Tuesday, January 31, 2006

New Plug-In




AFS Trinity and Richardo to Develop Plug-In
Source: AFS Trinity
Jan 25, 2006

SEATTLE and LONDON

An Extreme Hybrid™ car -- which plugs into house current from the power grid for most of its power and is expected to give the average driver more than 250 miles per gallon of gasoline -- moved closer to reality today according to news from AFS Trinity Power Corporation and the leading global automotive engineering firm, Ricardo.

AFS Trinity and Ricardo have agreed to work together to design, test and develop the Extreme Hybrid™ drive-train and build the initial systems that are expected to be licensed by AFS Trinity to carmakers worldwide.

Dave Shemmans, CEO of Ricardo plc, said, “After the Extreme Hybrid™ is ready to be licensed to OEM’s, Ricardo intends to provide assistance to the world’s automakers integrating the XH™ plug-in hybrid drive train into their specific vehicular platforms.”

Ricardo has 1750 engineers and consultants who serve the world’s automotive OEMs and tier one suppliers from design, testing and engineering facilities throughout Europe, US and Asia.

In related news, Edward W. Furia, Chairman and CEO of AFS Trinity, said, “The power electronics, ultra-capacitors, batteries, motors and other related advanced components that we will integrate with Ricardo’s help into the Extreme Hybrid™ drive train are all advancing rapidly and reducing in cost.

more

Monday, January 30, 2006

Public Power Leads Charge


TPPA

Public Power Leads Charge for Plug-in Hybrids
New Rules. org
January 30, 2006

Last week, a dozen cities, over 100 public power utilities, businesses and a host of national policy groups kicked off a nationwide campaign to urge automakers to accelerate development of plug-in hybrid vehicles. The "Plug-In Partners" campaign is hoping to demonstrate a large market potential so that automakers will start producing plug-in vehicles.

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) would combine today's new gas-electric hybrid technology with larger batteries that could provide an all-electric operating range of 25 to 35 miles or more. The result is an 80+ mile-per-gallon vehicle.

Plug-ins could be recharged by plugging into a standard wall socket, delivering "electric" gallons of gas for about $0.75-$1.00 per gallon. Experts estimate there is sufficient generation in place and available at night to charge up to one-third of all vehicles in America, if they were plug-ins.

Austin, TX, has pledged $1 million in city rebates to help citizens and businesses purchase the first wave of plug-ins to roll off assembly lines. The campaign has been led by the municipally-owned utility in Austin. They have called for cities to initiate citizen petition drives and to encourage government and businesses to issue soft orders or expressions of interest in purchasing plug-ins. In Austin, 11,000 citizens have signed petitions calling on automakers to produce plug-ins, and soft orders for 600 plug-in vehicles have been received from government and businesses. more



More News

Friday, January 27, 2006

Hatch Hopes to Drive Plug-In


EV world

HATCH HOPING TO DRIVE PLUG-IN HYBRID TECHNOLOGY
Speech with National Press Club explores alternative-fuel cars

Washington — Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) extolled the virtues of plug-in hybrid technology, which promises electric-gas cars powered via standard wall sockets, in a speech to the National Press Club today.

The press conference kicked off the Plug-In Partners campaign (www.pluginpartners.org), a national coalition of cities seeking to reduce dependency on foreign oil while improving environmental standards.

Although plug-in cars are not currently on the market, the Plug-In Partners support development of more advanced alternative-fuel automobiles. The group recognized Hatch for his CLEAR ACT (Clean Efficient Automobiles Resulting from Advanced Car Technologies), which Congress passed last summer.

The CLEAR ACT provides, among other items, tax credits for purchasing alternative-fuel vehicles to help drive the market beyond current hybrid technology, creating marketable plug-in and eventually fuel cell vehicles. A full copy of Hatch’s remarks follow:

"I want to thank Mayor Will Winn of Austin, Austin Energy, and the Plug-in Partners Coalition for holding this important event today and for asking me to say a few words.

more

Thursday, January 26, 2006

NYT Editorial

Editorial
Trying to Find the Road Ahead
Published: January 24, 2006

With its bonds downgraded to junk and its market share on the ropes, Detroit's auto industry almost looks to be in a free fall. Ford Motor Company's announcement yesterday that after three straight quarters of North American losses, it will close as many as 14 factories and eliminate up to 30,000 jobs by 2012 is another sign of dark days in the Motor City. What's really sad is that Ford is in such bad shape that few people think the restructuring and job cuts are too aggressive, even though they were larger than many auto industry analysts had been expecting.

