I’ve always found most body kits to be silly. Side skirts, fender flares, and front splitters usually do little more than add weight and make a slow car look like it’s trying too hard to go fast. But every now and then a good, clean body kit can improve the appearance of a car, and if done right, even improve its aerodynamic properties.

Hybrids seem to be especially popular to make body kits for recently, with both the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion Hybrid receiving different takes on body enhancements. Toyota is taking the game a step further with its Aerius body kit which offers subtle improvements to the exterior without negatively affecting the drag coefficient.

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When it comes to music, the Beatles—fueled by my parents’ large collection of vinyl—dominated most of my early life. The White Album is like my musical comfort food; it’s what I go back to when I need to feel rooted. But in terms of the music that has influenced and shaped much of my adult life, there is no band more important than Phish.

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With the perceptible movement of a slow landslide, Ford hybrid sales have been dramatically increasing over the last year—sales in September were up 73% from last September. According to Automotive News (subs. req’d), this brings Ford within a few thousand units of overtaking Honda to become the second largest seller of hybrids in America.

These numbers are significant because, according to Ford hybrid marketing manager David Finnegan, “More than 60 percent of Fusion Hybrid sales have been from non-Ford owners, and more than half of those are customers coming from import brands, mostly from Toyota and Honda.”

Confirming Finnegan’s assessment, the established hybrid juggernaut, Toyota, has seen sales of its hybrids plummet 28% in the same time period. Toyota still blows all the hybrid competition out of the water—capturing nearly 66% of all US hybrid sales—but the speed with which the changes are taking place certainly bodes well for a healthy and competitive hybrid marketplace in the future.

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Mazda, one of the few manufacturers to stay out of the hybrid car craze, has announced they will raise over $1 billion for hybrid research by issuing 315.2 million shares of their stock. As someone who questions the practicality of hybrids, this news is rather disappointing to me personally. You might call me a “hybrid hater.”

But what about hydrogen, Mazda? Le sigh…

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The domestic auto industry may be in turmoil, but for at least one of the Big Three things are starting to look up. Ford Motor Company, the only American auto company not to take government aid, has been moving forward full speed with their green car initiatives, and as such has been awarded the Green Choice Award by Natural Health magazine. Ford has expanded in every direction by trying to become a more green car company, building on the success of its Ford Escape Hybrid SUV by introducing the Ford Fusion Hybrid, which gets 41mpg in the city and 36 on the highway, besting Toyota’s Camry and equaling its initial quality, according to recent surveys.

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A few months ago Cleantechnica reported on the new Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan’s graphical display known as SmartGauge. Now Ford has released a video showing the interactive display in action.

Probably the coolest part of the video is where it shows how the driver will get instantaneous driving habits feedback by displaying how efficiently he or she is driving. The gauge does this through a constantly changing display of green leaves — the more green leaves on the display, the better you’re driving. For the less creative among us, that same information can also be displayed in a history graph (fuel economy over the last ten minutes). This is a nice, non-intrusive way to help promote good driving habits and maximizing a driver’s fuel economy.

Video after the break (skip to minute 2 for hybrid-specific graphics and display).

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Unfortunately, you still can’t have any of those things (although the Nikes did appear on eBay, briefly, and sold for $1300 US), but maybe you can have something better:  a real, honest-to-goodness Mr. Fusion!

The “Mr. Fusion” reactor mounted to the back of Back to the Future’s famous DeLorean hovercar produced the car’s fuel by extracting chemical energy from common household garbage.  While the 1985 movie version of Mr. Fusion put out enough power to juice the good Doctor Brown’s flux capacitor all the way to the year 2015, the 2008 version will probably only get a few miles down the road.

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Ford is set to release its first hybrid sedan, the Ford Fusion, early next year. The fuel efficient car includes a novel ‘Smart Gauge’ dashboard designed to improve mileage and encourage greener driving habits.

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