Green Car Congress

AUGUST 8, 2017

The SOLETAIR project ( earlier post ) has produced its first 200 liters of synthetic fuel from solar energy and the air’s carbon dioxide via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Project partners include INERATEC, a spinoff of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT). The mobile chemical pilot plant produces gasoline, diesel, and kerosene from regenerative hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

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Creative Greenius

AUGUST 21, 2017

Ladies and gentlemen your friendly neighborhood Greenius has hit the wall. I am dog tired. And I’m cranky – angry even – I’ve got no patience left. My lips no longer pucker to kiss politicians ass and I find that I can no longer suffer fools gladly. I need a break, right now, before I snap. So I’m finally taking one. A year-long one.

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Green Car Reports

AUGUST 29, 2017

Sometimes it's best not to dare the public to do the research, especially if you're trying to persuade them of something that isn't true. Almost two years ago, Inside Climate News published a significant expose that confirmed Exxon's own scientists had agreed that human carbon emissions contributed to global warming as early as July 1977. But as.

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Green Cars News

AUGUST 10, 2017

It was reported last month that UK vehicle theft has increased 20% in recent years, and recent evidence suggests that a new computerised ‘relay’ style

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Green Fleet Magazine

AUGUST 31, 2017

The IARA launched a new website earlier this year. The site brought a number of improvements over the old version; however, the organization says there are still a number of improvements and features to come.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 11, 2017

Siemens has been commissioned by the German state of Hesse to build an overhead contact line for electrified freight transport on a ten-kilometer stretch of autobahn. The line will supply electricity for the electric drive of a hybrid truck. Siemens originally presented its innovative “eHighway” concept in 2012. ( Earlier post.) The system will be installed on the A5 federal autobahn between the Zeppelinheim/Cargo City Süd interchange at the Frankfurt Airport and the Darmstadt/Weiterstadt interc

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2017

by Dave Crichton. Driverless cars are poised to decongest personal car traffic, shrink our eco footprint, free up parking spaces and reduce the frequency of collisions by about 90%. This could result in a conservative estimate of $642 billion in cost savings. But as promising as autonomous private vehicles are, could self-driven buses outshine them?

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 11, 2017

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) reached. settlements with Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF) and Union Pacific Railroad Company (UPRR) to resolve violations of the state’s drayage truck regulation, which requires cleanup of trucks servicing the state’s busy ports and intermodal rail yards. An investigation by CARB’s Enforcement Division documented that both companies had failed to accurately report all the required information for noncompliant trucks entering 12 separat

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 14, 2017

Registration of model year 2016 plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) in New Jersey was up 79% over 2015, according to a recent analysis by ChargEVC , a diverse coalition of organizations and companies that support growth of the electric vehicle market. New Jersey now has more than 10,000 PEVs on the road, 60% of which have been sold in the last two years.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 19, 2017

Volkswagen announced it will put the battery-electric I.D. BUZZ microbus concept into production. Volkswagen presented the concept at the Detroit Auto Show in January. ( Earlier post.) The Chairmen of the Boards of Management of the Volkswagen and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brands, Dr Herbert Diess and Dr Eckhard Scholz, announced the decision today at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in California.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 4, 2017

Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) and Mazda Motor Corporation (Mazda) signed an agreement to enter a business and capital alliance, with the aim of further strengthening their partnership. The companies agreed to: 1) establish a joint venture that produces vehicles in the United States; 2) jointly develop technologies for electric vehicles; 3) jointly develop connected-car technology; 4) collaborate on advanced safety technologies; and 5) expand complementary products.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 10, 2017

Chanje, a California-based commercial electric vehicle and energy solutions company, has emerged from stealth mode. Chanje’s first model, the V8070 panel van, already has volume orders and will be delivered later this year. The van has a payload capacity of up to 6,000 lbs (2,870 kg) and 580 ft 3 of cargo volume. A 70 kWh liquid-cooled battery can charge at up to 7.2 kW.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2017

