Gas 2.0 |
- EV and Fleets: Electric Heat Hits the Streets
- Bearing Witness: Why A Small Film Called Crude Matters in a $27 Billion Lawsuit Against Chevron
- Electric Lambretta? Brilliant!
- X Prize Takes On GM’s 230 MPG Claims, Offers Free (and Fun!) MPGe Calculator
- Wood-Gas Truck At Last Week’s One-Gallon Challenge
- 7 Car Mods That Get 100 MPG Or More
| EV and Fleets: Electric Heat Hits the Streets Posted: 24 Aug 2009 11:59 AM PDT
Scanning the week's news of the leading fleet magazine, more than half the headlines are focused on automotive manufacturers including Toyota, Ford, Nissan and their commitment to greening of their fleets by moving to electric vehicle technologies. For example, Nissan plans to use a $1.6 billion U.S. loan to rework a Tennessee factory so that battery-powered cars can be manufactured there. Ford Motor Company said it has developed an intelligent vehicle-to-grid communications and control system for its plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that “talks” with the nation’s electric grid. Indeed it is exciting to read on a daily basis how much closer we are to the reality of EV's for consumers and fleets. Fleets will be the first mass adopters of EVs and PHEVs. We are already seeing businesses, government agencies, cities and countries across the world that are making significant and meaningful steps to reducing their fuel costs, our nation's dependence on imported fuel, and our carbon footprint by converting their gas guzzling and polluting fleets to eco friendly EV's…but what about the infrastructure needed to support such vehicles? Is there different technology needed to support EV fleets vs. consumer EVs? Just what are the needs of fleet managers when it comes to EV fleets? |
| Bearing Witness: Why A Small Film Called Crude Matters in a $27 Billion Lawsuit Against Chevron Posted: 24 Aug 2009 11:47 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website. During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients' story. Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch. The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile "cancer death zone" the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation. |
| Electric Lambretta? Brilliant! Posted: 24 Aug 2009 11:36 AM PDT
EV manufacturer Wheego has placed the ad above in this month’s issue of Scoot! Magazine, asking “the scootering community” to weigh-in on the concept of an electric Lambretta GP under the tagline “Brilliance or Sacrilege?” You’ve seen the title, so you know my vote already - but there’s more to it than that. My top 5 reasons a new electric GP200 from Wheego would be the brilliant-est EV ambassador since Tesla’s Roadster after the jump. |
| X Prize Takes On GM’s 230 MPG Claims, Offers Free (and Fun!) MPGe Calculator Posted: 24 Aug 2009 11:31 AM PDT
GM’s recent “230″ PR campaign (previously covered HERE and HERE) has certainly caused a lot of controversy, most of it centered on the fact that the EPA initially “backed away” from the automaker’s optimistic (?) Chevy Volt mileage claims. Despite the fact that the 230 mpg rating will likely stand (once GM gets a final-production Volt into the hands of the EPA, that is), so much attention has been paid to the matter that the good in charge at Progressive’s Automotive X PRIZE decided it was time to chime in, asking “Is MPG still relevant?” Short answer: No. Read the X Prize group’s long(er) answer, and learn about their proposed MPGe rating system, after the jump. |
| Wood-Gas Truck At Last Week’s One-Gallon Challenge Posted: 24 Aug 2009 10:37 AM PDT
No doubt many of you have read or heard about David Nichol’s woodgas F-150. I came across it during a media hailstorm a few months ago (which has since petered out). But while I was doing research on the One-Gallon Challenge, I saw that David’s truck was going to be participating. I gathered up my camera and notepad and my best friend (who I sort of tricked into coming) and took the drive to Greenfield Mass. last Wednesday night to get a look at this truck, and other fuel-sippers in person. I learned a whole lot more than I bargained for. |
| 7 Car Mods That Get 100 MPG Or More Posted: 24 Aug 2009 09:41 AM PDT Hand-built, eco-modified, and wood-powered cars raced across the Bay State this weekend driving 100 miles on just a single gallon of fuel. Aptly named the One Gallon Challenge, the event was part of a four-day long festival in Boston that celebrated clean technologies. Welcome to GreenFest 2009!
Garage-Built Car Gets 105 MPG, Cost $2,500 To BuildFrustrated with the price of filling up his Toyota, Jory Squibb built the Moonbeam. It has been to the Altwheels Festival in Boston twice and has traveled over 10,000 miles. It is powered by a 150 cc gas engine and carries two passengers “if they are on good terms,” he says. |
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