The Electric Mini E is looking for lease-holders! Check out the story at the Mini Car Blog — it’s great news for electric car lovers!
A quick excerpt:
“The car will depend on lithium-ion battery which will propel the front wheels by transferring the energy through a gearbox without producing any sound and emissions. The battery of the Mini E was especially engineered for the vehicle and has a rating of more than 150 miles per charge.”
Chevrolet, a division of General Motors, has been manufacturing cars powered by biofuel for the last eight years. According to Beth Lowery, GM Vice President, Environment, Energy and Safety Policy, “at GM, we believe that the biofuel with the greatest potential to displace petroleum–based fuels in the U.S. is ethanol.” GM’s preferred form of ethanol is called E85, a mix of eighty-five percent ethanol to fifteen percent gas, and is presently produced from grain products grown in the US.
And whether one agrees with the way in which ethanol feedstocks are produced and the fact that ethanol powered vehicles still rely on fossil fuel gasoline in some way, Chevrolet presents a diverse selection of alternative fuel vehicles including the Avalanche, Impala, HHR, Silverado, Suburban, Tahoe and Express.
Chrysler is moving quickly to advance its line of eco friendly vehicles. With ten years of history behind them in the electric car business, they have recently announced more models that will be added to the selection. Formerly known as Global Electric Motorcars, the division is now called Green Eco Mobility in accordance with the times and to show Chrysler’s determination to become a leader in environmentally friendly vehicles.
Their newest innovation, the GEM Peapod, announced mid-September, will be the perfect “around town” vehicle. Short trips are said to cause the worst type of pollution. By driving the Peapod to run local errands, the environment will be much healthier. No gas and no emissions, the Peapod is considered the next generation of electric vehicles with production beginning in 2009.
The race is on to find reliable and realistic foodstocks to produce biodiesel. In keeping with the rest of the world to voluntarily contribute to the advancement of alternative fuels, Bharat Petroleum Corp, Ltd, the state run oil refinery of India, has recently announced that it will commit nearly four hundred and eighty million dollars to the production of biodiesel from jatropha plants. Rich in oil, the plants are perfect as a renewable resource as they are not edible and do not conflict with human food sources.
In a joint venture with Nandan Biometrix, Ltd, the jatropha grower and Shapoorji Pallonji Co. Ltd, a construction company, the newly formed company Bharat Renewable Energy Ltd will be responsible for converting the jatropha to biodiesel. One million hectares of the plants will be planted and harvested in the next four years in response to the September 11th announcement by the Indian government to require a twenty percent mixture of bio fuels in all transportation fuels sold by the year 2017.
Doing not talking is important. It is not enough to say that we need to find better ways to power modern day cars. The best solution is to do something about the dilemma. And that is exactly what Bio-Beetle from Maui, Hawaii has done. They have taken a stand against traditional, dirty polluting cars and opened an eco car rental agency with vehicles powered only by biodiesel.
Unlike fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel, biodiesel used to run these cute little Beetle cars, comes from discarded cooking oils. Imagine fueling a vehicle with a restaurant’s old vegetable oil used to cook French fries. Another aspect of the Bio-Beetle is that it also uses earth friendly coolants, synthetic oil, and non-toxic cleaners. The company employees wear organic cotton uniforms and the company mission is “to be the greenest and best rental car company on the planet”.
I’ve gotten quite a few e-mails asking me about what kind of alt fuel the mini in our header image is packing….
Well, it’s a Hydrogen Mini using BMW’s CleanEnergy technology!
I wouldn’t mind driving one of these… 
This has become a common topic and everywhere that you go you will find people discussing about natural gas car fuel. People are fed up with the sharp increase in the prices of both diesel and petrol and it is becoming tough for them to run their car on these standard fuels. 
People feel afraid of driving their car to the fuel pumps as they do not know when the prices will go up again making them pay that extra buck or two for the same amount of fuel they fill up their car tanks with every day. Natural gas car fuels have become the best way to reduce your burden that has been imposed on you due to increase in fuel prices. People are discovering the long known method of using natural gas car fuel which makes their car into a vehicle that burns water.
This Karma Super Saloon is one of the most aggressive-looking Hybrid Cars I have EVER seen (and will see in the upcoming years too, I assume…).
I haven’t been able to find exact prices of this car yet but I’m sure it’ll be aggressive too.
A little more info about this Fisker Automotive Super Saloon Hybrid can be found on Wheeltronix.
People generally assume that when someone says alternative fuel, the new fuel must be better than gas or better for the environment. Unfortunately, this is not true. Alternative fuels can be equally as detrimental or worse than currently used fuels.
Tar Sand Oil
Remember that the word alternative only means another form. It does mean better or cleaner. Take for example oil produced from tar sands. It is said that tar sand oil products are at least three times higher in greenhouse gas emissions than oil produced from traditional sources. And yet Canada has a very large tar sand oil industry exporting most of it to the United States.
As a result, as recently as May 2008, green organizations both from Canada and the US have lobbied the US Congress and Senate to ban the importation/exportation of the oil. Alberta, Canada is rumored to hold as much or more oil in the tar sands as oil in Saudi Arabia. Environmentalists strongly suggest that tar sand oil is infinitely more detrimental as it a dirtier oil causing great harm to wildlife.
Biodiesel is a substitute fuel comparable to usual or ‘fossil’ diesel can be shaped from direct vegetable oil, animal fats and waste cooking oil. The procedure used to exchange these oils to Biodiesel is known as transesterification. It is a non-petroleum diesel. The major feasible resource of suitable oil comes from oil crops like soybean; rapeseed or palm rapeseed represents the most possible for biodiesel production In UK. A large amount of biodiesel is produced from throw away vegetable oil sourced from restaurants, manufacturing food producers, chip shops, etc. The raw oil is very costly and so it is not being created commercially. Following the expenditure of converting it to biodiesel has been supplemented on it is merely too costly to contend with fossil diesel. The desecrate vegetable oil can regularly be sourced without charge or sourced previously treated for a little price, so that the Biodiesel created from throw away vegetable oil can fight with fossil diesel.
In modern diesel engines Biodiesel can be used in unadulterated form (B100) or may be mixed with petroleum diesel at any application. Biodiesel manufacture and use are increasing rapidly. Fueling stations make biodiesel willingly accessible to customers transversely in Europe, and progressively in Canada and USA.
Biodiesel can also be used as a heating fuel in household and saleable boilers, seldom known as bioheat. Biodiesel is normally formed by the transesterification of the animal fat or vegetable oil feedstock. A number of methods are used for carrying out this transesterification reaction together with the regular batch process, microwave methods, supercritical processes and ultrasonic methods
Biodiesel has a lot of environmentally valuable properties. The chief advantage of biodiesel is that it can be described as carbon neutral and it is quickly recyclable and totally safe, meaning spillages correspond to far a smaller amount of a threat than fossil diesel spillages. Biodiesel has an upper blaze point than fossil diesel and so is safer in the result of a collapse.