At the request of Chevron Energy Corporation, I spent the bulk of today in Richmond, California receiving the grand tour of Chevron’s Richmond Technology Center. Despite the fact that my feet were dragging from jet lag, the tour was definitely worth the effort, even if for no other reason than the plentiful supply of engineer eye candy [they definitely gave the Chevy Volt-mates a run for their geeky stud-muffin money].

As drool-inducing as I found many of the Chevron execs to be, however, RideLust’s content censor tends to maintain the same business theory that most professional pornographers do, namely: the majority of your audience is not interested in dicks. So, in the interest of maintaining reader interest, I’ll move on to explain the less sexual parts of the tour.

Battery manufacturer Ener1 has recently announced that they’ll be seeing a 50% drop in the price of lithium ion batteries as production increases. Statements indicate that the majority of the price decrease will come from scaling up manufacturing, and that it won’t happen until their dealing in hundreds of thousands of units. That means it’s a very optimistic prediction, to say the least.

I love sci-fi, futurism, and automotive shizz; that’s why I think Daniel Simon is so bloody super-fantastic. He’s the man behind Cosmic Motors.

Cosmic Motors, according the History of Cosmic Motors on their website, is an independent manufacturer of vehicles of all kinds, located in the center of the Galaxion galaxy. CoMo, as it is affectionately referred to by it’s fans, was founded by the famous Redooa brothers in the Galaxion year 8966-B.

Imagine a car that would emit no harmful vapors and would offer incredible fuel mileage far beyond that of the most efficient cars ever built. It’d be sleek and silent, with only the hum of a turbine. It’d basically be run on steam. That’s how nuclear power works.

Yeah, nuclear power. The Ford Nucleon concept car was designed to be powered by a miniature nuclear reactor. Simple, safe, and eco-friendly, right?

Hydrogen could be the fuel of the future, if someone can help bring the price down.

Hydrogen’s obtained by splitting water into it’s two parts, oxygen and hydrogen. Right now, the only method for doing the splitting involves platinum as a catalyst. Platinum is expensive, and that’s the main reason for the high cost of hydrogen as a fuel. But some researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have more cost-effective solution.

A new Sam’s Club Solar Kiosk

Cars like the Tesla Roadster are 100% electric, but that doesn’t mean they’re Zero-Emissions. You have to get the electricity you need to re-charge them from somewhere, and the main source for grid electricity in the US? Coal. So to power your super clean Tesla Roadster, you have to burn a bunch of coal. Makes it less appealing, doesn’t it?

Well, in California, being a smug eco/electro-driver just got a little easier, and from a company you’d never expect: Sam’s Club, aka Wal-Mart.

Volvo C30 Race Car

For a variety of reasons, Volvo has been given a ton of space on Ridelust recently.  So I promise this will be my last Volvo post in awhile.  But I just couldn’t resist reporting on the Swedish automaker’s new race car based on the C30 which is replacing the S60 in the STCC (Swedish Touring Car Championship).  More significantly for Volvo, and the rest of us for that matter, is the use of bioethanol as the C30’s choice of fuel.

Engineer Andy Pag On His
“Grease to Greece” Rally

On Wednesday, engineer and London native Andy Pag lead his 8-team caravan on the final leg of their 10-day “Grease to Greece” road rally. Throughout the course of the 2,500 mile long trip from London to Athens, Pag and his teammates spent approximately nothing on fuel, relying instead on the donations of used oils from restaurants. According to a statement Pag made to Reuters [as later printed by the Daily Mirror], it was incredibly easy to find eateries willing to donate for the cause, “Whenever people have had oil they have been really, really willing to give it,” he explained, “It’s a waste product for them so we are taking away their rubbish.”

In Surprise, Arizona, firefighters were dispatched to a private garage to extinguish a blaze that had been sparked by a chemical explosion. After containing the fire, the crew managed to identify the source of the combustion as a potent reaction between heavy ethanol vapors and a cleaning solvent-soaked rag. After speaking with the homeowner, Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Pool said it became apparent that the chemicals responsible for the blast were being used to concoct “bathtub” biodiesel.

Photo Source: Blueweeds.com

From Falls Church, Virginia: this week, city councilman Dan Szu was pulled over for traveling over three times the legal limit in his hyrdogen-powered Honda Clarity.