By Chris Milton •
September 23, 2009
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.
By Chris Milton •
September 22, 2009
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!
By Jerry James Stone •
September 14, 2009
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.
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.
By Jerry James Stone •
August 13, 2009
BMW’s new ActiveHybrid X6 promises to be the world’s most powerful hybrid with 480 hp (358 kW) and 575 lb-ft of torque (780 N·m).
The ActiveHybrid X6 will hit 60 mph in just under 6 seconds all while providing a 20-percent fuel savings according to the EU test-cycle. The EU also gave it a CO2 rating of 231 g/km. EPA numbers aren’t yet available.