Researchers have achieved a significant boost in the storage capacity of magnesium-ion batteries through a new design for the cathode and a new understanding of the electrolyte. In an open-access paper in the journal Nature Communications , they report a battery chemistry that utilizes magnesium mono-chloride cations in expanded titanium disulfide. The battery demonstrates the reversible intercalation of 1 and 1.7 magnesium monochloride cations per titanium at 25 and 60 °C, respectively, corresp

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 22, 2017

According to a new study by Bosch, the use of e-fuels—synthetic fuels based on renewable energy—in Europe by 2050 as a scheduled supplement to electrification could save up to 2.8 gigatons of CO 2 : three times Germany’s carbon-dioxide emissions in 2016. The calculation is based on an assumed e-fuels blend of 1% in 2025, 10% in 2030, 40% in 2040 and completely replacing the fossil fuel share by 2050.

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Emissions Fuel CO2 Gasoline-Electric 210

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 7, 2017

Through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) negotiated by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Technology Transfer and Outreach Office, ARL and Brown University researchers are attempting to address the difficulty of characterizing and then engineering the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer that forms on the anode of lithium ion batteries, with particular emphasis on experimental silicon anodes with very high capacities for lithium.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 3, 2017

Researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have discovered that a nano-galvanic aluminum-based powder of their design splits water on contact, producing hydrogen and oxygen. Scientists have known for a long time that hydrogen can be produced by adding a catalyst—such as sodium or potassium hydroxide or an acid—to aluminum. However, these methods take time, elevated temperature, and added electricity.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 15, 2017

Lithium-air (or lithium-oxygen) batteries potentially could offer three times the gravimetric energy of current Li-ion batteries (3500 Wh/kg at the cell level); as such, they are looked to a potential solution for long-range EVs. However, tests of various approaches to creating such batteries have produced conflicting and confusing results, as well as controversies over how to explain them.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 7, 2017

Tesla intends to offer, subject to market and other conditions, $1.5 billion in aggregate principal amount of its senior notes due 202. The Notes will be senior unsecured debt obligations of Tesla. The interest rate, redemption prices and other terms of the Notes are to be determined. Tesla intends to use the net proceeds from this offering to further strengthen its balance sheet during this period of rapid scaling with the launch of Model 3, and for general corporate purposes.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 24, 2017

UK-based ULEMCo has developed a fuel-cell-based unit that will extend vehicle range by supplying additional power to the standard Nissan e-NV200 van. With the combination of the on-board hydrogen storage and fuel cell module, the van will have a range of more than 150 miles (241 km) when laden, satisfying the range requirements of most average daily delivery operations for this size of van.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 14, 2017

Nissan Motor Corporation and its Infiniti brand revealed a sleek, open-wheeled electric retro roadster prototype at the 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. The car, called Prototype 9, is a re-imagining of a 1940s race car with time-honored production techniques employed to realize its retro design. The Prototype 9 is the first Infiniti to be powered by a new EV powertrain from Nissan Motor’s Advanced Powertrain Department—a 30 kWh high-voltage battery paired with a prototype electric m

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 31, 2017

A new study commissioned by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) investigates the real-world emissions of four Euro 6 passenger cars—one gasoline and three diesel vehicles with different aftertreatment technologies—tested under variable conditions. The investigation was conducted by the Laboratory of Applied Thermodynamics, of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and its spin-off company, Emisia.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 31, 2017

Volkswagen has developed a special automatic climate control system—“Air Care Climatronic”—which keeps pollen, fungal spores and particulates out from entering the car. The air purification system is available for all current Golf, Touran, Tiguan, Passat models as well as the new Polo and Arteon. It uses an air quality sensor with an active biogenic filter that is more effective than conventional pollen filters.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 31, 2017

EY launched Tesseract, an integrated mobility platform underpinned by blockchain technology. The platform facilitates fractional vehicle ownership, shared use and seamless multimodal transport and it will help lay the groundwork for how autonomous vehicle fleets could be owned in the future and provide access to a variety of on-demand mobility options.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 30, 2017

