Author: Green Car Online News

Pininfarina-kissed Karma GT plug-in hybrid heading to Monterey Car Week

Gone is the Joker grin, as well as the walrus mustache.

The new Karma GT by Pininfarina will show off its much sleeker facelift at Monterey Car Week next weekend in California.

The GT by Pininfarina, which made its first appearance at the Shanghai auto show in April, is a two-door coupe version of the Karma Revero sedan. The Revero itself is an updated Fisker Karma, built by the successor company (Karma), with a new engine, a new battery pack, and a new look for 2020.

The coupe is the first fruit of a new collaboration between Karma and classic Italian design house Pininfarina. It puts forward a much simpler look, with narrow headlights, a flowing, curved bumper, and more conventional air intakes above the splitter beneath.

Karma GT by Pininfarina concept

Longer doors give the coupe more graceful proportions, and with its tiny back seat, the Revero loses little in practicality for the sacrificed rear doors. A contrasting black roof pulls the proportions together and finishes it off in a sleek arc.

Like the updated Revero GT, the GT by Pininfarina will use a turbocharged 3-cylinder engine from BMW along with a 28-kilowatt-hour battery pack that is expected to deliver electric range in the neighborhood of 65 miles before the 3-banger has to fire up. The combination is expected to generate 536 horsepower and acceleration of less than 4 seconds.

Karma has not confirmed whether it will produce the GT by Pininfarina, but is working on a new electric SUV, which it says will arrive in 2021.

Volvo study shows driver-assistance, self-driving features will make cars more efficient

Self-driving cars are green cars, not just because they are usually electric.

One of the biggest reasons engineers began working on self-driving cars more than a dozen years ago was for their efficiency, reducing stop-and-go driving and eventually even stoplights. (Potential safety improvements are another big motivation.)

Now, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on behalf of Volvo quantifies that savings. Although fairly rudimentary in its approach, the study is the first that uses real-world driving data to show how much more efficient cars with driver-assistance features can be. The study showed a 5 to 7 percent drop in fuel consumption for the cars driving with adaptive cruise control compared with human drivers.

Cars in the study logged 18,500 trips around Gothenburg. The study, “An Automated Vehicle Fuel Economy Benefits Framework Using Real-World Travel and Traffic Data,” was published in June in IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine.

Researchers studied Volvos driven by employees and their families near the company's headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, and compared the fuel economy of cars using adaptive cruise control compared with those driven exclusively by human drivers.

Adaptive cruise control is one of the building blocks of self-driving cars, holding a steady speed on the open road, but slowing down gradually if a slower car appears ahead and maintaining a set following distance behind it.

Volvo Drive Me self-driving car project

The study and the parameters aren't perfect. Some of the benefit may come because cars driven with adaptive cruise control tend to travel more slowly as more, slower cars continue to appear in front of them. It also only tests this one aspect of self-driving cars, albeit a fundamental one. Future developments of self-driving cars, such as “platooning” and vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications that can smooth traffic flow even further could have even bigger benefits.

“One obstacle to research like this is limited availability of real-world travel data from automated vehicles,” said Lei Zhu, a researcher in NREL’s Mobility, Behavior and Advanced Powertrains Group and lead author of the new paper. “The partnership with Volvo Cars provided a rare opportunity to work with actual vehicle operation and energy consumption data in real traffic.”

The researchers designed the study to provide a basis to simulate benefits from other types of advances in self-driving in the future.

Shorter range Audi E-tron planned for Europe

Audi is already introducing a new version of its E-tron quattro electric SUV in Europe with smaller batteries.

The short-range model will have a 71-kilowatt-hour battery pack in place of the original's 95-kwh battery pack.

Audi confirmed to Green Car Reports that the new model won't be sold in the U.S. In Europe, it will be rated at 186 miles on the new WLTP test, versus about 249 miles in that test with the larger pack.

The E-tron 50 also won't get the quick, 150-kilowatt charge rate that other E-trons are known for, though with a smaller battery it won't need them as badly. The E-tron quattro is the first car on the market capable of using new 150-kw CCS DC fast chargers being installed by several networks in Europe and the U.S. Instead, the E-tron 50 can charge at up to 120 kw, which can still deliver about 100 miles of range in less than half an hour.

