Published on February 12th, 2010
2009 was a pretty terrible year for auto sales, and the most obvious culprit is the economic downturn. While things are looking up for 2010 (ignoring the whole recall scandal blown entirely out of proportion), new car sales may not return to pre-recession levels for years, if ever. And while the economy may still be a factor, that may be an important paradigm shift in how people regard their cars.
According to a study by Auto MD, which is owned by the US Auto Parts Network, Inc. (i.e. people who have a vested interest in making parts for used cars) 77% of people are, on average, planning on driving their current cars at least 50,000 miles more than their previous cars.
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Published on January 20th, 2010
I love going fast, and I make no apologies for it.
Ok that’s a lie. Sometimes, I feel guilty about going fast, guzzling gas, drooling over 5 mile per gallon muscle cars. I know the world is in a bad way, mostly because of cars. Yet I still love them, especially fast ones, because in my opinion life is too short for a 0-60 mph time of 7 seconds or more.
Still though, the easiest way to increase fuel efficiency is to make everyone go a lot slower. Instead of pursuing billions of dollars in new technologies, if everyone would just let off the accelerator, we would save a lot of gas every year. One such way would be to (again) lower the interstate speed limit 55 mph. Yet that didn’t work too well the first time around. What if we went even further, what if new cars were capped at 200 horsepower, and had a top speed of only 60 mph?
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Published on January 18th, 2010
Depending on who you ask, Cash for Clunkers was either a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure.
These are the facts though. Cash for Clunkers helped sell 690,000 car sales in 30 days, at the cost $3 billion to taxpayers. While overall auto sales are down in 2009 compared to 2008, December was a strong finish for almost every brand. In the four months since the program, car sales have also been up as a whole. Chrysler and General Motors are out of bankruptcy. 2010 is looking like a much better year for car buyers.
Still, the question lingers. Are we going to get a second round of Cash for Clunkers?
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Published on December 15th, 2009
The U.S. Energy Information Administration has just released the figures comparing 2008 with the previous year and found that greenhouse gas emissions, from just the transportation sector, dropped 4.7% between 2007 and 2008.
The EIA attributed the drop not just to the gas price rise of the summer of 2008, but also in the Fall to the near-depression-level econo-apocalypse that denuded neighborhoods of many of the businesses that we take for granted as part of the landscape. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on December 8th, 2009
GM has announced that it is investing another $336 million to fix up its Hamtramck assembly plant in Detroit, now bringing its total Detroit plant investment in building the Volt extended-range electric car to $700 million.
First they’ll clear out the cobwebby remains of the Cadillacs and the Buick Lucernes they used to build there, and then they’ll rework those assembly lines to start rolling out something more in line with the times.
The American people are not asking for so much. Just an electric car with four wheels that we can fit at least a few kids into, that can be fueled with electrons from the solar panels we’ll soon have on our garages.
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Published on October 19th, 2009
Pennsylvania is beautiful this time of year, but I missed most of it since I made the 400+ mile drive mostly in the dark. It took eight hours of dodging speeding semi-trucks and going through many miles of tunnels, but I finally made it to the Westinghouse Plasma Center in Madison, PA. In case you’re asking, yes, the same Westinghouse that makes flat screen televisions (among other nifty tech stuff).
The Coskata semi-commercial flexible ethanol plant, dubbed “Lighthouse”, is located here. This facility is essentially a working scale model of a full size ethanol plant, and the processes and technology here can one day soon be scaled up to produce as much as a 100 million gallons of flex ethanol annually. The important word here is flexible, because unlike other ethanol products, the Coskata process can use just about any carbon matter to produce ethanol. This means the very garbage filling our dumps may one day instead fill our cars.
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Published on October 16th, 2009
Even as Detroit is felled by horrific 28% unemployment levels unseen in this nation since the Dust Bowl era, eight Government Motors’ Volts headed out for their first long distance real world test drive this month.
