial hearts. Our friends at Tree Hugger have now published a nice article, offering the details of this wireless goodness. Here are some interesting details:

• Wireless charging works on the principal of electromagnetic induction, and when two coils (one on the ground and one under the car) come into proximity, a charge can be transfered from a power supply to the battery.
• It takes a few seconds for the primary and secondary coils to recognize each other, but once they do, the system could charge this small EV in three hours.
• Nissan engineers are certain the charging efficiency is as good or better than plugging in, and that induction charging is simple and cheap.

Earlier Tree Hugger reported that Nissan is not only investigating induction charging for stationary applications such as in a garage or parking spot but is also looking at embedding plates into roadways, so that battery powered cars could charge while driving. Induction charging certainly has a ways to go and many questions to answer: what will it do to other devices, are there health risks from long-term exposure, what if you have an artificial heart (which is also powered by induction), not to mention how much efficiency might be lost in transmission?

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: NY Times – Green Inc.)

Having shipped hundreds of electric vehicle charging stations, and with repeat orders now coming in from Europe, Coulomb Technologies, a privately-held Silicon Valley company, expects to be profitable by the 2010 introduction of the Chevy Volt, according to its chief executive, Richard Lowenthal.

(Mr. Lowenthal appears in the video above, explaining the company’s ChargePoint Network.)

“Our plan was to sell a thousand stations, but we will probably double that,” he told NY Times’ Green Inc. last week after the company secured its third Bay Area order this year. “Our company is structured to be profitable based on early adapters.”

Image Courtesy: Coulomb technologies

Founded in 2007, Coulomb is looking to crack the chicken-and-egg riddle that bedeviled the hydrogen fuel cell industry. Without a refueling infrastructure, consumers won’t buy vehicles. But no one invested in refueling stations without potential customers on the road.

“It is a very fundamental issue for the business,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “What do you do about the road trip?”

With electric vehicles, the additional problem is that in cities like San Francisco, where almost half of all vehicles park on the city’s streets, many potential buyers couldn’t recharge their cars overnight.

Mr. Lowenthal, a Cisco veteran who served as mayor of Cupertino, said that municipalities, parking companies and condo developers represent the first tranche of customers for charge points that will be deployed on city streets and in garages. They sell for $2,500 to $4,000 and can recharge an electric vehicle battery in four to ten hours.

In what might shape up to be the VHS/Betamax duel of the industry, a Coulomb rival, Better Place of Palo Alto, is looking to develop refueling stations where consumers on road trips can swap batteries in a matter of minutes. Still other companies are building rapid recharge points.

Mr. Lowenthal predicted the next three years would define the nascent charging station industry. By 2012, he said, the car industry will have an understanding of the early adoption rate for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office)

The U.S. transportation sector relies almost exclusively on oil; as a result, it causes about a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Advanced technology vehicles powered by alternative fuels, such as electricity and ethanol, are one way to reduce oil consumption. The federal government set a goal for federal agencies to use plug-in hybrid electric vehicles–vehicles that run on both gasoline and batteries charged by connecting a plug into an electric power source–as they become available at a reasonable cost. This goal is on top of other requirements agencies must meet for conserving energy.

In response to a request, GAO examined the:

(1) potential benefits of plug-ins,

(2) factors affecting the availability of plug-ins, and

(3) challenges to incorporating plug-ins into the federal fleet. GAO reviewed literature on plug-ins, federal legislation, and agency policies and interviewed federal officials, experts, and industry stakeholders, including auto and battery manufacturers.

Increasing the use of plug-ins could result in environmental and other benefits, but realizing these benefits depends on several factors. Because plug-ins are powered at least in part by electricity, they could significantly reduce oil consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. For plug-ins to realize their full potential, electricity would need to be generated from lower-emission fuels such as nuclear and renewable energy rather than the fossil fuels–coal and natural gas–used most often to generate electricity today. However, new nuclear plants and renewable energy sources can be controversial and expensive. In addition, research suggests that for plug-ins to be cost-effective relative to gasoline vehicles the price of batteries must come down significantly and gasoline prices must be high relative to electricity.