That's not all that surprising when you consider that earlier this month, the Chinese automaker Geely did something no Chinese company had ever done. At Detroit's auto show, it unveiled a Chinese car that Geely plans to upgrade and sell in the United States in 2008. The price for what could be China's first foray into America's overheated love affair with cars: around $10,000.

The American auto industry is used to getting its head handed to it on a silver platter by Toyota and the Japanese. Judging from the reaction to Geely at the auto show, American automakers may soon be adding the Chinese to their list of global competitors. One DaimlerChrysler employee, checking out Geely's 7151 CK model, which seats five and is about the size of a Honda Civic, told the Voice of America: "If I didn't work for DaimlerChrysler, I would consider it as one of my buying options." Ouch.

The United Automobile Workers union was absolutely right to say, as it did yesterday, that Ford would be better off trying to design more appealing cars and trucks. The reality is that all the job cuts in the world won't help if Ford, and General Motors, for that matter, continue to shy away from offering more Americans many more cars that can run on fuels other than gasoline. With the global oil market operating at close to zero excess capacity, oil prices are not coming down anytime soon. To handle that, the auto bigwigs in Detroit should, for starters, be making sure that every new car they roll out is a flexible-fuel car.

Beyond that, Ford should be putting more into developing plug-in hybrid vehicles, which can be plugged into the electricity grid, and a lot less into gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. Company officials are talking about developing a new small car, along the lines of the ubiquitous SmartCars prevalent on European roads. That's good, but it would behoove Ford to make sure that it doesn't lose sight of the larger issue. "Oil prices are not going down, they're going up," said Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, based in Washington. "And if you don't have a car that can deal with that, you're dead."

Wall Street Report



Coalition Turns On to 'Plug-In Hybrids'
Utilities, Localities, DaimlerChrysler Give Traction to Professor's Drive For High Mileage
By JOHN J. FIALKA Staff Reporter

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 25, 2006

DAVIS, Calif. -- In the 1950s, an aspiring Pasadena hot-rodder named Andrew Frank shocked the competition by powering his 1936 Ford with a Cadillac V-12 engine. "It had gobs of torque," he recalls.

In the 1990s, as a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of California here, Dr. Frank produced another shocker. He yanked big engines out of American cars and replaced them with electric motors that worked in tandem with much smaller gasoline engines. He called his new configuration the "plug-in hybrid" because it allowed homeowners to recharge the car's batteries by plugging into an electrical outlet.

Hybrid automobiles work with two engines. Auto makers have tinkered with them since the early 1900s, but the cars didn't gain much attention in the U.S. until Japanese companies began selling them in 1999. The current top seller is Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius; Americans bought 205,790 of them last year. What Dr. Frank was proposing more than 10 years ago, however, was a variation on the hybrid theme.

But Detroit auto makers ignored him. Japanese car makers, about to market their own hybrids that didn't plug in, paid scant attention. This year, however, as hybrids have gained in popularity amid high gasoline prices, Dr. Frank, now 72 years old, is getting some traction:

A U.S. coalition led by electric utilities, sensing a way to gain market share through vehicles that derive 90% of their power from electricity and can recharge at night when power is plentiful and cheap, kicked off a national campaign in Washington yesterday to push auto makers to make plug-in hybrids.

Some cities, environmental groups and state pollution regulators have joined this "Plug-in Partners" effort. They see plug-ins as a means to meet tightening air-pollution standards and to use controls over utilities as a way to clean up urban air.

DaimlerChrysler AG has turned a European delivery van, called the Sprinter, into a prototype diesel-electric plug-in. Forty of the vehicles will be tested over the next two years by a variety of U.S. agencies and companies.

The plug-in campaign is intensifying just as car buyers and policy makers are grasping for ways to ease the nation's energy problems. When President Bush delivers his State of the Union address next week, he is expected to tout alternative auto fuels, like ethanol, as well as nuclear energy.

A key difference between plug-in hybrids and conventional hybrids is that plug-ins have a bigger battery pack and can be designed to run a passenger car on electricity for the first 60 miles -- about the length of an average daily commute.

Dr. Frank estimates that if drivers regularly recharge their batteries at home, plug-ins may get well over 100 miles per gallon. By comparison, conventional hybrids must rely on gasoline-powered engines to recharge their batteries and get between 40 and 60 mpg.

While running on electricity, the plug-in's fuel cost drops to 70 cents a gallon, or lower, Dr. Frank estimates.

Only a handful of experimental plug-ins are on the road. Some auto makers say the vehicles are more vulnerable to wear and tear than other hybrids. The biggest government spenders on auto research, the federal government and the state of California, remain focused not on hybrids but on fuel-cell-powered cars that use hydrogen.

