Green was center stage at this year's Detroit auto show press preview. Smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles and concepts starred along with more hybrids, including rechargeable plug-ins. Ethanol partnerships were announced and new clean diesel engine options for large pickups were featured.
Car geeks like me are always window-shopping for a set of wheels. New, used, doesn't matter. We like to play the "Dream Garage" game at various levels of relationship to reality, from what we could do with our personal real-world budgets to how we might drain an oil-sheik-sized bank account. I tend to play the game closer to reality, and now that it's looking like I might need a family car I've been thinking about vehicles that have four doors and are fun to drive.
Taking a cue from recent auto shows in Tokyo and Frankfurt, automakers at this year's Los Angeles Auto Show put "green" up front. Catch phrases such as "fuel efficiency," "sustainability," "fewer emissions," and "better vehicles for the enviironment" peppered the presentations by auto officials before the show. California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the preview Thursday to help promote the most fuel-efficient vehicles on display.
Initially, this blog was simply going to be a rant about all things Green, and how annoyed I was with all the "Green" marketing (there's still some of that). Look, I'm not pro-noxious gases in the air, I don't drive a gas guzzler, and I even have two trash cans in my kitchen—one for recyclables and the other for everything else. But after a rowdy discussion with my friend Monica (who is a tree hugger), I thought, maybe there's a fine line between those companies taking genuine steps toward improving the environment and those companies simply tripping over themselves to jump on the bandwagon of the "Green" marketing machine (like 30% of Red Sox Nation with their brand new hat—and don't tell me your favorite player is Jacoby Ellsbury, show me Fred Lynn, Yaz or Dewey).
Continue reading "Doing Green Right! The Hybrid Grinch Speaks..." »
I know this comes across as a bit cliché but I pretty much decided to buy a hybrid car the moment I stepped out of the theatre after seeing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I always considered myself someone who was concerned about the environment, but as I drove home in my comfy SUV—predictably purchased after the birth of my first child—I realized I had become a big, fat hypocrite. Figuring out how to wash away my eco-unfriendly sins became my top priority.
"I will never have to pay for diesel ever again," I told myself as I turned the handle of a barrel pump during what had become a weekly routine. I was transferring used cooking oil from a grimy container behind Casa De Carlos, a local Mexican restaurant, to a 55-gallon drum mounted in my 1982 Datsun diesel pickup truck. This was my filling station.
Today, for a short time, I stepped into the future. I'm not talking about time travel and Back to the Future; I'm talking about something real and tangible that might become commonplace on U.S. roads in the near-future—say 15 to 20 years. BMW recently took 100 of their 760i luxury sedans straight off the assembly line in Germany and modified them to run on two fuels: gasoline and hydrogen. The luxury automaker's goal is to generate "buzz" by lending these cars to celebrities and other "influencers" worldwide for a few weeks to show them how transparent the technology really is.
Continue reading "Zero Emissions Vehicle: Driving the BMW Hydrogen 7" »
Who makes the most models that are good for our environment? Easy. Toyota and Honda produce a larger number of vehicles that are better for the environment and create less air pollution or smog emissions. This year, both companies received top "Green" rankings from the Union of Concerned Scientists for using clean technology across their lineups, and both have the most models that earned our firm's '07 Green Efficiency Ratings.
Continue reading "Models That Are Good For Our Environment" »
The European auto industry is putting heavy horsepower on the back burner and moving forward with an environmental conscience—at least for now. Fuel efficiency was a theme at the recent international auto show in Frankfurt, Germany. Automakers showed clean diesels, hybrid-diesel engines, plug-in electric concept cars, as well as compact gas misers.
I want to be brutally honest. I hate hybrids. I give the majority of hybrids a thumbs down for acceleration and handling. Sure, it's nice to get that additional five to 10 miles per gallon, but where's the driving excitement? Just because a carmaker wants to boast about products that are "environmentally friendly" doesn't mean these hybrid models have to be ugly. When I say ugly, I'm referring to the styling and performance of these vehicles. In a manner of speaking, it's like the attractive cheerleader in high school who becomes "all bohemian" in college. I understand that hybrids provide temporary relief to our rising consumption of fossil fuel, but there can, and should, be some showmanship and style as well.
My husband drives a sporty Infiniti M35 to work and I commute in a Ford Escape. But when both of us want to have fun and think green, we ride my husband's 2003 silver Honda ST1300 Sport Touring motorcycle, powered by a 1261-cc V4 engine, which is mounted on a light aluminum frame. The ST1300 is called the Pan European across the pond. Some reasons why we like riding a motorcycle are:
"Global warming," "alternative fuel," "greenhouse gas," and "hybrid car" are phrases now associated with the automotive industry. With consumers, the important vehicle attributes are increasingly shifting from engine size, power and acceleration to mileage, emissions and environmental footprint.
I'm not an expert on global warming, but for the purposes of argument let's say the whole concept of the industrial revolution somehow altering the composition of the planet's atmosphere is one giant hoax. Forget melting ice pack, receding glaciers, warming oceans, and bizarre animal behavior. Ignore Al Gore's famous chart showing just how off the charts the situation has become, proving that what we've begun experiencing as a world society is not simply part of a normal heating and cooling pattern established hundreds of thousands of years ago. Let's just toss up our hands, shrug our shoulders, and chalk it up to stuff happens. After all, my cousin is a geological engineer, a guy with more expertise on the subject than I, and he's not convinced that humans could possibly have significant impact on a force as great as nature.
