Green Options

Conventional drag racing is pretty much the furthest thing from a green sport, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of it. Yet even this tire-melting, gas-wasting sport is diving into the realm of alternative fuels for a variety of reasons.

Roush, a leading builder of aftermarket Mustangs, is developing two Mustangs for the drag strip powered not by gasoline, but clean-burning propane.

I love trucks. To me they represent everything America does (or at least used to) stand for. Rugged, capable, the workhorse of the working man. So much praise to heap on a very basic and oft-uncomfortable vehicle. But where do those gas-guzzling, stump pulling, trucks with all the aerodynamics of a brick fit in the future?

Electric Motor Corporation has an idea, and is teasing photos of their F-150-based “Flash” pickup truck. The name could use some work; but how does the rest of the truck shape up?

Three more car companies received sizeable loans from the federal government yesterday, but don’t worry; it’s not another bailout. In fact, the$8 billion is just the start of a larger $25 billion project called the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program (ATVM for short) that was thought up back in 2007 and funded by Congress in late 2008 during the Bush administration. The project, overseen by the Department of Energy, is a federal grant and loan initiative bent on providing [...]

The 16 MPG  F-150 is one of the most ubiquitous vehicles on the road today. What if you could convert them all to get 41 MPG?

The Illinois Institute of Technology’s masters program has spun-off a start-up with big plans for our aging fleet of big trucks. The company, called Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technology (HEVT), has built a bolt-on module that will convert a standard F-150 into a 41 MPG plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).

HEVT demo’d their first prototype at the Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose earlier in the month. The suddenly attractive F-150 PHEV (which is not the 1994 model depicted above) gets 15 miles of emissions-free driving on electricity before it switches over to gas/electric hybrid mode, where it will continue to get an impressive 41 MPG for a typical day’s worth of driving.