"You should take a look and see at least what the federal government is thinking," Dr. Frank told students in one of his graduate classes recently, adding with a smile and a wink, "I don't agree with most of what they have to say." In the basement of his school's engineering building, Dr. Frank and his students tinker with sport-utility vehicles.

Their first move with a Ford Motor Co. Explorer was to rip up its floor panels. "Most cars have plenty of underutilized space," Dr. Frank explains, showing how he and the students filled that space with batteries.

Then the students replaced the Explorer's big gasoline engine with a fuel-sipper taken from a General Motors Corp. Saturn and a 200-horsepower electric motor. Power from the two engines, which operate on the same drive shaft, is controlled by a continuously variable transmission, a gearless, computer-controlled device. Dr. Frank estimates that the car's weight remains about the same. The batteries he puts in make it heavier, but his engines and transmissions are lighter than the ones he removes.

Dr. Frank's hybrids have enough electric power to run for the first 60 miles; then, computers turn on the gasoline engine to help run the car and keep the batteries charged. Dr. Frank's students have discovered that even with six of them riding in the Explorer, it could still "burn rubber."

That was the Explorer's downfall last year in an annual contest held by the Department of Energy to see which American university could build the most efficient-running car. Dr. Frank's students were showing off the car's acceleration in the parking lot before the contest, when it died. "We broke the motor," he explains.

In June, U.C. Davis will try again with a Chevrolet Equinox, powered by a relatively tiny Toyota Prius gasoline engine and electric equipment similar to that in the Explorer. To demonstrate that cars can be weaned almost entirely from fossil fuel, Dr. Frank's students plan to run the gasoline engine mainly on ethanol made from corn. They are designing a tent with solar panels that can be used to recharge the batteries.

Utilities are drawn to the idea of a car that plugs in at home. The Electric Power Research Institute, which is financed by utilities, is sponsoring DaimlerChrysler's experiment with plug-in delivery vans. The project is being shepherded one of Dr. Frank's former students, Mark Duvall, who remembers working long nights modifying cars in the professor's lab. "He was a complete master of giving you enough rope to hang yourself," Mr. Duvall says.

Critics say the plug-in's weak point may be its batteries, which could burn out if power is drawn up and down frequently. Dr. Frank says recent experiments with electric cars by Toyota and GM have developed batteries that can stand the strain.

Dan Benjamin, a transportation analyst for ABI Research, an Oyster Bay, N.Y., market-research firm, says the battery problem means plug-ins will appear first as commercial vehicles: "Stop-and-go city driving really takes advantage of this technology."

Bill Kwong, a spokesman for Toyota, says the company doesn't encourage buyers of its hybrids to use kits, made by some companies, that convert them into plug-ins, since "it cycles the batteries down way too deeply and shortens the life of the batteries." For that reason, he says Toyota isn't working on a plug-in hybrid.

Others think the car will be too expensive. It costs Dr. Frank about $100,000 to customize a car. But he estimates that made in volume, his adjustments would raise the cost of a car by a more affordable 25%. He says most plug-in parts could be made by a well-equipped machine shop.

The plug-in feature will add from $4,000 to $6,000 to the cost of a car, he calculates, noting "that's what some people pay for a sunroof, leather seats and a fancy navigation system."

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

MSNBC Plug-In Vote



MSNBC is carrying the story and it is offering an online vote.

Cities to seek plug-in hybrids
Austin, Texas announces ‘soft orders’ for 600,
but will carmakers build?
By
Miguel Llanos
Reporter
MSNBC

Austin, Texas, on Tuesday spearheaded a nationwide partnership that will lobby carmakers to build a new green vehicle — plug-in hybrids. In return, partners are prepared to commit to buying the cars — Austin alone 600 of them.

The vehicles take gasoline-electric hybrids to another level, allowing drivers to plug them in for a few hours to charge the batteries and then drive solely on electric power for up to 60 miles.

more

Campaign Begins


EV world

NATIONAL COALITION LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN
TO URGE AUTOMAKERS
TO PRODUCE PLUG-IN HYBRID VEHICLES

WASHINGTON, D.C.—January 24, 2006—Declaring the country’s economy, environmental health and national security at risk, a grassroots coalition of cities including Austin, Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle as well as electric utilities and national policy organizations today kicked off a nationwide campaign to urge automakers to accelerate development of plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) would combine today’s new gas-electric hybrid technology with larger batteries that could provide an all-electric operating range of 25 to 35 miles or more. The result is an 80+ mile-per-gallon vehicle — with even greater fuel economy possible utilizing bio-fuels.

