WSJ's Road Tester says Tesla Roadster gives a big charge, but the reality is it's still in beta.

There's a lot to love about the Tesla roadster and the gutsiness of Tesla Motors, but while the hype has done a great job of shouting that future is here, the pioneering BEV has to slog through the present. Driving range is way below the claims, prices are climbing, and recalls are demonstrating that, unfortunately "a whole new auto industry" is still subject to many of the technology, economic and industrial realities of the old one.

Read the Clifford Tabiyeh's review in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124629044888368573.html#mod=loomia?loomi...  read more »

WSJ's Road Tester says Tesla Roadster gives a big charge, but the reality is it's still in beta.

There's a lot to love about the Tesla roadster and the gutsiness of Tesla Motors, but while the hype has done a great job of shouting that future is here, the pioneering BEV has to slog through the present. Driving range is way below the claims, prices are climbing, and recalls are demonstrating that, unfortunately "a whole new auto industry" is still subject to many of the technology, economic and industrial realities of the old one.

Read the Clifford Tabiyeh's review in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124629044888368573.html#mod=loomia?loomi...  read more »

Henry Paulson – remember him? – is one of a few well-known investors in a company that wants to fashion a Chinese car for the U.S. market

Henry Paulson's new prescription for economic growth for the U.S.? Invest in Chinese know-how.

Coda Automotive – which wants to sell an all-electric sedan in the U.S. next year – has lined up $24 million in a second round of funding and, to a certain degree, it's an unusual group of investors.

The group includes Paulson – the former Goldman Sachs titan who became a familiar face to most Americans when the economy collapsed during his tenure as U.S. Treasury Secretary last year – as well as Thomas "Mack" McLarty, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton, Tom Steyer, a noted energy investor and one of the large donors to Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, and former Edison International CEO John Bryson. The VC firm Angeleno Group and company insiders also invested.

Coda was spun out of Miles Automotive earlier this year. Miles specializes in low-speed electric cars for military bases and college campuses.  read more »

The Powers of Good got a big PR boost when a hybrid Mercedes-Benz-powered McLaren Formula 1 racer broke the tape at the Hungarian Grand Prix. The fighter-jet-on-wheels is equipped with a Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) that converts recovered braking energy to provide into an extra squirt of horsepower for passing.  read more »

There’s a lot of gooey stuff between your heart and your bones, and there’s a lot more to a production automobile – fossil-fueled or electric – than a motor and a chassis.

Among the many things that have made the automobile tolerable is the un-sexy engine mount. Its evolution from the 1932 Plymouth’s innovative “Floating Power” hunk o’ rubber mount to today’s hydraulic dampener has made the internal combustion engine’s gradual torque rise tolerable, but we’re right back in the stone-age in terms of managing an electric motor’s immediate burst of full power. The engine mount is just one of hundreds of humdrum components that needs reinvention for EVs to become “normal” cars.  read more »

Mercedes-Benz launched the automotive era in 1886 [twice actually, since both Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz independently introduced automobiles that year; Daimler and Benz merged in 1926 – Ed.], and has been a technology leader since. But the tri-star’s focus on diesels left them open to be sucker-punched by Toyota and Honda’s hybrids. So, ten years late but hardly a dollar short, considering the price tag of $109,000, Mercedes is launching its first hybrid. The S400 Hybrid is a rather mild parallel-hybrid, but includes an important first that might assuage the spirits of Gottlieb and Karl: the world’s first lithium-ion powerpack offered in a mass-produced car.

As you would expect in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, there’s plenty of leather and gizmos; and of course it’s fast, comfortable, safe, refined, reasonably reliable, and blah blah blah. But is this baby built for the autobahn or the Audobon? Is it a MERCEDES, or just a high-priused surface for Free Tibet stickers? And how is it going to game the smoldering luxury-hybrid category?  read more »

One of the United Kingdom’s most enduring brands will proceed with plans to build the quintessentially British electric vehicle. Lucas, the world leader in faulty electrical components, has determined after decades of deliberation to finally push ahead with plans for an electric vehicle wholly of its own design.

The Lucas electric car, to be called the “Prince” in homage to the company’s founder, Joseph Lucas, who died in 1902, taking with him to the grave his secrets of how to make working electrical parts. Since that time, the company has been awarded more wisecracks than any other.  read more »

London Mayor Boris Johnson announced his official plan to turn London into the Electric Car Capital of the World at the meeting of the Climate Leadership group of 40 world cities, who presumably also each are planning to be the Electric Car Capital of the World.

The plan calls for Londoners to purchase 100,000 plug-in EVs (compared with 1700 in operation now) in the politically precise “as soon as possible” timeframe. Their taste for “leccy cars,” according to the inexplicable English tendency to infantilize inanimate objects, will be whetted by the installation of 25,000 car charging points (CCP) by 2015, 2500 of which will be funded by the Greater London Authority.  read more »

Korean researchers have devised a new approach to electric cars. Instead of placing large rechargeable batteries in the cars, electric strips would be placed in the roads that keep cars charged on the fly.

In the experimental technique, 8 by 35 inch strips would be built directly into the top of the roads. The vehicles would have special magnetic devices on their undersides that would extract energy from the strips as the cars drive by.  read more »

She's beautiful. So close that you reach out to wrap your arms around her waist -- but she disappears! Henrik Fisker has been a magician at dangling before us the luscious Plug-in Hybrid that bears his name, and reiterating his promised of a Fall '09 launch. Meanwhile, no one outside the company has driven one (and who really knows if anyone inside has either).

Tesla S was famously wheeled by actual people in NYC. The Mini-E is available for beta-lease. The Volt was just on Letterman. Seems like this is the time to show that your EV is more than just a Scooby-Doo hologram.  read more »