2019 Audi E-tron – first drive report – Calirornia, May 2019
2019 Audi E-tron – first drive report – Calirornia, May 2019
2019 Audi E-tron – first drive report – Calirornia, May 2019

With smaller batteries, the weight will also fall by 265 pounds.

The E-tron 50 will also have a less powerful motor, rated at 308 horsepower and 398 lb-ft of torque, down from 402 hp and 490 lb-ft. Audi says acceleration will be 7.0 seconds from 0-62 mph, and top speed will be limited to 118 mph.

Otherwise, the shorter-range E-tron 50 will drive just like the regular E-tron, with its three regenerative braking settings and progressive braking.

Deliveries of the new model are expected to start in the first quarter of 2020 in, among many markets, the UK, where it will cost about $12,000 (10,000 British pounds) less than the E-tron 55.

The smaller battery pack could have an additional benefit for Audi. The company has struggled to reach production targets for the E-tron at its Belgium factory after reports of battery shortages and price disputes from supplier LG Chem. Using fewer cells in a shorter range model could allow Audi to boost E-tron production by spreading its available cells over more cars.

Electric Ford F-150 already exists, as second-life conversion kit in Canada

The all-electric Ford F-150 teased for the first time last week is something to get excited about—especially as an electric version of the top-selling vehicle in America.

The model isn’t likely to show up at dealerships for at least another couple years, though. And there are electric F-150 pickups already in use today. About a dozen of them ply the streets and highways around Montreal, Quebec, and are the product of Montreal’s Ecotuned, a shop that “aims to be a leader in the field of electric vehicle conversion in North America.”

Ecotuned has made about 15 electric truck conversions that are currently in service, and it's working on “several” more builds at present. Clients include the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, the utility Hydro Quebec, and the grocery chain IGA.

Ecotuned electric F-150 conversion – Montreal, June 2019

Green Car Reports caught up with Ecotuned last month, at a technology exhibit ancillary to an annual Michelin mobility conference, where that company revealed a potentially production-bound airless-tire technology. And right off the bat, marketing and branding spokesperson Pierre Gladu took some of the air out of my first questions. He was quick to underscore that Ecotuned has no aspiration to become an automaker, a high-volume builder of conversions, or a builder of batteries or power systems themselves.

From tired to tailpipe-free

Its role, Gladu says, is focused in the “matchmaking” that the company does—of selecting off-the-shelf components from a number of different sources, and assuring that they will work well together as a prolific kit that will turn a tired truck into one with no tailpipe emissions.

“We’re not a car manufacturer,” said Gladu. “We’re recycling those cars that would otherwise go to the scrapyard, or the secondary market with polluting engines.”

Up until now, the company has focused on putting together the essentials to create a flexible combination of components that works well for the F-150, Super-Duty F-Series trucks, or Ford’s E-Series vans and anything built on them. Although Gladu says that other solutions are on the way, and that the company can work with GM, Ram, and “anything that’s on an H-frame.”

Ecotuned electric Ford E-Series refrigerated van

In what’s shaped up to be a two-day process for two mechanics—a total of 32 labor-hours—Ecotuned takes a regular F-150 that’s near or past the expiration of its original powertrain warranty and takes out the original engine, transmission, fuel system and exhaust. It then installs the motor and two-speed transmission and the power electronics. And then the battery pack goes underneath the car. Finally, they turn the fuel meter into the battery level meter—a nice wink to the truck’s new purpose.

The battery pack can range from 43 kilowatt-hours up to 86 kwh, depending on the space. In many installations, such as the F-150 it was showing last month, Ecotuned tucks some of the cells under the hood. They’re all cooled on the same circuit as the power electronics and the cells under the floor, utilizing the original radiator placement.

In its 48-kw form as displayed, in a 2014 Ford F-150, the company listed 87 miles as the driving range, but Gladu says that it goes well beyond that in “ideal conditions” and that he’s gone more than 124 miles (200 km). The company said that the top 86-kwh version, with 14,500 pounds on board, can still go 99 miles. Level 2 onboard charging allows a six-hour recharge time for the cells, which arrive from a China-based supplier packed in modules.

