cars

Is Toyota developing a purely solar-powered car?

An AP report is generating headlines around the world:

Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy ...

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

Getting some electricity from rooftop PV panels isn't news, though it is a good idea, if only a "symbolic gesture" until panel costs drop sharply. (See also Treehugger's "Solar-Powered Toyota Prius Project.")

But there isn't enough rooftop area to run a car solely on rooftop solar cells. I don't see how it would work even for an ultra-lightweight short-range city car with a really big roof area -- an ungainly, unaerodynamic design. And don't forget, cars are often parked inside.

Battery makers come begging to Congress

American lithium-ion battery makers, including giants like 3M, are banding together to try to extract a few billion dollars from Congress so they can build a shiny battery manufacturing plant that, for whatever reason, they aren't willing to spend their own money on. This latest handout request is a fairly dubious idea that is nevertheless likely to appeal to a lot of people on grounds of both economic nationalism and a vague aura of environmental goodness.

Whatever you think of the request, though, let's at least all agree not to put up with this:

"We don't want to go from being dependent on Middle East oil to Asian batteries."

- Jeff Depew, chief executive of Imara, a start-up that makes lithium-ion batteries

Oil is a viscous substance, finite in quantity, concentrated in hard-to-reach pockets in certain corners of the globe. These properties allow a relatively small handful of countries to exert some imperfect control over its supply. Batteries differ from oil in just about every important way.*

Depew has an obvious interest in promoting American battery manufacturers. But surely savvy outsiders understand that a competitive, low-cost industry, whether centered in Asia or anywhere else, is good for everyone who needs batteries?

Recently, Andrew Grove, former chairman of Intel Corp., began urging the chip maker to explore whether it could play a role in battery manufacturing. Mr. Grove and others say U.S. companies must step up efforts to produce advanced batteries for the country's car industry or America will end up trading its dependence on foreign petroleum for dependence on foreign-made batteries.

Oh, well. The industry consortium is organized by Jim Greenberger, a lawyer specializing in clean tech. In case you're not scared enough yet of the Asian battery menace, Greenberger spells it out:

Who do we repay for the pollution from which we have benefitted?

If I buy bread from you, when you want to sell it to me, and we agree on a price, that's a deal between the two of us. Now imagine that you getting up early to bake bread wakes two people who would rather sleep in. They are not a factor in our deal -- they are "external" to our market exchange and any effect on them is an "externality" we have ignored in agreeing on our price. The same logic holds for the greenhouse gases your ovens generated when you baked the bread. That contribution to climate change is an "environmental externality."

How many of those did you create today?

Vandana Shiva’s powerful Soil Not Oil

Edible Mediatakes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism. —– In a recent essay in The Nation, the critic William Deresiewicz made a pungent observation about the U.S. cultural scene: An iron law of American life decrees that the provinces of thought be limited in the collective consciousness to a single representative. Like […]

Falling out of love with cars

Jon Rynn suggested that this comment to another thread be posted, so, by request, a repeat for the holidays! I would have posted it yesterday but we had a long power outage as a winter storm caused a transformer to blow up, putting several thousand of us without power. It was a fitting problem to […]

Study finds that tolls and parking charges are key to ease traffic

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster. They considered lots of the standard solutions — improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth — and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. […]

Bush pledges $17.4 billion for auto bailout, with no efficiency requirements

President Bush today approved $13.4 billion in emergency loans for General Motors and Chrysler, and will make another $4 billion in loans available in February. The loans are intended to keep the automakers alive until March 31, at which point the Obama administration will get to decide how to proceed. In a press conference this […]

Hertz to offer car sharing service like Zipcar

Hertz is going to experiment with hourly rentals a la Zipcar. Here’s hoping they make a go of it, and the other national chains follow. Every person who realizes you can live well — and inexpensively — without owning a car is a plus for the environment.

CNNMoney reports that electrification is key to Chrysler’s bailout pitch

CNNMoney has the surprising story of “Chrysler’s plan to beat the Chevy Volt“: Chrysler is pinning a huge part of its future on a plan to produce a full line of electric vehicles, at a reasonable cost to both the carmaker and the consumer … Chrysler’s strategy hinges on keeping it cheap. The carmaker will […]