Lotus makes some great cars; they’re high powered, light weight, handling focused, driver’s cars; and now they’re trying to make them green too. Lotus has taken the Elise S supercar and and turned it into an Eco Superhero, just to show they can. This is all apparently part of Lotus’s new green focused business plan. They’ve already been involved in helping create the 100% electric Tesla Roadster; and at Lotus’s Hethel England headquarters they recycle almost 60% of their waste and have been able to reduce water usage by 11%, electricity consumption by 14%, and gas by 30%. Clearly they’re dedicated to this whole green thing.

Possible Design of Next Prius

At every major crossroads in the automotive industry, car manufacturers have stepped up to produce… garbage.  Ok, that’s not always true, but maybe that isn’t so bad either.  Even failures, often ESPECIALLY failures, have ultimately forced car companies out of a comfortable status quo mentality to produce better, faster and safer vehicles. 

Hemp is a controversial material, part of the famous family of plants known as Cannabis Sativa. Hemp grown for industrial use is very low in THC the psychoactive chemical in its famous sister marijuana thus making industrial hemp useless as a drug.

Ironically, Hemp powered cars was the dream of both Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel. However, gasoline powered engines became so cheap to manufacturer and were easy to maintain so they caught on in the automotive industry even though the pioneers had other dreams.

Up until this point the single biggest hurdle for mainstreaming the use of biofuels has been the complicated process required for producing them. However, E-Fuel Corporation is going to be releasing a new Micro Fueler product designed to make it easy to make ethanol to power your vehicle in your own garage.

The cost of the unit is not cheap. It’s $9,000. But with tax credits and other incentives, along with cheaper overall fuel, it might just be worth the cost, especially if the cost of gas keeps skyrocketing.