electric vehicle
Inhabitat’s Week in Green: solar aircraft, freshwater wind farms, and the Automotive X Prize
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Tesla planting electric engines into two Toyota prototype bodies
Word on the street had it that Tesla’s $50 million deal with Toyota wasn’t formal back in late May, but evidently things have made positive progress since. According to a new (though admittedly brief) report over at CNN , Toyota is currently working with the electric automaker on a pair of prototype vehicles
JFE Engineering’s quick auto charger does 50% charge in three minutes, hits parking lots in March
While range is an unfortunate limiting factor for electric vehicles , slow recharging time is perhaps even more troubling. Going 100 miles on a charge would be okay if you could stop at the corner electron stand and top up your cells while hitting the potty, and JFE Engineering’s quick charger gets makes that a reality, able to charge an EV’s batteries to 50 percent in just three minutes. Five minutes gets you a 70 percent charge, but from there things go downhill, with 30 minutes required for an 80 percent charge.
Chrysler’s Peapod NEV killed in bankruptcy
Chrysler’s Peapod neighborhood electric vehicle always seemed like more of an experiment than a profit-maker, and unfortunately idealism isn’t too popular with creditors — according to Edmunds , the Peapod was canceled in March as part of the company’s bankruptcy proceedings. Apparently adapting the Peapod’s button-cute design to federal safety standards was overly expensive, so Chrysler and new part-owner Fiat will convert the existing Fiat 500 to electric operation. The Peapod design and other assets are up for sale, so there’s a chance someone else will pick up the pieces, and Peapod designer Peter Arnell may yet build a full-speed EV in the future, so we’ll keep our eyes open.
MotoCzysz E1pc claims to be the world’s most advanced electric motorcycle, we don’t argue
We’ve seen quite a few electric motorcycles , and even driven some ourselves, but none quite like the MotoCzysz E1pc, which is touted to be the “world’s most advanced.” As Popular Science discovered in an exclusive look at the bike, there seems to be little doubt about that fact — for starters, the bike packs ten times the battery capacity of a Toyota Prius and two and half times the torque of a Ducati 119 motorcycle and, well, look at it. Other standout features include ten 19.5 pound lithium polymer batteries that don’t have wires so they can be swapped out easily, an oil-cooled electric motor that’s been “developed from the ground up to win races,” and a top speed (so far) of 140 MPH — nearly 40 MPH better than its nearest competitor. Most impressively, however, is the simple fact that the E1pc is indeed built for racing — it’ll take on the Isle of Man TT tomorrow, which is described as the “toughest motorcycle race in the world.” Dare we say it might now also be the most electric
Coulomb partners with Ford, Chevy, Smart to deliver 4,600 free EV charging stations in US
Looks like Australia and Poland were just the beginning: Coulomb Technologies is looking to roll out nearly 5,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the US, effective immediately. If one of those cherry-red push pins is pointed at your neighborhood, you’ll likely see the stations popping up at local businesses soon, and if you’re looking to purchase a Chevy Volt , Tesla-powered Smart or one of Ford’s two new EVs, you can even qualify to have a free station installed in your home. Partially paid for by a $15 million grant from the Department of Energy, the ChargePoint America program won’t necessarily give you free electricity to go with it — that “charge” in ChargePoint has a double meaning, after all — but we’re happy to see the zero-emissions future is finally on a roll.
