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alternative energy
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Alternative Fuel
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alternative energy
alternative energy
SEV Solar Roof Makes Prius Even More Prius-y
For those that just can't get green enough, here comes a new accessory that will make your Prius even more deadly. The SEV Solar Roof Module is essentially that. What makes this vehicular solar panel a bit better than the average bear is the fact that it installs seamlessly onto the Toyota Prius roof. The entire roof-panel is replaced with these solar cells and can provide 20 miles of electric range as well as upward of 29-percent increased fuel efficiency. This module is capable of fitting 2004 through 2006 Prius models. Watch out, deaf kids! [SEV via TFRJ]
choose your eternity
The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup, which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL!
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PCH, No Blood For Oil Edition: Veggie Oil Peugeot or Hybrid Austin Marina?
The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup, which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL!More »
alternative fuel
Hyrdrofuel Is Alternative Fuel Of The Future, 27 Years Ago
Apparently an idea and creation from the past that holds promise for future applications was just too much for the CBC's crack team of comedy writers to resist — the Back to the Future puns in this piece are a real riot. Greg Vezina managed to convert a Chevy Impala to run on "Hydrofuel", or the very smelly chemical ammonia to everybody else. Though there was interest from Canadian officials in at the time in 1981, the fact that the car is now a rusting away beside his garage speaks volumes of its success. More »
down on the street bonus edition
Tesla Spotted In Palo Alto, Price Of Electrons Climbs
A few months before I started writing for El Jalop, one of the few Mercedes-Benz F-Cell fuel cell cars parked on my block for while, and I'm still kicking myself for not photographing it. The anonymous tipster who sent in the shots of a Tesla Roadster he found parked in Palo Alto, on the other hand, had his camera primed and ready when the moment of truth arrived. Good work, anonymous tipster!
alternative energy
Coskata Breaks Ground On Ethanol Plant, Could Make Fuel For $1 Per Gallon
Kings of ethanol and new GM buddy, Coskata, has announced it has broken ground on an new cellulosic ethanol plant in Pennsylvania that could be churning out the alternative fuel as early as next year. Coskata claims it can produce the two carbon alcohol at a cost of $1 per gallon so unless they aren't interested in getting to step three, expect pricing on the more renewable fuel to be higher than that. Regardless, it will likely beat the hell out of that $5.40 gallon gas bullshit going on in California. More »
choose your eternity
We took a break from the PCH Superpowers and watched the Rotary Honda 600 pound on the Rotary Starlet in yesterday's all-Japanese Choose Your Eternity poll. However, Britain's defeat of Italy last week can mean only one thing: Britain must now take on PCH SuperGigaPower France in an attempt to claim the rusty, oil-leaking PCH Intergalactic Superchampion crown!
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PCH, Superpower Showdown: V12 Jagchero or Electric Renault?
We took a break from the PCH Superpowers and watched the Rotary Honda 600 pound on the Rotary Starlet in yesterday's all-Japanese Choose Your Eternity poll. However, Britain's defeat of Italy last week can mean only one thing: Britain must now take on PCH SuperGigaPower France in an attempt to claim the rusty, oil-leaking PCH Intergalactic Superchampion crown!More »
new york auto show
Bentley Brings 17-Page Emissions-Reduction Plan To NYC, Also Some Dang Expensive Cars
Let's just get this out of the way up front so you can come back later: Bentley brought no new luxurious nor mega-costly glistening sheet metal hand-rubbed to a burnished sheen by ambidextrous master craft-rubbers at their lush productionMore »
3:45 PM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Matthew DeBord
677 views,
13 comments
Latest by Stoatmaster: @AdmiralAutobahn: That Bentley interior has more wood than John Holmes. more »
geneva motor show
Post Geneva Shocker: Lumeneo Smera Is A Two Seater!
A couple of days ago, we received an email from Lumeneo's PR rep Isabel giving us the business about the all-electric, leaning Lumeneo Smera we brought you. She claimed the car was not as our American eyes could clearly see, a single seater, but in fact a two seater! 'Impossible!' we said, 'Prove it with a picture.' And so she has. Seated inline, inside that tiny little car are father Daniel and son Thierry Moulène, President and Technical Director respectively.More »
geneva auto show
Lumeneo Smera: 80 MPH EV Gets Geneva Started Down Path Of Weird
Tucked into a lightly trafficked back corner of the show is this awesome little scooter-sized concept car called the Lumeneo Smera. The Smera is aMore »
alternative fuel
Grassolean Helps You Find Hippie Fuel Stations
Need to find a station to fuel up your Mercedes 300D with biodiesel? How about tips on how to prevent all that soy based fuel from gelling up when the hard freeze hits? Well now you can find out where all the professional hippy fuel buyers get their fix at Grassolean (it's funny cause they replaced the word gas with grass and came up with a clever wordplay version, see how they did that?). The site offers everything you need to know about the art and science of being a veganfueler. As an added bonus, the eco-warrior himself Bill O'Reilly interviews BFF Darryl Hannah about biodiesel in this clip from 2003. You can tell it's that old since Bill quotes LA gas prices that aren't a thousand dollars a gallon. More »
geneva motor show
BMW Diesel Mild Hybrid X5 Concept Officially Revealed, Officially Has A Silly Name
We've been saying for years the only efficient hybrid with current technology is one mated to a diesel engine, and now it looks like another automaker is jumping into the conceptual fray. Our little news yesterday on the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics X5 — translated from Bruce, that appears to be an X5 outfitted with a 2.0-liter twin turbo common rail diesel mild hybrid (wow, that's a mouthful, ain't it?) — appears to be wholly true. BMW will be revealing this little concept in environmentally friendly CUV-ing at the Geneva Motor Show next month and they've now seen fit to reveal the rest of their press shots and the full press release, which we've got below the jump. Feel free to read through it if you're suffering from a strong desire to fall back into bed. For now, here's the gist of it — hybrid + diesel + BMW = Over 100 HP per liter (total of 204 HP), 295 lb-ft of torque between 2000 and 2500 RPM. Exciting, isn't it?More »
alternative energy
Carbon-Capturing Car To Eliminate Emissions, Maybe
Rather than focusing vehicle-development and alternative-energy resources on finding different kinds of fuel, students and researchers at Georgia Tech are taking a couple steps back and looking at the emissions problem. The project currently being worked on involves a car that still operates on standard liquid fuels, but the kicker is the carbon emissions. The car will collect those and shuttle them back to a processing plant that can convert them back into fuel, taking out two birds with one stone. More »
found on ebay
Buy Hyper-Autographed BugE, Help Autistic Kids!
