In a briefing last week General Motors reaffirmed their commitment to the launch of the Chevy Volt by late 2010. The primary purpose of this briefing was to discuss the benefits of lithium battery technology as well as the reasons for their choice of LG Chem to produce the first generation of batteries for the Volt. [...]

Whether or not electric cars are going to hit the roads in volume anytime soon is more uncertain than ever, with the market for new vehicle purchases off nearly 50% compared to just one year ago, and the price of a barrel of oil back under US $40. But while the near term prospects for the automotive industry [...]

While regulating CO2 emissions occupies an ever increasing share of policymaker and environmentalist priorities, which translates into countless new businesses and technologies to address this new challenge, there are still all those other air pollution emissions that we used to worry about exclusively, and almost, but not quite eliminated.
While impressive results in air pollution have been logged ever [...]

Last month one of the leaders in providing enabling technology for the smart grid, GridPoint, Inc., conducted a public demonstration of their “smart charging” software. This took place at an EV conference sponsored by the Electric Drive Transportation Association. As we reported in an earlier feature “Smart Grid Enablers - GridPoint,” the move to a more [...]

A recent comment on our report entitled “Ford Delivers Electric Vehicles” (written in April 2001 when USPS tried out a fleet of 400 EVs) has called our attention once again to EEStor (site under construction), the stuff of legends, the company developing an ultracapacitor to supply partners such as ZENN Motor Company, among others. According to Wikipedia’s entry on EEStor, EEStor’s [...]

Most of us have heard about the “Hydrogen Highway,” that mythical roadway which, along with bullet trains and bridges to nowhere, may actually get built someday at a staggering expense to the taxpayer (to be fair - we’re as hopeful as anyone the formidable technological barriers to using hydrogen as a transportation fuel are eventually overcome).  But [...]

In our interactive spreadsheet “How Much Electricity for all Commuters? ” you can calculate what it would take to replace our combustion-driven automotive fleet with electric vehicles.  The assumptions that the spreadsheet default to (which you can change to anything you wish) indicate that based on 4.0 kilowatt-hours per mile, and 40 miles per day [...]