They drove on real world Government Interstates from Milford in Michigan to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to see if they are going to able to make the transition from being just another concept vehicle – to actual reality, now that they’re government funded.
Apparently, yes they can.
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Published on September 29th, 2009
The demise of retail giant Filene’s Basement may have a positive effect on proponents of vertical urban farming and algae biofuels alike. Since 2007, the developers of a Filene’s site in downtown Boston have been unable to find funding to move the project forward. But now Höweler + Yoon Architecture and their partner Squared have put forth a proposal to erect a temporary vertical, modular, algae bioreactor high-rise in its place.
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Published on September 1st, 2009
Setting its sights on the burgeoning US market for car batteries, cutting-edge Swiss zinc-air battery company, ReVolt, has decided to take advantage of Oregon’s generous business tax credits for development of next generation car technologies.
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Published on September 1st, 2009
But from an another point of view, are wild oil price fluctuations really all that bad?
In my experience, it doesn’t take a higher degree and advanced knowledge of oil economics to see that rampant speculation is behind the crazy swings in oil prices we’ve seen in recent years. Even so, it’s a topic that economists and pundits have debated ad nauseum.
In what may be one of the most exhaustive analyses of the issues surrounding the murky field to date, Rice University researchers from the Baker Institute for Public Policy have released a new policy paper — “Who is in the Oil Futures Market and How Has It Changed?” — aimed at setting the record as straight as can be.
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Published on August 14th, 2009
A few years ago while back home in the US, I hopped in the car with the family to quickly run some errands. Now, you need to understand that I have been in Europe for over 10 years and was not ready for what would happen next—a shopping experience without ever actually touching the ground.
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Published on August 10th, 2009
Entrepreneurs have begun to retrofit ordinary combustion vehicles into all-electrics or plug-in hybrids. Here’s why this could be the “big fix” that the auto-industry needs.
Are we stuck with our oil addiction? What if millions of our middle-aged vehicles could be reincarnated as superior versions of their youthful selves, while developing new revenue streams for Detroit? What if that “fix” could start reducing the billion a day we spend on imported oil, while creating tens of thousands of local jobs in communities and cutting greenhouse gases from fossil fuels?
Automakers could do all this—by thinking of vehicles as upgradable high-tech products. For example: A pioneering Chicago startup makes a prototype Ford F-150 pickup with an all-electric range of 30 miles per charge. After that it’s a hybrid, boosting the best-selling truck’s 15 city miles per gallon to 21. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on August 10th, 2009
Jalopnik has issued a call to arms to its fans: Won’t someone please save our quirky classic cars. Ford Explorers – - fine, that’s one thing….but…
…this is the very last straw: “A classic example of vangenieering, is being sacrificed at Galpin Ford in Los Angeles. For what? A Ford Focus? We must let people know of the horrors. If you see a great vehicle being sacrificed take a picture and post it here. We must bear witness to the atrocity.”
Jalopnik is a site for the auto-world equivalent of Fashionistas, and the CARS Carpocalypse is hitting them hard. For the most part its devoted readers are putting a very brave face on it. But the agony:
“I saw a mid 80’s El Camino get traded in. I… I didn’t cry. I know it wouldn’t want to be looked at with misty eyes of mourning.”
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Published on July 17th, 2009
Today, the first customer to get a Tata Nano will take delivery of the world’s cheapest car, at $2,053 – and right on schedule. Tata had announced the first deliveries would be in July of 2009 when orders were first taken earlier this year.
For a gasoline car; the Nano has astounding mileage ; 56 mpg while producing emissions of just 101 grams of CO2 per km, lower than even European requirements, forget about the U.S. (We have none: the sky’s the limit – literally)
Even more surprising, just old fashioned simple tech makes this price and mileage possible:
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Published on July 15th, 2009
In what is sure to go down as a deft marketing move to garner some publicity (and virtually nothing more), Bank of America and Tesla have teamed up and announced that the megabank will start financing purchases of the Tesla Roadster to make them “much more affordable.”
I call BS.
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