cars

Volkswagen Jetta TDI: 2009 Green Car of the Year

2009 Green Car of the Year: Volkswagen Jetta TDI At the L.A. Auto Show Thursday morning, the Green Car Journal jury voted the Volkswagen Jetta TDI the 2009 Green Car of the Year. The TDI "clean diesel" runs on ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and uses a "common rail direct injection system" that decreases 95 percent […]

Sad sentences can say so much

“The Federal Highway Administration has approved Utah’s plan for a Mountain View freeway — if the state can afford it.” — “Freeway gets greenlight from the feds,” Salt Lake Tribune

Actor touts renewable energy 30 years ago

I wanted to post this before editorial found it, because when I see something this cool, I like to plant my flag on it. The following is a segment from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s program "Marketplace," back in 1978. To repeat: Nineteen. Seventy. Eight.

‘Meet the Press’ takes on cars and energy independence

This Sunday, “Meet the Press” was devoted to the auto industry’s travails and to energy independence. (They decided to go totally counterintuitive and have … T. Boone Pickens as a guest. Isn’t that guy’s 15 minutes over yet?) Also, Thomas Friedman was one of the roundtablers. Here’s the video: [vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1011974&w=425&h=350&fv=launch%3D27751726%26width%3D400%26height%3D320]

To save themselves, the Big Three should become ‘transportmakers’

Irony of ironies, the one set of products that could save GM is the one that GM destroyed — the electric trolley systems of America. According to the well-known research of Bradford Snell, GM killed the electric trolley, because in 1922 they decided that the only way to increase car sales was to eliminate the […]

Bush: all the bailout, none of the social benefits

I see that Bush is delightful as always: Complaining about what it termed partisan "gridlock" in Congress, the White House late Friday called on lawmakers to let U.S. auto makers get quick access to a $25 billion federal loan program, by dropping a requirement that the money be spent on converting to fuel-efficient vehicles.

Because small fixes make the biggest difference

Despite the excellent reasons to reject the GM bailout, consider this: a strings-attached investment that tweaked GM’s production model could reap huge climate benefits — perhaps bigger than anything else we do to autos in the near term. That’s because the biggest opportunities in fuel economy are at the low end of the fleet, not […]

Republicans refuse bailout; Obama wants auto czar

Looks like there will be no auto bailout with this Congress and this president. The NYT reports today: The prospects of a government rescue for the foundering American automakers dwindled Thursday as Democratic Congressional leaders conceded that they would face potentially insurmountable Republican opposition during a lame-duck session next week. Nor does it appear that […]

Call it ‘green mobility’

With an auto industry bailout careening down the pike, Climate Solutions policy director KC Golden has some vitally needed insights regarding what we need to demand from industry leader GM in return. —– We should not rescue General Motors as we know it. But Congress could use the proposed bailout as an opportunity to begin […]