The Obama administration yesterday announced its rule that will set a 35.5 mpg average for the U.S. auto industry by 2016, a move that will cut fuel consumption by 40% and realize $130 billion in benefits. Despite their $52 billion burden, manufacturers welcome the the standards, as it will avoid a much more costly patchwork of state and federal regulation.

The cost expected to be shouldered by the consumer works out to less than $1,000 per new vehicle sold in 2016, but should be expected to be recouped in three-years in fuel-savings.

This rule represents the first limit by the federal governemnt on greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: eGMCarTech

BMW AG, the world’s biggest maker of luxury cars, probably will bring back four-cylinder engines to meet tougher U.S. fuel-economy standards, the company’s top North American engineer said.

The automaker, which hasn’t offered the smaller engines in the U.S. since 1999, wants to boost fuel efficiency without hurting its reputation for performance vehicles, said Tom Baloga, BMW’s vice president of engineering for the U.S.

“The biggest challenge will be maintaining the ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ performance,” he said in an interview yesterday, referring to the Munich-based company’s marketing motto.

Automakers must boost industrywide average fuel economy to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 under U.S. rules adopted in May that moved up the deadline by four years. BMW will have a harder time meeting the tougher standards than most companies because it has a smaller vehicle lineup and focuses on compact, powerful models, Baloga said.

BMW’s fleetwide average was 26.5 mpg in 2008, he said. The exact increases for individual automakers haven’t been set yet because the government is still writing the new standards.

Baloga wouldn’t say when BMW might resume offering four- cylinder engines in the U.S. About 50 percent of the company’s models worldwide use them, he said. Outside the U.S., BMW uses four-cylinder engines on models such as 1-series and 3-series cars, as well as the X3 sport- utility vehicle and one of its 5-series cars.

Source: Bloomberg

Nissan announced yesterday that they have developed a dual-injector system to increase fuel-efficiency on its small-displacement gasoline engines.

“The new fuel delivery system, the first of its kind in the world, uses an injector for each port rather than one per cylinder - speeding up fuel vaporization, reducing the amount of unburned fuel and reducing hydrocarbon emissions,” Nissan said in a statement.

Most current gasoline engines use one injector per cylinder while Nissan’s Dual Injector system uses double the number of injectors per cylinder, which reduces the diameter of the fuel droplets by about 60 percent.

“We consider it important to further improve the fuel efficiency of gasoline engines as demand for gasoline and other internal-combustion systems continues to increase around the world,” said Shuichi Nishimura, Corporate Vice President, Nissan Powertrain Engineering Division. “By widely applying the Dual Injector system on small-displacement engines, we hope to help reduce CO2 emissions and conserve rare metals.”

Nissan said that it will introduce the new system in production vehicles starting early in fiscal 2010.

Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world's fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers. Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car's size, weight, and performance.

Their claims cannot be independently verified.

They hope it can reach speeds of over 145 mph when it is tested on a racetrack in a few weeks time. They have driven it at around 60 mph and are now making final adjustments to the engine before driving it at top speed.

Warwick's project manager James Meredith said their model shows that it is possible to build a fast, efficient, environmentally friendly car.

The car, named the "WorldFirst Formula 3 racing car," will go on display at several races including the European Grand Prix and Britain's Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Thanks for the tip, Firebat!

Source: Yahoo

Overall last year, green investing increased around 40 percent -- but that was mostly before the financial crisis hit. While some reasoned that the economy was the sole reason green investing dropped, others guessed that it might have been a natural turning point. Perhaps green investors were growing weary of pouring money into wind and solar -- and were starting to look more heavily into biofuels.

Bentley is teasing us with a lone picture of the biofuel burner it promises will be the fastest, most powerful and cleanest car the company has ever built. The biofuel Bentley the crew from Crewe will unveil at the Geneva Motor Show in March marks the first big step toward the automaker's goal of getting the average CO2 emissions of its entire fleet to a Toyota Yaris-like 120 grams per kilometer, and it should have gearheads rejoicing at the prospect that going green doesn't mean going serene.

Source: Huffington Post

Fiat has taken a cue from hybrid technology to improve fuel economy in the 500 subcompact with technology that shuts off the engine at stops.

The 500 Start&Stop model raises fuel economy by up to 12 percent in city driving by shutting the engine off whenever traffic brings the car to a halt. On Europe's driving cycles, the 500 Start&Stop achieves 41.3 mpg in the city and 54.7 mph on the highway, Fiat said.

