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A Non Gas Future Is Closer Thanks To Toyota
DETROIT — Every car company is striving towards a completely electric vehicle where we will not need any more gas to power it. Toyota has moved this dream one step closer to reality due to their action plan.
Toyota said that it intends to cut the average emissions from its vehicles by 90% from 2010 to 2050. That means conventional gasoline-only vehicles will be a small minority of its products as hybrids and fuel cells will become mainstream powertrains.
“You may think 35 years is a long time,” Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters in Tokyo. “But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary.”
Separately, a non-partisan group seeking to reduce America’s dependence on oil formed an Autonomous Vehicle Task Force to promote battery-based self-driving vehicles and clear the regulatory path to their deployment.
Both events come in the wake of Volkswagen’s scandal over the use of a “defeat device” to fraudulently meet emission standards on its diesel engines. They also come before next month’s United National Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Low gas prices in the U.S. have causes sales of gasoline-electric hybrids to fall 17% this year through September, but the U.S. has committed to cut its 2005 greenhouse gas emissions up to 28% by 2023. China has pledged to nearly double the portion of its energy mix generated from non-fossil fuels by 2030.
Tempers Sore When It Comes To Finding Plugs For Their Electric Cars In California
SAN FRANCISCO — There is hope that some day will be a completely electric vehicle that runs without needing any gas, but to do so there needs to be more places to charge them.
Of all the states, California has set the most ambitious targets for cutting emissions in coming decades, and an there
Important pillar of its plan to reach those goals is encouraging the spread of electric vehicles.
But the push to make the state greener is creating an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner.
The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. Electric owners are unplugging one another’s cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window.
In the moments after Don Han plugged in his Nissan Leaf at a public charging station near his Silicon Valley office one day this summer, he noticed another Leaf pull up as he was walking away. The driver got out and pulled the charger out of Mr. Han’s car and started to plug it into his own. Mr. Han stormed back.
“I said, ‘Hey, buddy, what do you think you’re doing?’ And he said, ‘Well, your car is done charging,’ ” Mr. Han recalled. He told him that was not the case, put the charger back in his own car and left “after saying a couple of curse words, of course.”
Such incidents are not uncommon, according to interviews with drivers and electric vehicle advocates, as well as posts from people sharing frustrations on social media. Tensions over getting a spot are “growing and growing,” said Maureen Blanc, the director of Charge Across Town, a San Francisco nonprofit that works to spread the adoption of electric vehicles. She owns an electric BMW and recently had a testy run-in over a charging station with a Tesla driver.
Merger Between Popular Car Companies Possibly On The Horizon
With the race to perfect new types of cars heating up more everyday with the dream of autonomous driving and a fully connected vehicle, it is no wonder that rival companies may start to work together to get ahead of other companies.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) (FCHA.MI) boss Sergio Marchionne said on Sunday that seeking a tie-up with General Motors (GM.N) was a “high priority” and such a deal would also be the best strategic option for its U.S. rival.
GM’s board rebuffed a merger proposal from the Italian-American carmaker earlier this year. That has not stopped Marchionne from wooing his bigger competitor as he seeks to reduce the number of players in the industry and share the prohibitive costs of building greener and more intelligent cars.
“That discussion remains a high priority for FCA,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the Formula One Italian Grand Prix in Monza, northern Italy.
He did not want to discuss the next steps FCA might take or their timing, but said a merger with GM would “be the best possible strategic alternative for us and for them. General Motors does remain the ideal partner for us and we represent a not easily replaceable alternative for them.”
8 New Ways To Take Your Road Trip Up A Gear
When packing your car to head out on a family road trip, do you have everything that is needed, or are you missing some key new items to make it even better. You’ve got your phone with its battery at 100 percent. You’ve got great playlists to get you down the road. You’ve even got a proper emergency kit full of essential tools in case of trouble on the road. Now all you need is something that will make it easy to sift through your music, mount your phone at eye level, and keep you from getting that speeding ticket.
iBolt Command Remote ($35)
Call it the magic button for your car. This Bluetooth button adheres to your dashboard using an adhesive strip, then syncs over Bluetooth to your phone. You use it to issue voice commands to your phone, such as skipping a music track or asking Siri for directions, so that you don’t have to take your eyes or hands off the wheel while you drive.
