Gas 2.0

I know we have a lot of readers from Southern California. Sure the weather is great, and the people are generally friendly, but for me it is just too crowded and congested to ever call home. Plus, for such a progressive place, there is a surprising lack of good public transportation. Then again, California has been making big strides towards electric and hybrid vehicles, whether en masse or one municipality at a time. Give credit where credit is due, I always say.

Much credit is due the Foothill Transit authority, which serves Pomona and San Gabriel. They have, at great expense, purchased two all-electric buses and charging stations from Proterra, an electric vehicle startup.

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This summer I was lucky enough to be able to drive across the county and visit 29 states and dozens of different cities. One city that really stuck out to me though was Portland. It was young, hip, and, although cool in its own right, was not at all my scene (I’m a country boy through and through). What really stuck out to me about Portland though was the traffic, or lack thereof. See, Portland has a rather complete public transportation system, which includes a lot of streetcars.

The streetcars have been a success for Portland, and other cities are taking notice. Combine that with changes to the Department of Transportation’s new guidelines for building public transit, and we could see a real streetcar renaissance.

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Energy giant Shell International has signed binding Agreements with Brazilian company Cosan to begin forming a new, $12 billion joint venture project that would see Shell develop sugar can ethanol and new, “next-generation” alternative fuels.

More on what this project means for the future of biofuels, after the jump.

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That dangerous-looking propeller/catamaran thing?  It’s taking a team of 11 researchers on a trip that will cover 3,600 miles of the Antarctic surface as part of the (awesomely named) Moon Regan Transantarctic Expedition.

That thing is pointy, loud, and fast… and you know you want one.  Find out more about this biofuel-burning ice-rider, after the jump.
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The EPA is considering a new fuel economy sticker for new cars and trucks sold in the US that gives consumers more information about their new car’s environmental impact, and they’ve posted an interactive “walk-through”on the EPA website.

More about the new stickers, and why they will spark insane shouting matches, after the jump.

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I have a rather positive outlook on diesel engines, especially compared to many of my older contemporaries. To me diesels, are powerful, efficient, and sound a good deal cooler than most gasoline engines. Many older car buyers today though think of diesel engines as smoky, smelly, cranky old engines like those from the 1970’s and 80’s.

My how times have changed. Mazda, an automaker that prizes itself on its youthfulness, is considering adding a diesel engine to the Mazdaspeed 3. A diesel-powered performance hatchback for the youth, you say? Sign me up!

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In general, once you’ve bought something new, its value tends to sink the moment you take it out of the box. For a new car, the value plummets as soon as you drive it off the dealership lot. It’s called depreciation, and with cars it is especially brutal. That shiny new car you just bought for $30,000 might be worth less than $25,000 after just a week of ownership. With very few exceptions (like vintage muscle cars), most cars suffer a steep drop in value almost immediately.

This may go doubly true for electric cars it seems—at least in Europe. Mitsubishi has put out a chart to the BBC which suggests that the higher up-front costs of an electric car, plus the increased depreciation, mean in the long haul it could cost a lot more than a petrol powered car. Now why would they do that?

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All the energy we could ever want and ever need comes from the sun. The trouble is that harnessing that energy en masse is extremely difficult given the low efficiency of current solar panels and the huge amount of area needed to harvest the sun’s power. While many people have paid out of pocket to install solar cells on their roofs, when it comes to powering transportation, we are still a long way off from driving on sun-power. Yet it seems like every day brings a new innovation.

Enter the Solarve; it’s basically a public bus with solar cells attached to the roof, it makes enough energy to power the interior lights. It is also the world’s first public transportation bus to be equipped with solar cells.

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It is hard to believe that is had been over a year since Chrysler and GM went into bankruptcy filings. Both companies have shed a tremendous about of debt, obligations, and in GM’s case, four car brands. Only in America, right? So with all that taxpayer money, you’d think we’d see some genuine innovations in terms of hybrid and electric vehicles, especially when it comes to pickups. A hybrid pickup sounds great, especially for your average small business owner, where every buck counts.

Here we see proof of taxpayer money being put hard at work, as Chrysler tests out its Ram Plug-In Hybrid pickup truck in Death Valley. Guess what? You can’t buy it. Ever. It is part of a small “demonstration fleet,” with no plans to sell such a vehicle to the general public.

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Detroit News writers recently got the chance to test-drive one of Honda’s new, “fun to drive” CR-Z hybrid coupes. They wrote about their experiences, and (after they got done calling Americans overweight and shallow) they told us about Honda’s new CR-Z and its chances in the US market.

They were wrong.

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So far as I know, not many people from my generation want to be astronauts. It used to be the other way around; everybody wanted to be an astronaut. While getting strapped to a giant rocket and shot into space sounds appealing, living in cramped quarters with a half-dozen other human beings for months on end doesn’t sound like much fun.

NASA engineers have, however, figured out how to maximize space and efficiency, and those efforts could help us down here on earth. One NASA engineer took his expertise and built himself a funky little travel trailer called the Cricket.

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O Canada! Land of Maple trees, Maple syrup, and of course, the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, 13 time Stanley Cup champions. It is a vast, sparsely populated country, where the people sing show tunes with their crazy bobbing heads (at least according to South Park). The vastness certainly presents a challenge to anybody trying to cross such a huge country, and that goes doubly so for anyone with the gusto to cross it in an electric vehicle.

Yet that is what a group of students from the University of British Columbia are doing. They left Vancouver last week in their electric 1972 VW Beetle. Now that’s some moxie!

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According to reports, Mercedes will introduce an all-electric version of its A-Class compact car at the 2010 Paris Auto Show in October. The A-Class E-Cell, as it’s called, will be made in a limited run of 500 units, mostly aimed at testing, and will start production early next year. Initially the car won’t be sold in showrooms, but will find its way into the hands of fleet customers and other customers that have shown an interest in plug-in vehicles.

As previously rumored, after significant investment by Daimler in Tesla, the two companies have developed the A-Class E-Cell in conjunction. In fact, it seems that most of the impetus behind the A-Class EV came from incessant and persistent pushing by Tesla to make it happen.

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New Holland’s revolutionary ZEV NH2 tractor will be making its North American debut at next week’s Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa… but it’s much more than a static concept: it’s a fully-functional prototype of (what New Holland hopes will be) the farm tractor of tomorrow.

More – including  pictures and videos – after the jump.

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Last time I reported on the topic of using termite guts to make next generation cellulosic ethanol cheaper and easier, it was 2008. Back then a team of researchers from the University of Florida had just started on the path to analyzing the more than 7,000 genes associated with the production of special enzymes within the termite guts that can break down woody fibers so that the termites can digest them and use them for energy.

This process that goes on in the bellies of hundreds of millions, perhaps trillions, of termites all around the world, day-in and day-out—a process that many homeowners fear in the depths of their hearts—is exactly what the next generation ethanol crowd needs to make fuel from woody waste such as thinned forest debris and agricultural residues.

In a paper published in the journal Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the researchers are now providing an update of sorts. The researchers have reportedly found that a group of enzymes found in termite salivary glands may just do the trick.

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