AutoblogGreen

Spy shots of Honda's upcoming Prius-fighting hybrid model have come and gone and we still haven't had our fill of guessing what the new model will look like. We've heard that the new non-Insight will bear a resemblance to Honda's hydrogen-consuming FCX Clarity and we can certainly tell that it will have a certain Prius-esque look to its profile - all in the name of aerodynamics, of course. Armed with all of this information, the scribes at Japan's Best Car have come up with a rendering of the new car. Based on what we know, as discussed a few sentences back, this is surely pretty close though there will undoubtedly be extra details that nobody is aware of yet. Under hood will be a revised version of Honda's familiar Integrated Motor Assist system hooked to a 1.3-liter four cylinder engine. A nickel metal hydride battery pack will prove the necessary juice to the electric motor. Expect to see the real thing soon enough as Honda is set to debut its latest fuel-sipper in this October in Paris.


[Source: Best Car via Carscoop]

Click above for high-res gallery of the Splinter Wooden Supercar

When we first reported on the Splinter, we thought that the students at North Carolina State University had no intentions of building the unique wooden supercar. Apparently, we were wrong. As much of the interior and exterior of the car as possible is made from good ole' fashioned wood, including the frame, wheels and little pieces such as the steering wheel. Specifically, the body shell is a composite, like fiberglass or carbon fiber. Much of the external skin, while still wood, is actually a weave and is coated in an epoxy. While it should prove to be plenty strong, we don't imagine that building a car with this particular process results in a car which is all that light. Still, nobody is going to argue that this car isn't renewable.

There is at least one part of the car that's not made from wood: the drivetrain. A twin-supercharged Northstar V8 engine will power the car and a 6-speed tranny will send the power to the rear wheels - suspended of course on transverse leaf springs made from laminated wood.

For some cool pictures of the process, check out Autoblog's gallery: Splinter Wooden Supercar - the build

[Source: Building the Splinter via Jalopnik via Autoblog]

It's the end of an era. Piaggio has officially built its last PX, and it's a bittersweet farewell as we have mixed emotions about the model's departure. On one hand, the PX has always been a fuel-sipper and a very high quality piece of machinery. On the other hand, the reason for its demise is that the Italian wasp's two-stroke engine just wasn't clean enough to continue to be sold in Europe or America. While it is possible to make the ring-dingers meet emissions regulations, it is not really cost effective to do so considering the efforts necessary to make it happen. As you may know, two-stroke engines burn oil by design and emit much more toxic pollutants and carbon into the atmosphere. There are still two-stroke engines being made, but they may not be for longer. In the U.S., Genuine Scooters still offers the Stella, which is very similar in design to the classic PX and still uses the stroker engine, albeit equipped with a catalytic converter. How much longer? Certainly not another thirty years.

[Source: Motorcycle.com]

As we stated a few months ago, automakers always get tax credits from cities in an effort to get them to build new plants or retool existing plants. As we know, the upcoming Chevy Volt is likely to be assembled in the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant where the Buick Lucerne and Cadillac DTS are currently built. As you may expect, those two models might not last too much longer, so the Volt is very important to the Detroit factory. The engine for the Volt, though, is expected to be built in a new facility which will be located near the existing Flint Engine South and Flint Truck plants, also in Michigan. Fortunately for the city, some three-hundred jobs will be saved. That engine will be a 1.4-liter four cylinder and should also make an appearance under the hood of the next Chevy compact, the Cruze, in turbocharged form. The total sum which GM will invest is $359 million and the plant will cover some 530,000 square-feet.

[Source: The Detroit News]

It's certainly true that most ethanol opponents can find plenty of fuel for their arguments. Some claim that food prices have been adversely affected by ethanol production. Others point to the fact that most cars get worse fuel mileage when running E85. Obviously, there have been many debates regarding the effects of running ethanol in our vehicles. While we primarily are concerned with automobile engines, there are many other internal combustion engines to be concerned with, including those in motorcycles, lawn mowers, trimmers and numerous other devices which have become necessary for modern life. Even if automakers are able to ensure that their engines are not harmed by ethanol-blends, small engine manufacturers may not be able to do the same. MSNBC has an polled a handful of small engine mechanics and each of them cite internal engine damage, which they claim can be attributed to the use of alcohol fuels. We've heard about this problem for at least two years, and expect that this is an issue which will get even more attention as the government mandates more ethanol to replace petroleum.

[Source: MSNBC]

Click above for more shots of the Th!nk Ox and City

Th!nk Global recently hired a new President and COO named Richard Canny who had previously been Ford's Worldwide Director of Strategic Planning (details in the Th!nk release after the break). It didn't take too long for Canny to announce that EnerDel would be ramping up its supply of lithium ion batteries for the Norwegian electric automaker. Th!nk has ordered $70 million worth of battery packs from EnerDel, which equates to about 5,000 units. Each pack contains about 27 kWh of power.