Plug-ins could be recharged by plugging into a standard wall socket, delivering “electric” gallons of gas for about 75 cents a gallon at prevailing electric rates. Such a vehicle could reduce gasoline consumption for the average American by 50 percent to 70 percent and reduce automobile emissions well in excess of emissions that might result from the additional use of power plants.

“Plug-in hybrids represent a real near-term solution to America’s over-reliance on foreign oil imports and energy prices that escalate the cost of everything and threaten the very economic life of our nation,” says Austin Mayor Will Wynn, who pledged $1 million in city rebates to help citizens and businesses purchase the first wave of plug-ins to roll off assembly lines. “The technology exists today,” Wynn says. “This campaign will demonstrate to automakers that the market is also there.”

Already almost a dozen cities, over 100 public power utilities, businesses and a host of national policy groups have signed on to the “Plug-In Partners” campaign. Austin’s template calls for cities to initiate citizen petition drives and to encourage government and businesses to issue “soft” orders or expressions of interest in purchasing plug-ins. In Austin, 11,000 citizens have signed petitions calling on automakers to produce plug-ins, and soft orders for 600 plug-in vehicles have been received from government and businesses. For example, an area pest control company has pledged to buy up to 150 light weight plug-in trucks, once they are produced.

“Nothing has to be invented to produce a plug-in hybrid vehicle,” says Dr. Andrew Frank, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California at Davis and Director of the UCD Hybrid Electric Research Center. “Everything needed is available: the power trains, the gasoline engines, the computer systems, electric motors and batteries. All we need is for one of the large auto manufacturers to step up to the plate.”

An additional component of the nationwide Plug-In Partners campaign is for electric utilities to help build a pool of funding in their respective communities to provide rebates to citizens and businesses buying the first round of plug-ins. Experts estimate there is sufficient generation in place and available at night to charge up to one-third of all vehicles in America, if they were plug-ins. They point to plug-ins as a critical part of the answer to a looming crisis.

“Oil imports and the dark cloud they cast over this country requires dramatic and immediate attention,” says Frank Gaffney, President, Center for National Security Policy. “When that prolonged oil crisis occurs, Americans will pay anything because they will have no choice. Why wait until a catastrophe strikes to get truly serious about addressing the problem?”

Last year, U.S. consumers purchased more than 200,000 hybrid vehicles, which have grown from two models in 2000 to 11 models today. Hybrid sales are projected to triple over the next six years, as more Americans demonstrate their desire for better fuel economy and lower emissions. According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), half the cars in the U.S. are driven just 25 miles a day or less. “A plug-in vehicle with even a 20-mile range could reduce petroleum fuel consumption by about 60 percent,” says Bob Graham, Manager of EPRI’s Electric Transmission program.

EPRI has teamed with DaimlerChrysler AG of Stuttgart, Germany, to design and build a plug-in prototype van that will be tested in a small number of American cities over the next year. The vans, which have a 20-mile all-electric range, will be outfitted with either nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries or lithium ion (Li-Ion) batteries.

The cost, reliability and weight of batteries are often cited by automotive industry experts as one of the stumbling blocks to the mass production of plug-ins.

“We have driven our fleet of over 200 electric vehicles almost 12 million miles and have had no major problems with the batteries,” notes Edward Kjaer, Manager of Southern California Edison’s Electric Transportation Department. “The new generation of lithium-ion batteries is more powerful and lighter-weight and with reasonable volumes, should provide a price that would allow plug-in hybrid electric vehicles to be competitive.”

A number of leading energy efficiency and environmental organizations also support plug-in vehicles as important to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming. Plug-in Partner Coalition members include: Alliance to Save Energy, Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Clean Air Coalition, California Cars Initiative, and The Institute for Environmental Research and Education.

“Even drawing from our existing power plants, plug-in vehicles have the potential to cut a vehicle’s petroleum consumption by three-fourths or more, can operate at as little as one-fourth the fuel cost, and reduce greenhouse gases by two-thirds,” said Kateri Callahan, President of the Alliance to Save Energy. “As we increasingly turn to alternative technologies to improve the fuel economy of our vehicles, we will see increasing benefits to our economy, our environment, and our national security.”

News and information regarding the nationwide Plug-In Partners campaign will be chronicled at http://pluginpartners.org which will include summary reports on the results of petition drives, “soft orders” and development of community incentives programs. The coalition also will issue quarterly campaign reports over the coming year to the media, elected officials and auto manufacturers.

Web Site Up

The new plug in partners web site is up now.

Press Conference is today.

You can watch it here.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Press Conference Announced



The Plug In Partners Campaign will kick off on January 24th at the Press Club in Washington D.C.

More to Come