cars

Plug-in sports car to hit showrooms in 2010

Fisker Automotive is taking orders for its $80,000 (only $1,000 down!) "4-door plug-in hybrid sports sedan":

Performance details for the first car are impressive achieving 50 miles (80 kilometers) on a pure electric charge [sic]. Additionally, by further utilizing a gasoline or diesel engine offered by Fisker, one can extend the total range of their Fisker to more than 620 miles (1000 kilometers). The first Fisker will also deliver an extraordinary 100 miles per gallon -- performance figures that will ultimately help to reduce the need for the importation of foreign oil.

Delivery will be in 2010, unless you drop $100,000 -- and heck, it's only $5,000 down -- for one of the first 100 in the "signature edition." Then you'll get it in Q4, 2009, "with exclusive show car package (final details to be revealed after Detroit launch, Jan. 2008)." The customer registration form is here.

Tip o' the hat to Plug-in Partners, whose post on the car also discusses some other plug-ins that may soon be in showrooms around the globe.

Note to readers: This blog post should not be taken as an endorsement of any product or company, particularly one that has not offered me a discount or even a test drive -- hint, hint.

Joseph Romm Culture

Seattle-area voters tied the knot

In the Seattle metro region, voters just sank an $18 billion transportation megaproposal that would have built more than 180 lanes miles of highway and 50 miles of light rail. But so far, the mainstream press has missed one of the most important stories of the year. The real story isn't tax fatigue, it's this: perhaps for the first time ever in the U.S., a critical bloc of voters linked transportation choices to climate protection.

In the run-up to the vote, a surprising amount of the debate centered on the package's climate implications. (The state has committed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and many cities, including Seattle, have been national leaders on climate.)

The opposition argued global warming. So did the measure's supporters. If you don't believe me, see, among others, the Seattle P-I (yes), The Stranger (no), the Yes Campaign, the Sierra Club's No Campaign, the right-leaning Washington Policy Center (no), and even the anti-tax/rail No Campaign, which oddly enough kept trumpeting the Sierra Club's opposition as a primary reason to vote no.

The turning point may have been when King County Executive Ron Sims suddenly withdrew his support. He cited the climate-warming emissions from added traffic as one of his chief objections -- he was thinking about his granddaughters, he said, not just the next five years.

The funny thing was, there was a heap of confusion and disagreement over the proposal's true climate impacts, mainly because no one had conducted a full climate assessment of the measure. But climate clearly weighed as a factor for a critical bloc of voters on both sides of the issue. In fact, Prop 1 may be the last of its kind, at least in the Pacific Northwest: a transportation proposal that lacked a climate accounting.

Obviously, there were more factors in play than just the climate. Taxes and traffic congestion mattered too. But what ultimately may have tipped that scales is that Puget Sound voters are reluctant to expand roads because they lock us into decades of increased climate pollution.

It's pretty well accepted that Seattle-area voters are receptive to environmental messages -- and in this case there were smart and well-informed greens on both sides of the debate. But green or not, the biggest problem for a certain segment of voters may have been that there was no comprehensive accounting of the climate impacts of the project -- one that included the roads, the rail, and the probable effects on land use.

So what's the lesson?

Eric de Place Politics

100 households to test out plug-in hybrid Pruises in California

UC Davis's Institute of Transportation Studies and AAA are looking for 100 households willing to drive their plug-in hybrids. I nominate myself for the sacrifice.

The more batteries we have plugged into the grid, the more renewable energy we'll get on the grid.

I would say I can't wait to buy one of these commercially, but if you read the sad details from Felix at CalCars, you'll see that's exactly what I am going to have to do. It appears Honda is out, Toyota is retreating, and Nissan is talking EVs.

If you think this is most disappointing, then tell them so here. Or here.

Adam Browning Uncategorized

Abandoning the solution

After the introduction and an explanation of "The Coming Oil Crisis," the next part of "MidEast Oil Forever?" (subs. req'd) begins the discussion of the technology-based solution -- and how the Congress is working to block it. Yes, long before Shellenberger & Nordhaus claim to have pioneered the positive technology message that everyone else supposedly never tried, many of us were waging a public death-match (without their help) to save those technologies -- especially since the Gingrich Congress was dead set against a regulatory approach, such as tougher fuel economy standards.

Even back in 1996, we understood the promise of cellulosic ethanol and hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles -- though after years of trying, we could never get Detroit to give them any more than lip service. Back in the mid-1990s, I still had some optimism for hydrogen fuel cell cars -- but the inability to make key breakthroughs over the past 10 years, and the realities of the alternative fuels market, have since persuaded me it is a dead end, especially from the perspective of global warming.

Here is what we wrote:

Joseph Romm Climate & Energy

Silly

But what can I say? I’m male. Scatological humor is in the DNA. (h/t: Grist reader LS)

David Roberts Climate & Energy

CPR for the electric car

Project Better Place has a new take on jumpstarting the electrification of transportation: they've raised $200 million (about enough to buy, what, three fuel cell vehicles?) to start building infrastructure for charging and battery exchange stations.

That's just a down payment. If you play Internet Nancy Drew for a sec you will quickly find out that Israel Corp, a major investor, also has a stake in oil refineries, and 45 percent of Chery, the Chinese car company that keeps threatening to build electric cars. These guys are invested in the full value chain, and dollars to donuts they're leveraging much more value from partner companies than the measly $200 million. We are talking about a $6-10 trillion industry, after all, which tends to focus the mind and get people working together.

Do yourself a favor and check out the video. The vision is a transportation system powered by wind and sun. And a software exec (CEO and founder Shai Aggassi comes from SAP) is exactly the right person for the job.

We don't have an energy problem, we have an energy storage problem. When I listen to Agassi talk about developing software to manage the charging strategies of EV's flexible and mobile loads in a way that enhances integration of intermittent resources like solar and wind into the grid, I get a little weak in the knees.

Combine that with REC's announcement that it was building a 1.5 GW fully integrated solar manufacturing plant in Singapore, and the future seems much brighter indeed. Note that 1.5 GW was about the size of the entire world market in 2006.

The combination of cheap solar and millions of big batteries on the grid can mean only good things.

Adam Browning Climate & Energy

The ‘Nissan bloc’

Xenophobia rears its ugly head in the CAFE debate.

David Roberts Politics

Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the ‘end of suburbia’

The remarkably low fueling cost of the best current hybrids (like the Toyota Prius) and future plug-in hybrids are major reasons I don't worry as much about peak oil as some do.

James Kunstler, for instance, argues in his 2005 book The Long Emergency (see Rolling Stone excerpt here) that after oil production peaks, suburbia "will become untenable" and "we will have to say farewell to easy motoring." In Rolling Stone, Kunstler writes, "Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." (No -- that distinction probably belongs to China's torrid love-affair with coal power.)

But suppose Kunstler is right about peak oil. Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.