Th!nk's current plans call for an electric car to be made in the U.S. for less than $25K. Yeah, we are suitably excited by that prospect. EnerDel is just one of three companies vying for the right to supply the batteries for the new Th!nk cars, though its chances look fairly decent, not least because the company has gotten tax breaks from the City of Indianapolis to expand there and hire 850 new workers.


[Sources: Th!nk, EnerDel, The Indy Star]

Talk about going full circle. A garbage truck running on methane picks up the trash out in front of your home and deposits it in a landfill. Over the next few years, that garbage begins to deteriorate, releasing methane gas in the process. That methane waste gas is captured and re-used by the same garbage trucks to pick up your trash. While we aren't necessarily proponents for landfills, at least some good can come out of their creation. Methane gas is a pretty horrible greenhouse gas, so it's much better to capture it in some way than to let it out into our atmosphere. When burned, however, methane (natural gas) releases more energy and less carbon back into the atmosphere that other, more traditional hydrocarbons ... like petroleum-based gasoline. T. Boone Picken's company Clean Energy Fuels has recently made an acquisition for this purpose in Texas.

Another use for the waste-methane emitted from toxic dumps is for electricity generation. Many landfills pipe their natural gas to power-generating facilities where huge turbines could potentially create the power for your next electric car.

[Source: Automotive News - sub. req'd]

Click above for more high-res shots of the Electruck

Back in the '70s (when the Big 3 were really the Big 4), American Motors flirted a bit with electric vehicles. Perhaps their greatest successes came from the Jeep side of the ailing brand. Known internally as the DJ-5E and to the outside world as the Electruck, the E-Jeep used a 20-horsepower compound wind DC Motor made by Gould. That same company provided the batteries, an odd set of two 27 volt lead-acids which were later replaced by the Postal Service with Eagle-Picher batteries. Capable of hitting 40 miles per hour for up to 29 miles, the USPS got plenty of use out of the three-doored wrong-side drive EVs.

Over three-hundred-fifty electric Jeeps were sold to the U.S. Postal Service along with five sent across the border to Canada. Out of those five, only one is known to still exist and it now being lovingly restored by its current owner. The car is expected to be shown afterwards, so keep your eyes open for this unique piece of history in the next few months. Click here for plenty of information and to track the progress of the build. Thanks for the tip, Glen!


[Source: Electric Jeep]

Rumor has it that the classic XJ saloon may be the first model to benefit from the government-sponsored testing which should endow Jaguar with the technical know-how to make its first hybrid model. According to the spy shooters from Next Autos, the next edition of the iconic leaping cat has been spotted testing and will reportedly sport distinctive new sheetmetal that should serve to differentiate the newer models from the old. Despite the fact that the latest Jags have been built on new lightweight aluminum-intensive structures, they have been met with less than stellar sales, a fact that many attribute to stale styling that looks just like Jags from... oh, thirty years ago. For this reason, expect a pretty radical departure for the next-gen, which could share styling features with Aston Martin - not a bad place to get some inspiration from if you ask us. Along with the rumored hybrid should be gas-powered V6 and V8 engines as well as the Euro-requisite diesels.

[Source: Next Autos]

Click above for more early images of the production Chevy Volt

It's no secret that we appreciate what General Motors has been able to do with just two-liters. The direct injected and turbocharged mill powering the rear-wheel drive Solstice GXP and Sky Redline along with the front-wheel drive HHR SS and Cobalt SS models is an excellent one. What's more, its 260 horsepower represents 130-horsepower per liter, the highest ever from a GM production engine and on par with the best from the world. Expect to see more of this kind of technology from new GM engines along with more six-speed transmissions. Also expect an ever-higher percentage of aluminum to appear in all engines from all manufacturers.

GM also has plans for diesels and hybrids. The upcoming 4.5-liter diesel for full-size trucks and SUVs manages to weigh about seventy-five pounds less than other diesels of similar size. On the hybrid front, Automotive News says that GM will offer one new hybrid per quarter for the next four years -- that's sixteen new hybrids. That number would not include the Volt, a car which GM considers fully electric with a range-extender, and is something we've heard for a while now.

GM is also hard at work on HCCI engines, which we have covered extensively and offer the promise of diesel-like economy with the ability to use gasoline. Fuel cells are still on the table, though we'd imagine that today's tough financial times could slow down the development of GM's hydrogen plans. We'll take the trade-off of an HCCI engine over a hydrogen fuel cell as it would likely have a much larger impact and be ready for primetime much sooner.

[Source: Automotive News - sub. req'd]