How would you like to run your car for the equivalent of less than one dollar per gallon, with much lower emissions? Impossible, right?
A step-by-step breakdown of what happens when you sit behind the wheel of a hybrid car.
Are all hybrids created equal? Get a grasp on the definitions: full hybrid, mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid, parallel hybrid and serial hybrid...
Audi announced a 4,800-mile American driving tour, known as the Audi Mileage Marathon, yesterday in an effort to promote the arrival of the carmaker’s TDI clean-diesel technology in the US. “Think of it as the ultimate efficiency test,” said Marcel Barro, an automotive journalist and Marathon participant.
The story in yesterday’s Detroit Free Press sounded promising: A new electric car maker, with a revolutionary new electric motor, would revive the venerable Detroit Electric brand and start selling electric cars by the end of next year. The article didn’t point out, however, that Detroit Electric had already been revived once, by a California electric car company with a controversial history.
Magnussen’s Toyota of Palo Alto, Calif., took the bold step of starting to take $500 deposits for 2010 plug-in Priuses—even before a grid-capable Prius has been announced as an official product. Eric Doebert, business development manager for Magnussen’s, said, "It makes sense that people should get in line now in order to have a shot of even taking delivery in the first year that the vehicle is available."
Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters in Tokyo yesterday that fleet tests of an experimental Prius, modified to be rechargeable, will be moved up to late next year from 2010. Bob Lutz, General Motors product czar, told reporters at a press event that its plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, “wasn’t even comparable” to a Prius converted to plug into the electric grid. The race continues.
“All vehicles in 2020 will have some level of hybridization.” The statement is blunt and to the point. It might be dismissed as idle speculation until you see the source.
In recent years, the State of California has become the unofficial capital of plug-in hybrid technology. But proposed certification standards from the California Air Resource Board (CARB) could create an obstacle for small companies selling plug-in hybrid conversion kits.
Despite what many green consumers might like to think, we won’t all be driving electric cars—or even hybrids—next year. Hybrids may be a much larger portion of the market by 2015, but large numbers of cars between now and 2020 will still be fueled by plain old gasoline. Within a couple of years, however, they will be much, much more efficient with that gas—thanks to gasoline direct injection, or “GDI."
