RideLust

At a recent groundbreaking event in Smyrna, TN, Al Castignetti, Nissan’s division vice president, discussed the company’s market research. Per data collected by Nissan on the 130,000 Leaf buyers to date, “over half” have owned a Toyota Prius.

Does that make them turncoats or early adopters? Per Castinetti, “It tells us that there is a segment of eco-friendly consumers who are interested in going to the next level. They own a hybrid vehicle. But if the next step is available, they want to take it.”

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The initial track testing phase of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize vehicles has begun at Michigan International Speedway. This video, courtesy of Consumer Reports, gives a good overview of what the competition is all about. Unfortunately, there isn’t all that much footage of cars testing, but some things are clear: the Aptera may be fuel efficient, but it doesn’t handle worth a damn and the Tango (the extremely narrow orange car in the video) really can back its claim of a four second zero to sixty time.

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BYD, the Chinese manufacturer of electric cars and plug in hybrids, will establish a U.S. presence in Los Angeles. The facility will serve as a North American headquarters for R&D, sales, and marketing. Vehicle manufacturing will take place in China for the time being, although speculation has BYD announcing a manufacturing facility in California later this year.

BYD expects to create 150 new jobs in Los Angeles over the next 18 months as it begins to establish a U.S. presence. Berkshire Hathaway, owned by investor Warren Buffet, has a ten percent ownership stake in the Chinese company, and BYD recently partnered with Daimler to develop an electric powered Smart car for the Chinese market.

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The Zap Alias, one of 32 vehicles in contention.

Sooner or later, any comparison between vehicles comes down to this: it doesn’t matter how good it looks on paper, you’ve got to back that up with performance on the race track. So it goes for competitors vying for Progressive Insurance’s Automotive X Prize, a massive promotional effort to highlight alternative fuel and green car technology. The payout for the winners is a shared purse of $10 million, plus the international notoriety that will come with grabbing the title. We’ve previously told you about teams such as RaceAbout Association and OptaMotive, but there are a total of 32 teams in the competition. Some, like Tata Motors, have the full backing of a parent with deep pockets. Others, like RaceAbout and OptaMotive are working on shoestring budgets.

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The 2011 Chevrolet Volt is an electric car; although it has a 1.4 liter, four cylinder engine, this does not power the drive wheels. Instead, the engine is used to generate electricity, which powers the Volt’s electric motor when the batteries are depleted. Chevrolet claims an overall mileage rating of 230 MPG, which the EPA has yet to confirm.

The Volt was designed to have a “battery only” range of 40 miles, and pre-production units have achieved this goal. When the batteries run down, the 1.4 liter gasoline engine fires up to power the car’s electric motor. This gives the Volt a conventional car-like range of approximately 300 miles, making it useful for both daily commuting and vacation road trips.

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Remember all those visions of the future we were sold as kids? Underwater cities, vacations in outer space, nuclear powered kitchens and robot servants? How about personal jet packs and flying cars? Of all the lies Popular Science told us, it’s the jet packs and flying cars, or absence of these, that piss me off the most.

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In preparation for what will likely result in the biggest media circus since the debut of the Chevy Volt, Nissan has announced the impending Leaf EV will embark on a 22 city, 11 state tour, replete with special stops in Washington, DC and Vancouver, Canada. The goal of the PR parade is to counteract the storm launched by Chevy Volt engineers and raise widespread awareness of what Nissan is calling “the first EV for the masses.”

While the Nissan Leaf EV’s official on-sale date remains just as vague as the Volt’s, Nissan is apparently hoping to circumvent that by allow customers to pre-order their Leaf as much as a year in advance. Quite lofty for a vehicle that only just recently hit the scene, Nissan expects to receive a whopping 20,000 initial orders for the 5-door plug-in, encroaching considerably on the Volt’s
premature market monopoly.

To see what all the hype is about, check out the Leaf EV’s official tour dates below and prepare for your inevitable crushing disappointment. Read More…

Last week, we broke the news that the very thinly disguised “concept” known as the Audi e-tron was approved for production, but there was a catch. Contrary to what all exterior cues would suggest, the Audi e-tron would not be a plug-in version of the R8 but rather a sporty EV placed somewhere in size between the famed R8 and the compact TT. Today, we have learned that the e-tron will not be a model unto itself but rather a badge denoting the type of powertrain (similar to what Toyota has announced they will do with “Prius) and the first vehicle to wear the e-tron badge will be known as the Audi R4.

In addition to the lithium-ion e-tron, the R4 will also be offered with at least two other standard gasoline powertrains, though Audi has yet to reveal which ones. However, because the R4 is intended to sit on Audi’s line-up as a premium vehicle roughly equivalent in price and attainability to the R8, it’s safe to assume that output will be impressive and we could even see a TT-RS transplant. Read More…

BMW Motorrad’s C1-E Concept unfortunately got lost in last week’s shuffle of press releases (read: it was boring, we forgot), which is why it’s making its official debut to the RideLust readership – all 4 of you – a few days late.

Primarily based on the short-lived BMW C1 enclosed scooter that enjoyed a limited run earlier this decade, the C1-E concept is an electric single-track personal mobility vehicle that features some rather avant-garde design language, to put it kindly. As is immediately obvious by its basic engineering principles, the C1-E was intended primarily for use in congested city areas as a safer alternative to motorcycling. As a matter of fact, the C1-E Concept was actually created in conjunction with Europe’s eSUM (European Safer Urban Motorcycling) project which should signal some sign of relief for Americans like ourselves who would rather chew glass than trade in a Ninja for a C1-E. Read More…

Today, proving our assumptions right and themselves totally incapable of convincingly playing coy, Audi has finally dispensed with the subterfuge and officially confirmed that the Audi e-tron concept is slated for production.

Initially unveiled last month at the Frankfurt Motor Show, no hints were given about the e-tron concept’s production potential until a few weeks after its debut when Audi introduced the Vertical Run video game for PS3, featuring the e-tron concept on center stage. When explaining the motivation behind the game, Audi marketing directors stressed the importance of reaching out to the new, digital generation, which would have been largely a waste of money had Audi intended to keep the e-tron in the concept garage but will ultimately prove to be a very strategic move. According to Audi of America president Johan de Nysschen, a completely production-ready model of the e-tron won’t be ready until at least 2012 but “running samples” could hit showrooms as early as 2011. Read More…