Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

UK-based ultracapacitor company Skeleton Technologies and France-based Adgero SARL are introducing an ultracapacitor-based Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) for truck trailers. The hybrid system is designed to reduce fuel consumption and associated emissions by up to 25%, and is optimized for intermodal road transport solutions. The Adgero Hybrid System consists of a bank of Skeleton high-power ultracapacitors working alongside an electrically-driven axle, which is mounted under the trailer.

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Green Car Reports

AUGUST 27, 2015

The Tesla Model S P85D, the highest-performance and most expensive version of the all-electric luxury sedan, has earned even more plaudits and compliments from Consumer Reports magazine. The P85D, in fact, "performed better in our tests than any other car ever has," the publication said this morning. In fact, it did so well, that it broke the.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2015

In a new report, “ Autonomous Vehicles ”, Navigant Research forecasts that 85 million autonomous-capable vehicles will be sold annually around the world by 2035. While the core technology continues to advance, vehicles that can autonomously accelerate, brake, and steer under limited conditions are coming to market in the 2016 model year. Many OEMs are now projecting the next level of functionality is coming by 2020, with full autonomy possibly as soon as 2025.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

Quartz today reported that Bosch has agreed to acquire Berkeley Lab solid-state Li-ion battery spinoff Seeo. Seeo’s cell design couples a solid lithium metal anode with a conventional porous lithium iron phosphate cathode and Seeo’s nanostructured solid polymer electrolyte (“DryLite”). The electrolyte is entirely solid-state with no flammable or volatile components.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will award $10 million to eight incubator projects to develop innovative solutions for efficient and environmentally-friendly vehicle technologies that will help reduce petroleum use in the United States. Among the projects is a novel implementation of RCCI—Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition, usually investigated with two fuels ( earlier post )—using a single fuel with onboard fuel reformation.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 24, 2015

Over its 10-year lifespan, the Renewable Fuel Standard’s (RFS’) requirement to substitute biofuels for fossil fuels has displaced nearly 1.9 billion barrels of foreign oil and reduced US transportation-related carbon emissions by 589.33 million metric tons, according to a new analysis released by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). To develop its estimates, BIO utilized the GREET1.2013 model to compare carbon emissions from the mixture of US transportation fuels (both petroleum and bi

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

Commenting on Bosch’s newly revealed acquisition of Seeo, the Berkeley Lab spin-out developing solid-state Li-ion batteries ( earlier post ), Lux Research noted that the acquisition marks the first instance of a major automotive player outright acquiring a next-generation battery developer (although some OEMs, e.g., GM and Volkswagen Group, have already invested in advanced battery companies).

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2015

NGV Global reports that official Swedish statistics show that the proportion of biomethane in natural gas fuel sales in the country in now 73%—a historically high level and evidence of rising demand. The biomethane percentage has risen in recent years, from around 60%. The high proportion of biomethane makes Sweden a pioneer and shows that the green transition is fully possible.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

ZF TRW has won two major contracts with North American and European vehicle manufacturers for its second generation Safety Domain ECU (SDE 2)—a key building block and enabler of automated driving. The central controller will launch in Europe and the US starting in 2018. TRW introduced the SDE 2 at the Frankfurt IAA in 2013. The SDE acts as a central integration hub, processing millions of bytes of data from environmental sensors of the vehicle’s state and surroundings.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

The UK Government announced that the current Plug-in Car Grant scheme will continue to offer motorists up to £5,000 (US$7,800) off the price of an electric car until at least February 2016 for all categories of vehicle, boosting further the plug-in car market. Previously the Government had announced that grant levels would be reviewed once 50,000 vehicles had been sold, a milestone expected to be reached in November this year.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

Uber has signed a partnership with the University of Arizona focused on research and development in the optics space for mapping and safety. The partners will work to improve the imagery captured and used to build out mapping and safety features. As part of this partnership, Uber is donating to U of A’s College of Optical Sciences. In addition, Tucson and the University of Arizona will be become the next site for Uber mapping test vehicles.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

Automakers are investing billions of dollars to put connectivity technologies in their cars and light trucks that are not being used by many of the owners of those vehicles, according to the J.D. Power 2015 Driver Interactive Vehicle Experience (DrIVE) Report. The 2015 DrIVE Report measures driver experiences with in-vehicle technology features during the first 90 days of ownership.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 24, 2015