Start&Stop models use the 500's smallest engine, putting out 69 horsepower from 1.2 liters. Other 1.2-liter models without the start-stop function return 36.7 mpg in the city and offer the same highway efficiency. The Start&Stop is priced in the middle of the 500 range at the equivalent of $14,050.

Source: Inside Line

President Barack Obama reportedly plans to keep a campaign promise that will allow California and other states to set their own fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards. This will create a situation where carmakers will have to tailor vehicles to meet the standards of each individual state, a costly process for an industry that is already suffering financially.

Both American and foreign carmakers have waged a lengthy legal battle against the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which until now has been blocked from setting its own rules by the former Bush administration.

While the U.S. government has implemented its own fleet-wide fuel efficiency standard of 35mpg by 2020 for carmakers (plus an interim mandate of 31.6mpg by 2015), California is planning to implement its own ruling of 36.8mpg by 2016. The issue has been a major headache for carmakers as California represents the single biggest market for new vehicles in the whole of North America and to make matters worse 13 other states plan to copy the stricter mandate, reports the New York Times.

Such rules would lead to fuel economy targets that automakers and dealers warn would create a patchwork of state laws, drive up costs and limit sales.

The new memorandum planned by Obama will order the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the CARB application. While it stops short of directly ordering the Bush decision reversed, the agency’s regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.

Source: Motor Authority

The U.S. average for gas prices dipped to $1.75 a gallon, a near five-year low, a national survey said Sunday. The average price of self-serve gasoline dropped 22 cents in the past two weeks, said Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey. The average, tallied on Friday, was the lowest since the $1.74 average on March 12, 2004, Lundberg said.

Lundberg attributed the price reductions to a drop in crude prices and demand. Prices could drop more if the global economic crisis continues to affect demand for crude oil. The all-time high average was $4.11, set on July 11, according to Lundberg. The Lundberg Survey is based on responses from more than 5,000 service stations nationwide.

Checkout some averages across the country in the jump!

Drivers in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had the cheapest gas prices, paying $1.46 on average. Motorists in Anchorage, Alaska, paid the most, at $2.54 on average.

Here are average prices in other cities:

Detroit, Michigan -- $1.61

El Paso, Texas -- $1.81

Atlanta, Georgia -- $1.72

Salt Lake City, Utah -- $1.58

Manchester, New Hampshire -- $1.76

Miami, Florida -- $1.87

Los Angeles, California -- $1.83

Portland, Oregon -- $1.93

Source: CNN Money

The hydrogen breakthroughs just keep on coming. Here's another one, where Greek scientists have figured out how to store more hydrogen-per-liter than ever by using the newfangled carbon nanotubes you see in the illustration above. This is good news, because hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store and transport.

Those H atoms are so teeny-tiny, they tend to escape, even through steel containers. They also take up too much space to store, but this idea lets the hydrogen atoms nestle between nanotubes and a layer of carbon a mere atom thick, storing a lot more hydrogen per liter. In fact, at 41g per liter, its capacity nearly matches the U.S. Department of Energy's wishful thinking of 45g per liter.

Put this discovery together with that breakthrough from August where researchers found a way to produce hydrogen from water using solar energy, and we might be on the way toward someday driving vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Until then, this is all a lot of expensive vapor.

Source: DVICE

An unconventional engine design is attracting attention as a potential alternative to hydrogen fuel cells or conventional engines in some hybrid vehicles. Called the free-piston engine, it could be used to generate electricity as efficiently as fuel cells yet cost less.

Free-piston engines aren't new: they were invented in the 1920s. But the increased recent focus on hybrid cars has led a growing number of research groups and automakers to start research programs to develop the technology. Unlike in conventional engines, there is no mechanical connection between the piston and a crankshaft (hence the name free-piston). Since the design allows for improved combustion and less friction, the engines could be far more efficient in generating electricity than either conventional generators or newer fuel-cell technology. More in the jump!

Having a cheap and efficient way to generate electricity is becoming more important as automakers develop electric vehicles with onboard generators for recharging the battery pack and extending range. Such vehicles, called series plug-in hybrids or extended-range electric vehicles, are to be sold starting in late 2010. (Click here for a comparison of different hybrid and electric vehicle types.) The first will use generators based on conventional engines. But later models could incorporate fuel cells or other unconventional generators, such as free-piston engines.

