What that you say? A Toyota Yaris that just might be the (oh so green) apple of T. Boone Pickens’ eye? Toyota pulled out the stops for SEMA 2008 and rolled out a bright metallic green wide body five-door Yaris packed with spiffy surprises, including dual video screens, shaved doors, suicides, and a clamshell tailgate that revealed a CNG tank tucked away under the window-rattling sound system. Duel fuel is twice the fun!
With the aid of a gracious Toyota rep, we crawled all over the CNG Yaris to bring back this video for your viewing pleasure. Highlights include the under mirror door popper buttons, power clam shell, hidden CNG tank, low key CNG dash button control, Rotora brakes, and gargantuan DPE rims clad in Nitto rubber.
Drill, Baby, Drill isn’t an answer. It’s a cattle call … for sheep.
When you actually look at the numbers, you’ll see that whatever oil America has untapped is but a tiny fraction of what we will ultimately need. Yes, we should increase domestic production, but only on shore. In order to quickly create jobs and energy independence, America’s focus must be on renewable sources.
The Internet revolution created a wealth of capital that is now being put to good use. I’ve had the good fortune to be in the room with many brilliant people that are working hard to make this change.
The electric utilities have enough capacity in the grid at present to recharge a growing fleet of electric cars — at night, when there is an over capacity. As the fleet increases in size, of course, we’ll need to upgrade the grid and bring on additional power sources.
That’s one of the big reasons I’m down with the Pickens Plan. We need to ramp up the production of wind power as quickly as possible to free up natural gas for use in transportation. Natural gas can be quickly and easily retrofitted into a wide range of vehicles, from city buses to F-150s, to Ford Mustangs.
While I have never advocated corn ethanol, I am a big advocate of biodiesel. Biodiesel needn’t come from a food stock. In all likelihood, our biodiesel needs will be met by distributed infrastructure of algae fuel production, in facilities that definine clean green carbon-neutral energy. Algae biodiesel plants can be built quickly and the fuel can be be delivered to the existing network of service stations without the need to build costly pipelines that might take years to construct.
In less then ten years, at least half the vehicles sold in the United States of America can be either clean diesel or electric powered, in some form, for one simple reason … the manufacturers that choose not to produce these fuel efficient vehicles will find that their market has passed them by.
We are seeing the first results of this sea change, right now. Things can, and will, change more rapidly then most folks would have ever considered.
When a company comes seemingly out of the blue in 2009 or 2010 with a technology that changes the game, it may come as a surprise to many. It won’t come as a surprise to me. Every major auto manufacturer will have an electric vehicle on the road in 2009, with real availability coming in 2010. Chrysler’s electric car announcement last week was only a harbinger of what’s to come.
This is not rocket science. It’s a question of having sufficient battery production to dramatically lower costs.
