Gas 2.0

Students from West Philadelphia High School have built a diesel-hybrid race car that goes from 0-60 in four seconds. While the car currently gets 60+ mpg, they hope to soon break 100 mpg.

Why? They are competing for $10 million in the Automotive X-Prize .

Called the Hybrid Attack, the car was built by kids from West Philly’s Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. And if that alone doesn’t make them cool, they are the only high school team competing out of 90 different teams from the U.S. and overseas.

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Much has been written about the launch of the Hyundai i10 concept, the company’s first foray into the electric car market. It’s an impressive car and the underlying technology trumps many other competitors.

For example, there’s the Li-Poly battery which Hyundai claim will charge almost twice as fast as the Li-Ion battery championed by Renault and other manufacturers. Of course, this assumes you have an industrial outlet with enough amps to provide the power fast enough.

However, the Hyundai i10 is more than a standalone electric car. It is part of a range which the company has obviously thought about long and hard before bringing it to market.

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I’ve been happy with all the recent efforts by European auto manufacturers to bring fuel-efficient diesels back to the States. From Volkswagen to Mercedes, diesels seem to be the new attempt at pleasing the US “green” crowd with classy, low-emissions fuel-sippers.

Reading that last sentence over, it seems funny to call them a “new attempt” because these high mileage diesels have been available to Europeans for a LONG time — but that’s another story.

So, while it’s debatable whether a gasoline-powered Prius at 40 mpg is more “green” than a diesel-powered Jetta at 40 mpg — it all has to do with how much of each type of fuel comes out of one barrel of oil — It’s a fact that having these new clean diesels as an option is certainly something the US has been lacking for a long time. And I appreciate having that option, I really do.

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Set your DVRs: The Science Channel’s “How It’s Made” covers Audi clean diesel technology. Debuting TODAY, September 18th, 2009 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with an encore broadcast on the Discovery Channel on Thursday, September 24, 2009, 7:00 and 11:00 p.m. ET/PT.

“How It’s Made” is one of those head scratchers of a show for me. Take one part horrible muzak and one part kind-of-boring monotone narrator; mix it with some cool behind-the-scenes manufacturing footage of stuff that you normally take for granted; throw in some occasional history and you’ve got yourself… a winner? As much as the show bores my wife to tears, for some reason I love it. It’s so cheesy and cool at the same time.

So I was excited to hear that the show will be doing a segment on the building of an Audi V6 3.0 TDI clean diesel engine. Audi has recently started a push to bring their new clean diesels to the US and market them as a green alternative to gas cars and even electric cars. In fact, Johan de Nysschen, President of Audi America, recently got himself into a bit of hot water by extolling the virtues of diesel while insulting the people who would buy electric drive cars like the Chevy Volt. Read the rest of this entry »

This one may offend you more sensitive types as “ironic” or not green at all. But the fact is, the world needs bulldozers. Lots of them. But until now, anyone seeking a hybrid bulldozer was out of luck. But Caterpillar, the prolific maker of construction equipment has announced that for 2010 they will be selling the D7E, a diesel-electric bulldozer.

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This is actually old news that recently resurfaced, and as a lifelong Cougar aficionado I can’t pass it up. In actuality, the Mercury Cougar was a refined, “gentleman’s muscle car” based on the 1st generation Mustang. It came standard with a number of gas-guzzling V8 motors including the epic “Boss” 302.

But the pristine-looking 1967 Cougar pictured here has done away with those gas hogs in favor of a Mercedes turbodiesel motor that runs on, you guessed it, biodiesel.

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This post comes to you from Popular Mechanics. Written By Larry Webster.

In the U.S., gasoline and diesel are dirt cheap compared to their cost in Europe. In late August, the average U.S. price for a gallon of gas was $2.60, and a gallon of diesel cost $2.65. Both diesel and gasoline come from the same barrel of oil—since diesel is a heavier, less refined product, it has historically cost less than gasoline. However, the relative price difference in the U.S. is determined by market forces, refinery constraints and taxes. Typically, demand for gasoline is higher, and U.S. fuel taxes favor gasoline, making gas less expensive here. Federally, we tax diesel at a higher rate than we do gas—24.4 cents per gallon of diesel versus 18.4 for gas. Some states tax gas a higher rate, but on average, the diesel tax is higher (With state taxes added in, the average diesel tax is 51.4 cents per gallon, gas is 47.0). According to the Energy Information Administration, since 2004, diesel has generally cost more than gasoline in the U.S., year-round.