Gevo, Inc. and Butamax Advanced Biofuels, LLC, a joint venture between BP and DuPont, have entered into worldwide patent cross-license and settlement agreements, ending a patent dispute that stretches back to 2011 related to technologies for the production of bio-based isobutanol. ( Earlier post.). This settlement ends all of the lawsuits and creates a new relationship between the companies, aimed at leveraging each other’s strengths and accelerating development of competitive supply for bio-bas

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 22, 2015

Neste, currently largest producer of renewable drop-in fuels (primarily diesel) with its NEXBTL platform ( earlier post ), has filed a patent ( US20150144087 ) on a gasoline composition (and the method for making it) comprising up to 20 vol% (preferably from about 10-15 vol.%), of paraffinic bio-hydrocarbons originating from the NEXBTL process. In addition, the fuel can incorporate oxygenates such as ethanol (5 to 15 vol%); iso-butanol (5 to 20 vol%, preferably about 10 to 17 vol%); or ETBE (7 t

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Gasoline Fuel Renewable Emissions 203

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

The new Opel Astra, which makes its debut in several weeks at the IAA in Frankfurt, will be up to 200 kg (441 lbs) lighter than its predecessor (120 kg / 265 lbs at a minimum). The next generation of the compact bestseller is based on an all-new lightweight architecture, with a slimmer body and all-aluminum engines. The Monza Concept presented at the 2013 IAA ( earlier post ) was the role model for Opel’s eleventh compact class generation.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

At Young Brothers Ltd.’s Port of Honolulu facility, Sandia National Laboratories is leading the Maritime Hydrogen Fuel Cell project to test a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered generator as an alternative to conventional diesel generators. The project kickoff is being marked today with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by US Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Young Brothers President Glenn Hong and Sandia California Vice President Marianne Walck.

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Honolulu Hydrogen Fuel Hawaii 197

Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

Johnson Controls plans to build a new automotive battery manufacturing facility in the city of Shenyang in northeastern China as it continues to invest in the world’s largest new vehicle market. Johnson Controls has signed an investment agreement for a $200-million plant in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning Province. The plant will have capacity to produce 6 million automotive batteries a year.

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China Building Battery Batteries 197

Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

IBM and GENCI, the high performance computing agency in France, are collaborating to speed up the path to exascale computing ( earlier post )—the ability of a computing system to perform at least one exaflop, or a billion billion calculations, in one second. Currently the fastest systems in the world perform between ten and 33 petaflops, or ten to 33 million billion calculations per second—roughly one to three percent the speed of exascale.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

European sales of the Yaris have grown continuously over the last four years, rising from some 144,000 units in 2011 to an anticipated 200,000+ in 2015. Over the same period, the Yaris has also increased its B-segment market share from 4.1% to an anticipated 6.6%. Toyota attributes much of this ongoing sales success to the introduction of the Yaris Hybrid in 2012 and its subsequent refresh in 2014. ( Earlier post.). 170,000 hybrid units have been sold since its European launch at the end of June

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Sale Toyota Hybrid 2015 197

Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

A new report produced by INRIX and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) shows that traffic congestion in the US has returned to pre-recession levels. Washington, D.C. tops the list of gridlock-plagued cities, with 82 hours of delay per commuter, followed by Los Angeles (80 hours), San Francisco (78 hours), New York (74 hours), and San Jose (67 hours).

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

The US Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) Life Cycle Management Command (LCMC) has awarded Oshkosh Defense, LLC, an Oshkosh Corporation company, a $6.7-billion firm fixed price production contract to manufacture the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). The JLTV program replaces a large portion of the legacy HMMWV fleet with a light tactical vehicle with far superior protection and off-road mobility.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2015

by Dalan McEndree for Oilprice.com. OPEC next gathers December 4 in Vienna, just over a year since Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi announced at the previous OPEC winter meeting the Saudi decision to let the oil market determine oil prices rather than to continue Saudi Arabia's role of guarantor of $100+/bbl oil. Despite the intense financial and economic pain this decision has inflicted on Saudi Arabia, its fellow OPEC members, and other oil producers, the Saudis have given no indication they pl

