Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has proposed a new ten-year $150 billion energy plan today in Michigan. A large part of the plan centers around transportation -- both the use of petroleum and the types of cars we are to drive in the future. For automakers, $4 billion in loans and loan guarantees would be made available for PHEV development, with one-million of the vehicles to be ready for sale by 2015. For consumers, a $7,000 tax credit would be offered for their purchase of said vehicle. Also, in a more short-term effort, Obama proposes that the U.S. sells some seventy-million barrels of oil from America's strategic petroleum reserve.

While those PHEVs are being developed, Obama's plan would increase fuel economy standards 4-percent per year. What's more, Obama would mandate at least 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2030 while requiring that fuel producers reduce their fuel's carbon emissions by 5 percent within 5 years and 10 percent within 10 years. To make those biofuels have as large an impact as possible, all new vehicles would be required to have flex-fuel capability within four years.

Lastly, the entire White House fleet will be converted to plug‐ins within one year (does this include the new presidential limo that will debut in January?) and half of all cars purchased by the federal government will be plug‐in hybrids or all‐electric by 2012. See the entire plan in .pdf form at this link.

[Source: Barack Obama - .pdf]

By the middle of the next decade Mercedes-Benz wants its entire lineup to be able to operate entirely free of petroleum. The German giant is working on a variety of technologies that will help provide crude oil free transport such as battery electrics, fuel cells and highly efficient internal combustion engines that can operate on biofuels. Mercedes has recently been letting European journalists sample some of these new powertrains at a test facility in Spain.

The F700 concept that debuted last fall in Frankfurt is powered by a turbocharged DiesOtto engine. The DiesOtto is Mercedes' branding for a combined HCCI and spark ignition engine that provides nearly the same efficiency as a diesel without the need for the expensive after-treatment systems. This and conventional diesel engines can run on biofuels and Mercedes hopes to launch the DiesOtto in production by 2010. Mercedes is also currently field testing electrically-driven vehicles with both batteries alone and fuel cells each of which they also plan to launch at the beginning of the decade. While it may well be that all Mercedes models in 2015 will be capable of running petroleum free, the reality is that many - if not most - will still be using fossil fuels much of the time. That may come in the form of coal for electricity, natural gas reformed into hydrogen, or petroleum fuels blended with biofuels. But you have to start somewhere.

[Source: The Sun]

Last year, Google made some waves when they announced the RechargeIT project to convert a fleet of Toyota Priuses and Ford Escape hybrids to plug-in capability. The company has just issued their first progress report on the program, and the results may be disappointing for those promoting plug-in conversions. Right now the only way to get a plug-in hybrid is to buy an off-the shelf model like the Prius or Escape and than install a $10-15,000 conversion kit. Unfortunately, as we learned from a recent interview with GM's Pete Savagian, a conversion PHEV provides a limited additional benefit over a conventional parallel hybrid because the motors typically don't have enough power to drive the vehicle under most conditions without the engine turning on.

The other issue is that as fuel efficiency increases, the incremental savings in fuel use actually decrease. This is more apparent if you use the European units of fuel consumption which is measured in L/100km. If consumption is reduced from 12L/100km (19.6mpg) to 6L/100km (39.2mpg) you would save 6L on a 100km trip. Doubling mileage again going to 3L/100km (78.2mpg) only saves an additional 3L. This is apparent when you take an already efficient car like the Prius which starts at 44.6mpg and increase it to the 66.2mpg that Google saw. The result over 12,000 miles of annual driving is 88 gallons of fuel saved. At $3/gal, that's $158/year (after factoring in electricity costs). At that rate the $15,000 conversion would take 95 years to recover the cost. Ouch.

Google points out that most of the driving was on short runs where the engine often runs early in the drive to power certain vehicle subsystems. Longer runs would increase the mileage further, but you still have the issue of diminishing returns. With gas at $5/gal and a conversion cost of $10,000, the payback drops to a mere thirty years. Until vehicles are actually engineered from the ground up as PHEVs and mass produced to bring down cost, the cost benefits simply won't be realized by people doing conversions. Reduced emissions and oil use, though, should still take place.

[Source: Google.org via CNet]