How would you like to buy a "Special Edition BugE Personal EV Transport" signed by 100 celebrities, including John Legend, Ne-Yo and Adrienne Curry? Max speed in this little electric devil is 50 MPH; range is listed at 40 miles. Sure, the starting bid is a cool 10 grand, but every dollar over the MSRP will be donated to a charity that helps autistic kids! Say, what is the MSRP of a BugE? Is this what we'll all be driving in a few years? [eBay Motors]
news
Termite Gut Microbe Study: Cheap Cellulosic Ethanol Soon?
Wouldn't it be great if we had a super-cheap way to make ethanol out of cellulosic materials such as switchgrass and wood chips? The problem is that you need to turn the cellulose into simple sugars before you can ferment it into ethanol... but termites have managed the trick for gadzillions of years, so why not figure out exactly what magic takes place in their guts and replicate it on an industrial scale? Some white coats at Caltech have taken a big step in that process, performing a vast genomic study of the microbes in Nasutitermes termites' guts and identifying more than a thousand potentially useful enzymes. Hooray, soon we'll all be running 16:1 compression alky-burners! [MIT]
news
Suck Amps With Electric Drag Racers!
We've been following the saga of the amazing White Zombie, a '72 Datsun 1200 that runs low 12s on pure electrons, for quite some time now. First the Zombie makes the Wall Street Journal, and now the Gray Lady herself is covering electric drag racing (although we scooped 'em both). And the story doesn't just cover White Zombie; we also see an electric Shelby Cobra Daytona replica that ran a 13.18 its first time out, among other quick voltmobiles. [New York Times]
first drive
You're looking at Honda's new hydrogen fuel cell powered FCX Clarity parked in front of the Malibu Presbyterian Church that was destroyed in the recent fires. As the Clarity emits water and achieves the gasoline consumption equivalent of 68 mpg, we thought it only fitting to shoot it parked in front of one of Global Warming's victims. The Clarity, of course, is supposed to help with all that — although we're still not real clear on the clarity of the environmental benefits of hydrogen created using currently readily available sources. But Honda claims they're working on that — and hey, it'll reduce your home's overall power bills. Oh yeah, almost forgot. Honda tossed us the keys to their multi-million dollar pre-production baby (LA Times Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic Dan Neil claims it's worth "like $10,000,000 or more") and let us cruise from Santa Monica through the toasted canyons of Malibu. Full review coming this Monday.
Preview: Jalopnik Drives the Honda FCX Clarity
You're looking at Honda's new hydrogen fuel cell powered FCX Clarity parked in front of the Malibu Presbyterian Church that was destroyed in the recent fires. As the Clarity emits water and achieves the gasoline consumption equivalent of 68 mpg, we thought it only fitting to shoot it parked in front of one of Global Warming's victims. The Clarity, of course, is supposed to help with all that — although we're still not real clear on the clarity of the environmental benefits of hydrogen created using currently readily available sources. But Honda claims they're working on that — and hey, it'll reduce your home's overall power bills. Oh yeah, almost forgot. Honda tossed us the keys to their multi-million dollar pre-production baby (LA Times Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic Dan Neil claims it's worth "like $10,000,000 or more") and let us cruise from Santa Monica through the toasted canyons of Malibu. Full review coming this Monday.
choose your eternity
We see the Omni GLH has pulled ahead of the Porsche 924 Turbo by a 60-40 margin in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll, but what we aren't seeing is the big picture. As in, holy crap, the oil is running out! Yes, the wells were pumping, pumping, all thatcha like, but now we need to start thinking about what we'll be driving in a post-global-socio-econo-nihilo no-more-cheap-oil sorta world. We don't want to give up on internal combustion, and we just gotta have forced induction, so it would seem the easiest choice would be turbocharged diesel cars made to run on vegetable oil and/or animal fat (you killjoys who want to gripe about how you still need the petroleum-fueled gears of society to keep a-spinnin' to produce such oils can just go suspend your disbelief, in the same way you need to suspend your disbelief about the impossibility of actually finishing a Hell Project).
More »
PCH, Turbodiesel Edition: Peugeot 505 or Toyota Camry?
We see the Omni GLH has pulled ahead of the Porsche 924 Turbo by a 60-40 margin in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll, but what we aren't seeing is the big picture. As in, holy crap, the oil is running out! Yes, the wells were pumping, pumping, all thatcha like, but now we need to start thinking about what we'll be driving in a post-global-socio-econo-nihilo no-more-cheap-oil sorta world. We don't want to give up on internal combustion, and we just gotta have forced induction, so it would seem the easiest choice would be turbocharged diesel cars made to run on vegetable oil and/or animal fat (you killjoys who want to gripe about how you still need the petroleum-fueled gears of society to keep a-spinnin' to produce such oils can just go suspend your disbelief, in the same way you need to suspend your disbelief about the impossibility of actually finishing a Hell Project).More »
