Green Options

French energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo will announce a plan on Thursday for the country to invest 1 billion Euros ($1.46 billion US) in the infrastructure needed to encourage the adoption of electric cars. That investment will buy 4.4 million charging stations, upgrade the power grid, purchase a government fleet of electric cars, and provide subsidies to EV buyers and auto manufacturers.

France hopes that this amount of investment will be enough to get 2 million electric cars on its roads within 10 years.

“Premium … (adjective): finest, exceptional; premium quality.” So says Chambers Dictionary anyway. For me it usually translates to “bloody expensive”.

Come to think of it, that’s also a good description of the Lexus range: priced between $32,000 and $106,000, “cheap” is not the first word which springs to mind.

Last week, Volkswagen debuted it’s E-Up! electric vehicle during the Frankfurt motor show. VW has already coined its new car “The Beetle for the 21st Century.” And now, according to VW, this city-sized electric vehicle concept will be Americanized and super-sized (okay, super-sized may be a slight exaggeration) for its American debut shortly after its launch in Europe in 2013.

In an article published by autoweek.com, the board member in charge of product development at Volkswagen AC, Ulrich Hackenberg, summed up in one sentence why they are developing an electric car. “The reason we are working on an electric vehicle is the American market.”

The moment sustainable motoring has waited for has finally arrived: a full range of all-electric cars.

Renault has launched the world’s first range of purely electric cars at the IAA Frankfurt Motor Show 2009.  Designed to cater for everyone from a single traveller to local commerce, via 2.5 kids family cars, it’s a revolution in three important ways:

• the range is designed from scratch as a complete set of electric cars — not gas-fueled cars with an electric motor retro-fitted to give the manufacturer green kudos;
• the cars will be priced without an “electric premium,” allowing them to compete alongside gas-based engines on a like-for-like basis for the first time ever;
• most importantly, they’re real. Presented as concept cars, the Kangoo ZE is already in an advanced prototype stage, and I was lucky enough to drive it at Frankfurt.

In the days when Ronnie was in the White House, penis envy ruled the superpowers’ nuclear arms race and David Hasslehoff was the west’s epitome of “cooool,” one car kept communist Europe running…

The Trabant. There was nothing this little runabout wouldn’t do to be cheap.

Its engine, a 600cc two stroke, would outperform your neighbour’s lawnmower… just. The fuel tank was *in* the engine; to refuel you opened the hood and splashed petrol around right next to a red-hot carburetor.

Even the bodywork was superior: the Trabant was made predominantly of plastic… it may not take an impact as well as metal, but at least is didn’t rust!

VW premiered its spanking new EV concept, the E-Up!, at the Frankfurt Auto Show yesterday, and gave the strongest hint yet that the car will be very close to the production model available from 2013.

The E-Up! boasts acceleration to 62 mph in a fairly zippy 11.3 seconds and tops out at 84 mph, whilst its 18 kWh integrated lithium-ion batteries will enable a range of over 80 miles (see picture gallery after the jump).

Yesterday we brought you news of the impending debut of Audi’s e-tron concept at the Frankfurt Auto Show. Today Audi released more details on the the eco-luxe electric car, and it’s a monster. The car has four electric motors which, together, produce an impressive 313 HP coupled with a jaw-dropping 3,319.03 lb-ft of torque (!!).

To give you an idea of how much torque that is: the not-yet-released, 6.7-liter, turbocharged, 400 HP, Ford Power Stroke Diesel truck engine only produces a wimpy (by comparison) 725 lb-ft. And the “world’s strongest truck” (according to Volvo) — the 700 HP Volvo FH16 semi — produces merely 2,323 lb-ft of torque. The Audi e-tron produces a full thousand more lb-ft of torque than the “world’s strongest” semi truck.

Volkswagen will display an updated version of its 1-Liter concept this week at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show. The diesel-hybrid car which only weighs around 800 lbs gets an jaw-dropping 170 MPG. So who wants one?

It was seven years ago when VW first announced the idea. Dr. Ferdinand Piëch–currently the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Volkswagen Group–drove a prototype of the car from Wolfsburg to Hamburg. It was the world’s first car to travel 100 kilometers on just a single liter of fuel. But the concept wasn’t ready for production as the body’s carbon-fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) was too costly for consideration.

Just ahead of the upcoming Frankfurt Auto Show, Audi is sending out *extremely* mixed signals on how involved it’s going to get in the development and production of electric cars. In the wake of the proclamation by Audi US President, Johan de Nysschen, that the Chevy Volt “is for idiots” and that electric cars are a mistake in general, Audi has just released a barrage of videos teasing about the power of electricity and hinting that they will be developing an electric car.

So which one is it Audi? Are you for or against EVs? Or is it that you just want to appear to be for EVs so that you can tame the “elite intellectual” crowd that you so heavily rely upon, while secretly being against? Perhaps a bit of nefarious greenwashing?

Ah, the Trabant. That most humble and often-maligned communist-era East German auto icon. To people who remember the car — lovingly and mockingly nicknamed the Trabi in its heyday — it conjures up all sorts of feelings. Personally the Trabi and I have a special connection: My wife grew up in East Germany and has fond, bittersweet memories of taking vacations to the Baltic Sea crowded into the back (and sometimes even the trunk) of the loud, blue-smoke-belching, death trap.

I’ve always been of the mindset that fuel efficiency and performance do not have to be mutually exclusive. A new concept car from BMW pursues that ideology, blending almost 600 ft-lbs of torque with a 62.6 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency.

Called (take a deep breath) the Vision EfficiencyDynamics turbodiesel plug-in hybrid concept, it combines a lot of future technology into a polarizing design that is sure force people to draw lines in the sand.