Cobra DSP 9200 BT Radar Detector ($400)
The price tag on this small windshield-mounted adapter might seem high if your only goal is to avoid speed traps; other radar detectors come a lot cheaper. But Cobra has packed in handy extra features here. Once it’s installed and synced to the Cobra iRadar app on your phone, the detector scans for lasers, radars, and cameras, and notifies you by voice prompts as you drive. Other users can flag caution areas. The app also lets you control your music, get directions, and locate your car.
Do You Use Every Safety Feature?
While automakers are spending billions of dollars loading up their vehicles with technologies of all kinds, many owners are not using them and would rather use their smartphones instead, according to the first-ever J.D. Power 2015 Driver Interactive Vehicle Experience (DrIVE) Report.
The market research firm found that at least 20 percent of new vehicle owners have never used 16 of the 33 technology features that DrIVE measured. For the consumer, this means they are paying for something they are not using, said Kristin Kolodge, executive director of driver interaction & HMI research at J.D. Power.
The report looked at driver experiences with in-vehicle technology features during the first 90 days of ownership and was based on responses from more than 4,200 owners and lessees of 2015-model-year vehicles.
Features that owners did not use
43 percent—In-vehicle concierge feature such as OnStar.
38 percent—Mobile connectivity, such as a factory installed Wi-Fi hot spot.
35 percent—Automatic parking system, which aids in either parallel or perpendicular parking with limited interaction by the driver.
33 percent—Head-up display.
32 percent—Built-in apps such as Pandora.
“Tired and impatient, car buyers just want to get out of the dealership, often without becoming fully oriented with all of their new car’s features,” says Tom Mutchler, Consumer Reports’ automotive human factors engineer. “But many high-tech features aren’t immediately obvious or intuitive, especially when trying to decipher their use for the first time when driving.”
What Features To Look For In A Car for Your Next Road Trip
Whether you’re making a trip to visit relatives across the country or enjoying a road trip with friends, long car rides can become uncomfortable. Simple attributes of your car will make the journey more enjoyable for all.
When I was 13, Cox and I had a heated discussion about the features and engineering that optimize a car for long-distance travel. Cox, a friend of my dad’s who had logged about a million highway miles, argued that the best machine for a long road trip was a silent, smooth-riding car like his Buick.
I scoffed. Buicks were bourgeois luxury barges that no real driver would be caught dead in. Although I had yet to drive a single highway mile, I declared that the ultimate car for a long trip was the Ford GT, a machine that had won the 24 Hours of Lemans. Never mind that the GT’s engine wailed away just millimeters from the driver’s skull, or that the interior was the size of a Guantanamo confinement box – this was a true driver’s machine that would be ideal for a major trip.
Or so I believed.
In the decades that have passed since that argument, I have learned a lot about what makes a great highway car – and I have also learned that the Colonel was smarter than I realized.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I did a 3,000-kilometre road trip to Georgia and back. We’ve done this trip in many different cars. In some, the trip was effortless. In others, it felt like a four-wheeled version of the Bataan Death March.
This got me thinking about the essence of the long-distance machine. What are the automotive qualities that make distance disappear?
Winning Sports Car Design About To Be Revealed
5 years after his sports car design won out of over 400 contest entries,, we are about to see how 22 year old Ryo Mukumoto’s sports car design has turned out.
Ryo Mukumoto was 22 and into his third year making mock-ups at Honda’s research arm when he won an in-house competition.
Honda made him the youngest lead engineer in the company’s history and gave him a young team to help translate his ideas into reality.
Mukumoto’s vision — a low-slung roadster inspired by a speeding bullet — goes on sale next month in the most competitive segment in Japan’s shrinking car market.
“People of my generation think cars are simply a tool for transportation,” Mukumoto, now 26, said in an interview in Wako City, Japan.
“I wanted them to say — hmm, this car is different,” he said. “We have made a car that will turn heads.”
The introduction of the S660 roadster, named for the 660-cc engine capacity limit that defines the mini car category unique in Japan, comes as Honda searches for a way out of record vehicle recalls and quality lapses.
The company has blamed these problems in part on an overly ambitious sales target that placed undue stress on its vaunted engineers.