hybrid electric vehicles

Chevy Volt

After a difficult first year in 2011, sales of the Chevy Volt shot up to a respectable 23,461 car sales for 2012 — driven largely by consumer demand reacting to high gas prices.[read more]

We’ve all heard the comparison between carbon offsets and indulgences, the latter being those documents that let Medieval Catholics exchange money for an official (or not so official) pass that let them avoid the penalties for committing sins. (See Wikipedia: Indulgence for some fascinating background on the topic.) I dislike this...[read more]

Bob Morris at Polizeros has a post on "World’s first hybrid bulldozer" from Caterpillar.The D7E represents a mid-range dozer between Caterpillar’s popular D6 and D8 models, and commands a price premium of 20%, or $100,000, over a standard D7R. But that 20% can be recouped in as little as two years thanks to fuel savings of 10-30% It has...[read more]

Andrew Price reports that “the state of Colorado is giving people tax credits that will offset the cost of turning a hybrid car into a full plug-in electric by as much as $6,000. These conversions normally cost in the $12,000 range, so this is a pretty significant discount.” One might suspect that increasing availability of plug-in...[read more]

It’s been a busy past couple days for the Department of Energy.Yesterday, President Obama announced that the DOE has awarded $2.4 billion to 48 projects for manufacturing electric vehicles, vehicle batteries and components. The funding comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and is directed at increasing U.S....[read more]

By Alisha Fowler, Breakthrough Generation FellowThis post is part of our week-long Special Issue exploring ways to sever the link between transportation and oil by electrifying transportation. Stay tuned for more...Last week, Volkswagen announced it will roll out a demonstration test fleet of 20 plug-in hybrids by 2010, with plans for...[read more]

Last month I blogged about my Toyota Prius test drive and how it left me wanting more in terms of fuel efficiency. Well, the following shows that it could have been worse. This nifty table from Edmunds.com shows you a comparison of the hybrid price premiums for all 2008 models, along with the number of years it would take to recoup your...[read more]

Payback For Many Hybrids Grows As Gas Costs Rise: Higher demand has stiffened sales prices for hybrids and other cars and crossover SUVs with decent fuel economy while dealers and manufacturers are discounting less-efficient conventional gasoline models to try to move them off the lots. That boosts the difference between the retail...[read more]

The Brookings Institution and Google have started a two-day conference on plug-in hybrids elective vehicles you can listen to here. Needless to say for Climate Progress readers, PHEVs are a core climate solution and probably the best way of significantly reducing US oil consumption (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core...[read more]

greencarcongress.com : The Nikkei reports that Toyota and Matsushita intend to build two plants for automotive batteries: one for NiMH cells, the other for Li-ion cells. The Li-ion cells reportedly are targeted for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The companies seek to lift annual production of such batteries to around 1 million units...[read more]

Subtitle: The Next “Rigged” Competition from DOE and GM As Doug Korthof can attest, CARB the (California Air Resources Board) has been a battleground for greater accommodation of electric vehicles recently. While this blog ignored for the most part what seemed to be petty politics, we now learn about a corollary to the in-fighting. It...[read more]

MSU (Mississippi State University) earned top honors in the GM and US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Challenge X student engineering competition. This was the second consecutive year that the MSU team took first place. “The Mississippi State team designed a through-the-road parallel hybrid electric vehicle powered by a 1.9L GM direct...[read more]

I ran across an interesting calculation in a presentation recently that I think serves as a good example of how careful we have to be about energy and environmental analyses and what conclusions we draw from them. The number is in the presentation “Peak Oil”, by Paul Wallace, which was made at the event Peak Oil and Future Challenges: A...[read more]

I have a dilemma regarding what to do about your dilemma. The people I’m talking about are my readers, friends, and relatives who are popping up in my e-mail, asking me questions about whether they should buy a new car, when they should buy it, what they should get, etc. The dilemma is not that I’m hesitant to opine about such things (...[read more]

bloomberg.com, greencarcongress.com : Nissan and NEC will jointly spend about 20 billion yen ($194 million) for the world's first mass production of lithium-ion batteries for hybrid and electric cars. The two companies plan to build by next year a plant capable of making enough batteries for 60,000 electric cars each year, the Nikkei...[read more]