Eighth-grader David S. Dixon–along with his dad David G. Dixon–has built a street-legal quadricycle powered by a solar-charged electric motor. The bike not only carries his dog and three friends, but it has also has an iPod dock and GPS. Ya, it’s that cool!
Coined as the Solar Human Hybrid (SOHH), the vehicle was launched as part of David Jr.’s middle school project for the Novato Charter School. Read the rest of this entry »
Robert Riley’s XR3 kit car is an amazing three-wheeled plug-in diesel hybrid. The trike gets a jaw dropping 225mpg on combined diesel-electric power and 125mpg when using only the 23hp diesel engine.
And hey, it kinda looks like that Back to the Future car!
Introduced back in June of 2008, the two-passenger car was designed so it can be assembled using readily available parts. Fully constructed, the car weighs in at 1480 pounds and has top speed of 80mph. And while you can only get 40 miles out of its li-ion battery pack, it can be plugged into any standard wall socket. Read the rest of this entry »
For all intents and purposes, the automobile has remained largely unchanged in the past 100 years ever since the first Ford Model T started rolling off of assembly lines. Four wheels, an engine, transmission, and as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But with summer around the corner, so are high gas prices (which have shot up 20% in the month of May alone) and some people are taking another approach to personal mobility, such as an 8th grade project dubbed the Solar Human Hybrid Vehicle.
Tony Parker has built an electric motorbike completely from found junk.
Why? The laid-off worker found himself with a lot of time and just began tinkering around the house. Read the rest of this entry »
Jeremy Clarkson, the outspoken host of Britain’s Top Gear auto show, made a spectacle of racing a Prius vs. a BMW M3, in which the latter recieved better gas mileage. His point was that is isn’t what you drive, but how you drive. Nothing emphasizes this idea more than the Aerocivic, a simple yet highly publicized Civic whose owner, Mike Turner, utilized basic hypermilling techniques such as coasting down hills and shutting off his engine at stop lights to maximize fuel usage. He then took his very basic car a step further by applying an aerodynamic body kit to reduce drag at high speeds, and now he is using the power of the Interweb to give further insight into the how and why of his car, the Aerocivic.
Jungle Motors is already the largest electric vehicle conversion shop in Orange County, California. They can take virtually any car and convert it to all-electric, but specialize in converting old Porsches and PT Cruisers. They’ve actually been converting Priuses into plug-in hybrids for a while using lead-acid batteries. That’s old hat at this point.
Consisting of two pieces of equipment — an ethanol boiler and the mini-refinery — the whole system can fit into an area of less than 30 square feet with 8 feet of clearance and is completely automated.
Prices for regular diesel have been historically high nationwide, and all over the U.S. people are turning to backyard biodiesel as a way to make cheap fuel — a fairly straightforward process that can be accomplished for less than $1/gal.
One of the most copious sources of inedible oil to make biodiesel is the nasty, used fryer grease leftover from commercial kitchens — and what cheaper way to obtain it than stealing?
It’s early in the pre-dawn dark hours of the morning. A group of Northern California pseudohippies just finished a game of Zonk — or rather, the game just stopped because somebody quoted a line from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and everybody forgot what they were doing.
Yet, by a stroke of luck, the conversation about Harold and Kumar reminds the group of their real reason for staying up so late. They pack into a truck and head down to the local fast food joint looking to load up — but it’s not the food they’re loading up on, it’s the nasty, half-rotted, leftover fryer grease.
I’m eagerly awaiting the 4-door, family-sized EV sedan rumored to be in the pipeline from the Canadian-based ZENN Motor Company (they already make a great 2-door model that’s even affordable to us non-celebrity types, picture above). I’d like to avoid going to the gas station at all when going to an Energy Fair or Green Festival. While our VW Jetta TDI gets more than 40 mpg, these days the cost for diesel (and biodiesel when I can get it) is quite a bit more than gasoline, and rising faster than gas.
For now, we’re moving around locally in a funky-looking, all-electric CitiCar, made in 1974. Our CitiCar is restored to roughly original condition (except for the wear and tear on the body itself) with the expert help of our neighbor who found two more after we found ours. It’s hard to go anywhere without people cutting me off — not out of rage — but curiosity or with a smile on their face. Sometimes getting a “head turner” doesn’t need to come at a huge price. Read the rest of this entry »
Gas 2.0
Gas 2.0 digs into the viscous world of biofuels and the fast-paced transit arena, exploring the technologies and substances that are the future of transportation.
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