The potential high efficiency of free-piston engines gives them an advantage over conventional generators, and their ability to use a variety of fuels is an advantage over hydrogen fuel cells. What's more, free-piston engines don't require expensive materials such as the platinum catalysts needed in fuel cells, so they could be cheaper too.

Automakers such as GM, Lotus, and Volvo have started to investigate the possibility of using such engines in future vehicles. Meanwhile, in the past couple of years, an increasing number of academic research teams have started developing the engines. So far, most have focused on computer simulations. An exception is a research group at Sandia National Laboratory led by Sandia researcher Peter Van Blarigan that has been testing physical components of free-piston engines. He is assembling a complete free-piston engine prototype, a project that he expects to complete within a year.

In conventional internal combustion engines, multiple pistons are connected via rods to a crankshaft that, via the transmission, drives the wheels. Free-piston engines do away with the crankshaft: the pistons aren't connected to anything. Instead, two opposing pistons just shuttle back and forth inside a chamber. To generate electricity, the pistons could be equipped with rows of magnets that shuttle past metal coils to create an electrical current.

The development of free-piston engines, however, is still at an early stage. "The free-piston has some unique features--simplicity and variable compression--which make it intriguing," says Gary Smyth, the science director of GM's Powertrain Systems Research Lab. "But [they] also pose a number of challenges."

Source: Technology Review

A storm-related gas shortage in the Southeast that has left some places bone-dry and others with two-hour gas lines is expected to continue for at least another two weeks, energy experts and industry officials say.

The shortage began two weeks after Hurricane Gustav hit the oil-refining regions of the Gulf Coast on Sept. 1. Operations that shut down before that storm were just coming back online when Hurricane Ike hit, forcing another shutdown. The gas shortage, now in its third week, is particularly acute here in sprawling Atlanta, in Nashville in parts of the Carolinas and in Anniston, Ala.

Crazy stuff.

Source: USA Today

Mazda has independently developed an idling stop system, called the Smart Idle Stop System (SISS), which improves fuel economy by about ten percent (in Japan’s 10-15 mode tests*1) in urban areas where vehicles frequently stop at traffic lights or in heavy traffic during operation. The SISS uses direct injection technology to achieve an excellent engine restart, ensuring drivers do not experience any discomfort with the new system. Mazda plans to introduce this core environmental technology to the marketplace in 2009.

Idling stop systems save fuel by shutting down the engine automatically when the car is stationary, and restarts it when the driver resumes driving. Want to learn more? Follow the jump!

Conventional idling stop systems restart a vehicle’s engine with an electric motor using exactly the same process as when the engine is started normally. Mazda’s SISS, on the other hand, restarts the engine through combustion. Mazda’s system initiates engine restart by injecting fuel directly into the cylinder while the engine is stopped, and igniting it to generate downward piston force.

In order to restart the engine by combustion, the pistons must be stopped at exactly the correct position to create the right balance of air volume in each cylinder. The Smart Idle Stop System provides precise control over the piston positions during engine shutdown to accomplish this. The SISS indexes each cylinder and initiates fuel injection before the engine begins to rotate. This enables the engine to be restarted in just 0.35 seconds*2, roughly half the time of a conventional electric motor idling stop system.

In addition to saving fuel, Mazda’s Smart Idle Stop System ensures that the engine will restart quickly and with exactly the same timing every time. Drivers will feel no delay when resuming their drive, which means they can enjoy a comfortable and stress-free ride.

*1 The 10-15 mode test is the Japanese standard for emission certification and fuel economy for light duty vehicles. It consists of two separate drive cycles. The 10-mode drive cycle is a low speed drive cycle test, while the 15-mode is a higher speed assessment.

*2 For vehicles with automatic transmissions. Restart times measured by Mazda.

Source: Mazda

We really like the whole saving-the-earth thing, but now Nissan’s gone too far. The ECO Pedal, to be offered as an option in Nissan vehicles next year, is designed to start pushing back when you step on the gas too hard, with the idea being to save lot of gas by discouraging lead-footing.

Just what we need — a nagging piece of tech that physically fights our urge to feel the thrill of acceleration. Feedback about fuel economy on a dashboard display is one thing, but physically pushing back is entirely another. No thanks. We’ll just combine trips and drive a hybrid vehicle instead.

Source: DVice