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Saudi Arabia Russia Oil 2015 197

Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2015

A team of researchers at the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have hit a new milestone in their development of a hybrid bioinorganic system for solar-to-chemical energy conversion. ( Earlier post.) The system first generates renewable hydrogen from water splitting using sustainable electrical and/or solar input and biocompatible inorganic catalysts.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 25, 2015

A team in South Korea has developed a warm-forging process for the manufacture of an aluminium alloy automotive differential case—usually produced from ductile cast iron. The as-forged aluminium alloy differential case not only provides a net shape but also has a crack-free volume internally, while reducing the total weight by about 40% based on the proposed design.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 24, 2015

Alcoa recently completed the acquisition of RTI International Metals, Inc., a provider of titanium and specialty metal products and services for the aerospace, defense, energy and medical device markets. The merger was announced 9 March. With RTI, Alcoa expands its reach into titanium—the world’s fastest-growing aerospace metal—and adds advanced technologies and materials capabilities.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 22, 2015

Beginning in September, all new vehicles with Porsche Communication Management (PCM 3.1) and the option “online services”—now available free of charge in Europe—can be connected with a smartphone and access a new real-time new traffic service without any additional charge. The system not only processes data from TMC and TMCpro, it now also uses a much larger database, including the GPS data of numerous mobile telephones.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 28, 2015

In a 23-year experiment, a team from Lund University, Sweden, and the University of New Hampshire has determined that the common understanding of how organic material is decomposed by fungi and bacteria is fundamentally wrong. This means that climate models that include microorganisms to estimate future climate change must be reconsidered, they said.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

After Optifuel Lab 2 ( earlier post ), the laboratory vehicle which brought together technological innovations designed to reduce long-distance trucks’ fuel consumption, Renault Trucks is extending its research to distribution vehicles. Renault Trucks and six partners—Valeo, Lamberet, Michelin, BeNomad, INSA de Lyon (LamCoS) and IFSTTAR (LICIT)—have launched the EDIT (Efficient Distribution Truck) project, which aims to reduce distribution vehicles’ fuel consumption by 13% compared w

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

GM Flint Engine Operations recently built its 1 millionth 1.4-liter engine, currently used in the Chevrolet Volt, Cruze and Sonic. Flint Engine is now in the midst of a $200-million upgrade that will end the 1.4-liter engine production this week and begin production of the new Ecotec small gasoline engine—announced for the next gen Cruze and Volt—by year’s end.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

^Volkswagen Group’s Czech brand ŠKODA will introduce its most efficient Superb model yet at the upcoming Frankfurt Motor Show. The ŠKODA Superb GreenLine features a 1.6 TDI 120PS engine delivering 63.6 mpg US (3.7:/100 km) and emitting 96 g/km of CO 2 (Hatch) and 97g/km for the Estate. As with all other Superb models, the GreenLine is equipped with start-stop ignition and brake energy recovery as standard.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 27, 2015

In the most comprehensive analysis of electricity reliability trends in the United States, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Stanford University have found that, while, on average, the frequency of power outages has not changed in recent years, the total number of minutes customers are without power each year has been increasing over time.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

FEV is developing a water injection system for internal combustion engines using condensate from exhaust gases, the “Extended Direct Condensate Injection” system. The concept, as reported in a new paper in the International Journal of Engine Research , demonstrates a potential for efficiency increase of 3.3% – 3.8% in the region of the minimum specific fuel consumption on a stoichiometric combustion concept with Miller cycle and cooled external exhaust gas recirculation.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

European drivers are showing an increasing appetite for semi-autonomous driving technologies, according to a new Ford Motor Company study on buying trends in Europe. Ford Car Buying Trends 2015 , a study of new car buying habits in 22 countries across Europe, highlights regional trends and national differences. The study shows significant increases in the number of cars with technologies that help drivers to park, avoid collisions, and maintain set speeds and distances from vehicles ahead.

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Green Car Congress

AUGUST 26, 2015

Verizon Telematics announced the commercial availability of hum, an aftermarket vehicle connectivity technology and subscription service. First announced in January at the North American International Auto Show as Verizon Vehicle, hum provides subscribers with a self-installed solution that helps predict potential issues, prevents breakdowns and offers protection when problems do arise.

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