GM Volt Ranks 13th Among Green Vehicles

There are 12 cars being sold today that are better for the environment than GM's Volt, a much-touted electric car with a 40-mile electric range and a gas engine for longer trips. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy put the Honda Civic GX, which is powered by natural gas, at the top of its list of the greenest cars of 2011. Not surprisingly, hybrids such as the Toyota Prius and Nissan's electric Leaf also ranked high (the Leaf ranked second). But small, gasoline powered cars, such as the Honda Insight and the Chevrolet Cruze (which costs half as much as the Volt) also did better than the Volt. From the New York Times:

In fact, seven of the vehicles on the list use only gasoline engines.

How can this be? The council uses a novel, holistic method of calculating the slippery notion of greenness, one that expands on the fuel-efficiency and tailpipe-emissions considerations made by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The criteria include emissions from power plants used to charge vehicles and energy used to make the cars.

To Make EVs Affordable, Lease the Battery

Electric vehicles are either very expensive (think Tesla Roadster) or have a short range (think Nissan Leaf, which isn't exactly cheap) because batteries are expensive. It will take years to drive down costs. Meanwhile, a new report suggests that cutting the battery out of the car price tag could make EVs more attractive. From Earth2Tech:

The solution, Accenture suggests, is "disaggregating" battery costs from the car, usually via leasing either the car or the battery itself. Not only would that bring down vehicle costs, but it would help deal with thorny warranty issues, given EV batteries will likely end up having a lifespan of 10 years or less.

Automakers would have to arrange those battery financing terms on their own, or they could partner with a player like Better Place, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup with plans for developing battery swapping stations around the world.

Joule Unlimited Says it Can Make 15,000 Gallons of Fuel on an Acre of Land

A biofuel company has published a paper in which it claims its technology can produce 5 to 50 times more fuel per acre than other biofuels processes. Green Car Congress summarizes:

Joule's process, called Helioculture, combines an engineered cyanobacterial organism supplemented with a product pathway and secretion system to produce and secrete a fungible alkane diesel product continuously in a SolarConverter designed to efficiently and economically collect and convert photonic energy. The process is closed and uses industrial waste CO₂ at concentrations 50-100 times higher than atmospheric.

Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids have been enjoying the limelight recently as leading candidates for the energy efficient cars of the future, but a car powered by an internal combustion engine just rolled away with the top prize in the Automotive X-Prize. This contest has seen teams race vehicles that achieve the at least the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline (MPGe) (under prescribed driving conditions), and that pass U.S. emissions and safety standards.

On Thursday, the Edison2 team won the $5 million prize in the "mainstream" vehicle class, which required the car to transport four passengers and to have at least a 200-mile range. The team's car achieved 102 MPGe. The mile-per-gallon equivalent figure is a way to compare the efficiency of cars that use different kinds of fuels or energy sources, in a competition that included cars powered by natural gas, ethanol, gasoline, diesel, and energy stored in batteries. It's calculated by determining how far the car travelled and how much energy it consumed relative to the energy content of a gallon of gasoline.

The team's design formula was simple: make the car extremely light and aerodynamic, so that it can be powered by a small 250 cc, single-piston motorcycle engine. The winning car weighed 376 kilograms (830 pounds) and had a coefficient of drag of 0.15, far less than the Prius, which with a coefficient of drag of 0.25 is one of the best on the road today. Innovations included an aerodynamic body design like a diamond (rather than the rectangle base sedans have) that's supposed to deflect other vehicles in the case of an accident, and lightweight wheels that project out from the sides of the car and serve to absorb impact in an accident.

Edison2's winning vehicle.

The team started out expecting to design a hybrid car that could capture energy from braking using batteries and an electric motor. But it decided that the weight of the batteries and motor simply weren't worth it.

While achieving 100 MPGe is a challenge, it's not surprising that it was possible with a car that's less than a third of the weight of a Prius. And if the car is to help make a dent in fuel consumption a lot of people will have to buy it. To address this, the prize was designed to ensure that the cars would have good performance: the winner had to win a race, not just achieve a certain mile-per-gallon figure. But the Edison2 car certainly looks strange and it doesn't have much space inside it. Especially in the United States, where gas prices remain relatively inexpensive, it's hard to imagine the masses rushing out to buy it.

Winners in two "alternative" categories were also announced on Thursday. In these categories the vehicles only needed to seat two people and have a 100 mile range. In the alternative vehicle class for tandem vehicles (where people sit one behind the other), the winning car was looks like a motorcycle with an aerodynamic enclosure for the passengers. During the award ceremony, it was announced that the vehicle achieved the equivalent of 187.6 miles per gallon, using batteries and an electric motor--a separate press release put the figure at 205 MPGe.

The winner of alternative class with passengers sitting side-by-side was Li-ion Motors, with a battery-powered car that looks like some sort of a green vegetable (but which President Obama's science advisor John Holdren thought was quite good looking) and gets the equivalent of 187 mpg.

The MPGe figures for these battery powered vehicles are a little misleading, because they do not take into account the energy lost when the electricity is generated and transmitted. In the United States, the vehicles will do a good job offsetting oil consumption, since electricity isn't generated using petroleum here. But if the power comes from a coal plant, it's possible that the Edison2's ethanol vehicle could result in fewer carbon dioxide emissions--especially if the ethanol comes from cellulosic sources such as grasses and corn stalks.

Porsche has announced that it will make a production version of its 918 Spyder plug-in hybrid concept car.

The car, which was first shown off this year at the Geneva Auto Show, can accelerate to 60 miles per hour in under 3.2 seconds, and reach a top speed of 198 miles per hour. It pairs an electric motor with an eight-cylinder engine. Drivers will be able to putter along for 16 miles using electricity alone. In ordinary hybrid mode, the car can get 94 miles per imperial gallon (about 78 mpg). For the highest performance, select Sport Hybrid or Race Hybrid mode. The latter includes a "push-to-pass" button that delivers a surge of power from the battery.

With Porsche getting in on the electric-powered action, one wonders how up-starts like Fisker and Tesla will manage.