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Here’s one for the “surprising” list: a consortium of researchers and business partners at the University of East Anglia in Britain has found that they can convert diesel buses to run on either diesel or methane for a “small fraction of the cost” of purchasing a natural gas-only bus. The implications for Britain’s (and the world’s) fleets of already-existing diesel buses are huge.

The buses will run on biomethane — which is methane captured from landfill decomposition or other sources of surface biological decomposition and not derived from buried fossil sources. Methane is a large part of what makes up natural gas. According to the consortium, the converted bus will reduce emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases by about half when compared to a standard diesel-only bus.

The converted vehicle was originally part of the local bus fleet run by the Anglian Bus & Coach company. After conversion of the standard Mercedes diesel engine, the bus now runs from 60-80% of the time on biomethane and the rest on diesel. Having the option to switch back and forth provides flexibility to the bus operator in the case of a shortage of either fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

What you see above (center) is one of the most well-engineered “Franken-cars” of all time: a factory-modified 1980’s era Mercedes-Benz 190 diesel, stuffed with the company’s latest BlueEFFICIENCY CDI engine, which makes more than double the horsepower and nearly three times the torque of the original 1988 D.

How far we’ve come in 20 years!

More photos, and MBUSA’s own comprehensive press release, after the jump.

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It’s an Audi-tastic day! Johan de Nysschen, President of Audi US, certainly took some major heat over the interwebs today for his inflammatory and derogatory statements that the Chevy Volt is a “car for idiots” and that electric cars are only for intellectual elites to “make a statement.” They were especially curious comments because they came at the same time that Audi launched a website touting the power of electricity.

So, knowing how these things usually go, after some serious damage control conference calls between the Audi communications folks and higher level management, de Nysschen was probably forced to respond with a much more diplomatic take on his positions — what he should have done in the first place. It’s so hard to backpedal once you’ve said something as concrete as “you’re an idiot if you buy this car.”

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Bring on the war of words. In a frank conversation with MSN writer Lawrence Ulrich, Audi of America President Johan de Nysschen has said that the Chevy Volt will fail and that anybody who buys the car is an idiot. Not only that, de Nysschen has lumped proponents of any type of electric car into a category of “intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are.”

I’m guessing that means a fair amount of the people reading this would be considered idiots and pompous intellectual elites in Mr. de Nysschen’s book. Funny that. Hearing an Audi executive mocking any other car as being for intellectual pompous elites is, err, interesting, given that Audi is known for being in exactly that category themselves. Agh.

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At the upcoming Frankfurt Auto Show (September 17-27, 2009) Volkswagen will be debuting updated versions of its Euro-spec Polo, Golf and Passat diesels. According to European testing methods, the Polo BlueMotion will get the equivalent of 71.3 mpg (US), the Golf BlueMotion 61.9 mpg, and the Passat BlueMotion 53.4 mpg.

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Global warming. Climate change. The greatest threat to continued human survival. The rhetoric these days can be awfully scary regarding new energy and oil. Sometimes it feels like we’ve all been doomed already by a hyper-active media always looking for the “next big story” to terrify us with. But I don’t really take anything seriously, so I am always on the lookout for a fun twist on a real problem.

What could be fun about climate change, you ask? Well, besides the fact that my home might end up as beach front property one day if we don’t mend our sins, how about a race? One that challenges contestants to go 100 miles on a single gallon of gas? That is the goal of the One-Gallon Challenge, where six contestants and their very different vehicles have to make the journey from Greenfield, MA to Boston in three hours using as little fuel as possible.

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As it stands, most vehicles in the world right now run on one of two fuels: gasoline, or diesel. While they perform the same function, and on the outside the engines look the same, they work in very different ways. While diesels have made progress in becoming cleaner burning, gasoline cars still dominate America’s highways.

But what might happen if someone mixed these two fuels up in the same engine? According to a research group from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the engine not only becomes more thermally efficient but cleaner burning, too.

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Running your car on biodiesel fuel is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. BioFuel Oasis, a women’s collective/owned business in Berkeley, offers not only fuel, but a level of expertise and service you haven’t experienced in a fuel transaction in years.

Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil, normally from soybeans. You can grow the beans to produce the oil, but the most environmentally conscious way is to use recycled oil from restaurants. Because diesel engines have much higher compression than gas engines, they can burn a range of fuels, including the stuff they use to cook French fries.

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