Green Options

Much has been written about the launch of the Hyundai i10 concept, the company’s first foray into the electric car market. It’s an impressive car and the underlying technology trumps many other competitors.

For example, there’s the Li-Poly battery which Hyundai claim will charge almost twice as fast as the Li-Ion battery championed by Renault and other manufacturers. Of course, this assumes you have an industrial outlet with enough amps to provide the power fast enough.

However, the Hyundai i10 is more than a standalone electric car. It is part of a range which the company has obviously thought about long and hard before bringing it to market.

New findings from the Cassini mission to Titan — Saturn’s largest moon — show that its atmosphere contains about 29 billion gallons of propane.

Given that the average new car fuel economy in the US is currently about 20 miles per gallon, and that propane-converted cars get about the same mileage as regular gas cars, there’s enough propane on Titan to take one average car more than 23 million times around the Earth’s equator.

Wow! So what you say? Even though that may sound staggering, you still aren’t convinced that it really means anything to you? What if I told you this: that’s only enough propane to satisfy the propane needs of the US for 18 months.

After several set backs last week, yesterday the British Steam Car Team unofficially broke the 103 year-old world steam-powered land speed record. The speed record has been held for more than a century by American Fred Marriott, who in 1906, drove a “Stanley Steamer” car 127 miles per hour (mph). The teams own calibrated equipment measured the two way average of 137.14 mph and a 48 min, 52 second turn-around.

At the wheel will be tri-national Charles Burnett III, a multimillionaire born in England to a Canadian mother and American father. The car, which looks like an over sized rocket on wheels, is nicknamed the “fastest kettle in the world”.

Coming 12 years after the introduction of the Prius in Japan, Hyundai may be extremely late to the hybrid party, but they’re hoping to play catch up quickly.

Hyundai’s new Elantra LPI will be sold only in South Korea. It runs on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and uses lithium-ion batteries. Although Hyundai has no immediate plans to export the Elantra LPI overseas, the company plans to release a gasoline electric hybrid version of the Sonata in late 2010. Presumably the hybrid Sonata would be marketed in the US to compete directly with offerings from Toyota and Honda.

A London manager for an energy saving company has found himself the recipient of some incredible luck after walking away from his converted Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Peugeot that had, moments before, exploded. The incident occurred while he was driving at 30 miles per hour after lighting a cigarette.