The EU-funded three-year NELLHI project has concluded after successfully developing a new stack design of solid oxide fuel cells, from an all-European supply chain. NELLHI combined European know-how in single cells, coatings, sealing, and stack design to produce a novel high-performance 1 kW SOFC stack along with with the proof of concept of a 10 kW e SOFC stack.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 30, 2017

A team from Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have used multi-faceted high-throughput density functional theory (HT-DFT) screening to identify a number of new Li 2 M I O 3 -Li 2 M II O 3 active/inactive electrode pairs—M I and M II being transition- or post-transition metal ions—that can be tested experimentally for high-energy-density LIBs.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2017

Magnis Resources Limited, part of a consortium aspiring to build a Li-ion gigafactory in Australia ( earlier post ), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with German Lithium-ion battery consortium TerraE-Holding GmbH (TerraE) for the supply of raw materials. TerraE-Holding GmbH has organized 17 major companies and research institutions into a consortium to handle planning for building large-scale lithium ion battery cell manufacturing in Germany. ( Earlier post.).

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 18, 2017

Researchers at Purdue University, the University of Notre Dame and Cummins have discovered a new reaction mechanism that could be used to improve SCR catalyst designs for pollution-control systems to further reduce emissions of smog-causing nitrogen oxides in diesel exhaust. The research focuses on zeolites—workhorses in petroleum and chemical refineries and in emission-control systems for diesel engines. “ The key challenge in reducing emissions is that they can occur over a very broad ra

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 17, 2017

Toyota and Servco Pacific Inc. (Servco) have partnered to test a new car-sharing technology in Honolulu. The suite of software and services is an important part of Toyota’s Mobility Services Platform (MSPF) which will offer various functions to enable a more convenient mobility experience. When the employee-only pilot testing program concludes, Servco, the distributor of Toyota vehicles in Hawaii, will use the car-sharing technology to launch a new Honolulu-based car share business by the end of

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 14, 2017

Researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Columbia University surveyed more than 1,200 people in Austin, Texas, to examine how their habits changed after Uber and Lyft pulled drivers out of the city due to a local law change. In May 2016, Austin voters blocked a ballot measure that would have allowed the companies to keep using their own background-check systems.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 13, 2017

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Advanced Power Technology Office, along with Engineered Propulsion Systems and the Arnold Engineering and Development Center, recently concluded ground-based testing of an advanced diesel engine that promises to increase the utility and ease the logistics burden of military aircraft missions. The high-efficiency aviation diesel engine is a potential replacement for current manned and unmanned aircraft internal combustion engines.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 11, 2017

Traffic is a major source of harmful pollutants; daily peak exposures tend to occur near roadways or while traveling—or being stuck—on them. For example, a team at the University of Surrey found that particulate pollution levels inside cars are up to 40% higher when the vehicle is stuck in a traffic jam or stopped at a red traffic light compared to free-flowing traffic conditions. ( Earlier post.).

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 10, 2017

New analysis commissioned by Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit organization working with investors and companies, suggests that national fuel economy and emissions standards can help increase the viability and international competitiveness of domestic automakers and suppliers. The analysis prepared by Alan Baum, founder and principal of Baum and Associates, proposes that legacy automakers are experiencing low stock valuations and cutting jobs and expenses largely due to two factors: Overall dema

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 8, 2017

Mazda Motor Corporation announced “Sustainable Zoom-Zoom 2030,” a new long-term vision for technology development that looks ahead to the year 2030. As part of the new technology to achieve this vision, the company disclosed plans to introduce a next-generation gasoline engine called SKYACTIV-X in 2019. SKYACTIV-X—which Mazda believes will be the first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition—uses a proprietary combustion method called Spark Controlled Compression Ignit

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 5, 2017

The state of Minnesota will implement a new biodiesel standard next spring, as Minnesota moves to a 20% biodiesel blend (B20) at pumps across the state. This new standard builds on Minnesota’s national leadership—in 2005, Minnesota became the first state in the nation to require all diesel fuel to have a blend of at least 2% biodiesel (B2). Beginning in May 2018, B20 will be sold at filling stations across Minnesota during summer months, when higher biodiesel blends can be used reliably.

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