Auto manufacturers plan to introduce a range of plug-in models over the next 6 years, but several factors could delay widespread availability and affect the extent to which consumers are willing to purchase plug-ins. For example, limited battery manufacturing, relatively low gasoline prices, and declining vehicle sales could delay availability and discourage consumers. Other factors may emerge over the longer term if the use of plug-ins increases, including managing the impact on the electrical grid (the network linking the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity) and increasing consumer access to public charging infrastructure needed to charge the vehicles.

The federal government has supported plug-in-related research and initiated new programs to encourage manufacturing. Experts also identified options for providing additional federal support. To incorporate plug-ins into the federal fleet, agencies will face challenges related to cost, availability, planning, and federal requirements. Plug-ins are expected to have high upfront costs when they are first introduced. However, they could become comparable to gasoline vehicles over the life of ownership if certain factors change, such as a decrease in the cost of batteries and an increase in gasoline prices.

Agencies vary in the extent to which they use life-cycle costing when evaluating which vehicle to purchase. Agencies also may find that plug-ins are not available to them, especially when the vehicles are initially introduced because the number available to the government may be limited. In addition, agencies have not made plans to incorporate plug-ins due to uncertainties about vehicle cost, performance, and infrastructure needs.

Finally, agencies must meet a number of requirements covering energy use and vehicle acquisition–such as acquiring alternative fuel vehicles and reducing facility energy and petroleum consumption–but these sometimes conflict with one another. For example, plugging vehicles into federal facilities could reduce petroleum consumption but increase facility energy use. The federal government has not yet provided information to agencies on how to set priorities for these requirements or leverage different types of vehicles to do so. Without such information, agencies face challenges in making decisions about acquiring plug-ins that will meet the requirements, as well as maximize plug-ins’ potential benefits and minimize costs.

The recommendations are listed below:

• To enable agencies to more effectively meet congressional requirements, the Secretary of Energy should, in consultation with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), General Services Administration (GSA), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and organizations representing federal fleet customers such as Interagency Committee for Alternative Fuels and Low-Emission Vehicles (INTERFUEL), Federal Fleet Policy Council (FEDFLEET), and the Motor Vehicle Executive Council, propose legislative changes that would resolve the conflicts and set priorities for the multiple requirements and goals with respect to reducing petroleum consumption, reducing emissions, managing costs, and acquiring advanced technology vehicles.
• The Secretary of Energy should begin to develop guidance for when agencies consider acquiring plug-in vehicles, as well as guidance specifying the elements that agencies should include in their plans for acquiring the mix of vehicles that will best enable them to meet their requirements and goals. Such guidance might include assessing the need for installing charging infrastructure and identifying areas where improvements may be necessary, mapping current driving patterns, and determining the energy sources used to generate electricity in an area.
• The Secretary of Energy should continue ongoing efforts to develop guidance for agencies on how electricity used to charge plug-ins should be measured and accounted for in meeting energy-reduction goals related to federal facilities and alternative fuel consumption. In doing so, the Secretary should determine whether changes to existing legislation will be needed to ensure there is no conflict between using electricity to charge vehicles and requirements to reduce the energy intensity of federal facilities, and advise Congress accordingly.
• The Administrator of GSA should consider providing information to agencies regarding total cost of ownership or life-cycle cost for vehicles in the same class. For plug-in vehicles that are newly offered, the Administrator should provide guidance for how agencies should address uncertainties about the vehicles’ future performance in estimating the life-cycle costs of plug-ins, so agencies can make better-informed, consistent, and cost-effective decisions in acquiring vehicles.
• Once plug-in hybrids and all-electrics become available to the federal government but are still in the early phases of commercialization, the Administrator of GSA should explore the possibility of arranging pass-through leases of plug-in vehicles directly from vehicle manufacturers or dealers–as is being done with DOD’s acquisition of neighborhood electric vehicles–if doing so proves to be a cost-effective means of reducing some of the risk agencies face associated with acquiring new technology.

Click here to read or download the entire report.