Solar Car-Charging Comes to New York - Wheels Blog - NYTimes.com

This is what happens when technology provides you with a button that posts links to your blog. I don't think I have even read this article yet but I just had to press that button and see if it would work. I remember there were a lot of pretty green pictures there. And it is The New York Times. And charging your car with sunlight, if any, seems like a good thing. New York is already, surprisingly, one of the greenest cities in the US. Mostly because it's small, crowded, and very difficult to drive a private car in. Let's keep the pressure on for solar charged-passenger sharing-dynamically routed taxis.

Solar Car-Charging Comes to New York - Wheels Blog - NYTimes.com

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At the dawn of the automotive age there were those who built chassis and those who built bodies. A whole car involved at least one of each. This arrangement resulted in hundreds of "automakers" in the United States. Over time, exploiting economies of scale the industry came to be known as the "Big Three". However bigness has its downside too and the majors find it impossible to anticipate where the market is going en masse. Exploiting small niches profitably is also difficult. Factories are shuttered. Layoffs announced. Hands are wrung.

The design process that once required a small army of engineers and support staff can now be done on relatively inexpensive CAD/CAM equipment. If you have development money you can beat the bigs to the small profitable niches and outsource the actual building of the car. Thus we see Tesla Motors funded by Elon Musk who made his nut at PayPal and Fisker Automotive led by Henrik Fisker and his impressive design portfolio from BMW, Aston Martin and others combining with eager venture capitalists to become the new car manufacturers.

If these new conglomerations succeed, we could be witnessing the dawn of a new automotive industry. These cars are aimed at a small but lucrative segment where the price of entry is $100.000 and up. These cars will never sell in numbers that make sense to GM or Ford but there are certainly 5000+ buyers a year for someone who can deliver the green performance car well heeled motorists desire. Fisker and Musk are looking to leverage the technology pioneered on these cars into larger numbers of cheaper, mainstream vehicles.

As automotive suppliers become suppliers of components to an ever more modular and computer-centric auto industry, one can imagine the emergence of completely new manufacturing entities. The Dell Dynamo? How about a GoogleCar?

Thinking about the sustainable car.

I'm currently enjoying the flood of unanticipated consequences flowing from $4+ gasoline. Of course this has generated a surge in interest in the cars I love best. Small, quirky and diesel. For the first time in history, Honda reports that Civics are selling in larger numbers than Accords. But interest like this is still a knee jerk reaction. What is really required is no less than a design revolution, one that encompasses every aspect of our lives and one that ultimately makes the personal car as we know it obsolete. More on this later.

What piqued my interest most recently was press about the Eco Elise from Lotus. Unless you are a car nut you probably have never heard of them. An English company founded by Colin Chapman in the 1950's they have worked a little niche building racing cars and sports cars. Chapman was known for being a nut for making cars light. He readily embraced new technologies that allowed him to make his cars lighter and stronger and therefore faster. Making more with less or as Buckminster Fuller would have it "ephemeralization". The Elise is the basis for the all electric Tesla sports car currently sold in the US.

Lotus has had trouble surviving as a car company but its engineering arm is alive and vital. Consider the amount of energy involved in manufacturing a car. My guess is that mining the materials, forming the plastics, and transporting everything to the showroom in finished form uses as much or more fossil fuel as you are likely to burn in the tank in a car's lifetime. (Anyone who has actually researched this should let me know!) Suddenly Lotus's less is more engineering techniques are very desirable.

So what does a respectable, forward thinking automotive engineer do next? How about planting your own hemp field! In pursuit of new and sustainable materials that is just what Lotus has done. The Eco Elise demonstrates the use of natural, renewable substances not only in the places you expect, like the upholstery and trim, but in the places you don't, like the seat frames and fittings. Lotus has developed a new composite using hemp and resins to replace many of the hard fittings in the car. Elsewhere hemp, sisal and natural wool replace traditional interior materials.

Currently Lotus must use oil based polyester resins for the hemp composite parts but they are committed to finding a more natural binder for this purpose. And more power too them I say. Other manufacturers are making progress toward the recyclable car but are concentrating on nonrenewable resources like aluminum and plastics. If Lotus succeeds, their efforts would represent an important step forward on the path to truly sustainable resources.Read about it here.