Ecotuned conversions – electric power unit

The company uses the common (BorgWarner) HVH250 permanent-magnet motor, rated at 214 hp and 295 pound-feet—which amounts to about a 12-second 0-60 mph time, and a top speed of 106 mph.

Because of the use of a two-speed transmission by Bert, a maker of racing components, the Ecotuned converted trucks can now tow up to 18,000 pounds, according to Gladu. The truck will downshift to low up to 59 mph and uses a special PID controller to blip or brake the electric motor to or from approximately three times the rpm in just a quarter of a second.

Off-the-shelf components, curated as a turn-key kit

Ecotuned uses off-the-shelf components, but what the company does, Pierre says, is offer a package that works efficiently together and offers a solution “that allows the fleet manager to have a turn-key solution, which they are all looking for.”

Eventually the plan would be to partner with a company like Midas or Mr. Muffler and offer a complete kit that can be assembled by those shops. In the meantime the company is aiming to fine-tune the “kit” that would enable this, as they target 1,000 conversions at the larger facility it moved to in March.

The total cost for its “turn-key” kit is about $23,000 to $30,000 (CDN$30,000 to $40,000), depending on the battery size, with some discounts for economies of scale. That doesn’t include the donor truck, but trucks that are in reasonably good condition routinely sell for less than $5,000 at auction and Gladu says that “they give it away if they have no more engine.”

Ecotuned electric F-150 conversion – Montreal, June 2019

It doesn’t require any changes to the stock suspension because the weight difference is negligible (just 4 percent more than a gasoline F-150 in the base build), which also lets Ecotuned carry over things like ABS or even the 4WD module.

The eventual aim is to get the cost of the kit down to about $19,000 (CDN$25,000).

If you’re getting your hopes up that there will eventually be some more polished version in the works for personal use, you’re better off waiting for Ford’s electric F-150. The goal here is going cheap and saving money over the long run, while cutting the carbon footprint of these workhorse vehicles.

More directly to the point for penny-pinching fleet managers, Ecotuned says that in fleets these vehicles will be able to cover a million kilometers (about 600,000 miles) with the conversion, with the same maintenance points as other F-150s—but without the oil changes, of course.

Prototype Sumitomo tires recover energy as they roll

There's wind power, solar power, and—tire power.

Sumitomo Rubber is developing a new tire that can restore energy to a car as it drives down the road.

The energy recaptures static electricity generated when the tires deform and return to their original shape as they roll down the road.

Recovering energy from a portion of tire rolling resistance works somewhat like regenerative braking, improving efficiency recovering a portion of the energy that would otherwise be lost while driving.

Sumitomo electricity-generating tire concept

So far, the small devices that Sumitomo attaches to the inside of the tire's tread recaptures only a small amount of energy, enough to keep the tire-pressure-monitor sensors charged, for example.

Eventually the savings could be bigger. In 2010, when Michelin was introducing a new line of low rolling-resistance tires for electric cars and hybrids, the company estimated that in an electric car up to 30 percent of the energy required to power the car down the road went to overcoming rolling resistance. Another third was to overcome wind resistance, and a smaller portion to mechanical friction. The rest come from waste heat in the motors, power electronics, and other smaller drains.

The Sumitomo energy “harvesters” use frictional charging, or the triboelectric effect. They use two oppositely charged electrodes sitting parallel with the inside surface of the tire's tread. When the electrodes make contact as the tire rotates it captures static electricity and transmits it to a wire through a conductive layer.

Goodyear BH03 concept tire

Sumitomo is not the first tire company working on energy recovery. And at the 2015 Geneva auto show, Goodyear rolled out a set of concept tires called the BH03 that recovered energy.

Neither tire manufacturer has announced when or if their new tire energy recovery systems may make it to production.

Tesla CTO and battery mastermind JB Straubel exits

At the start of a call Wednesday to provide guidance on Tesla’s record sales but $408 million loss in the second quarter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped a bombshell: that its chief technical officer, JB Straubel, will be stepping down from his executive post.

Drew Baglino will take over most of the responsibilities held by Straubel, who will be transitioning to the role of senior advisor.

The departure of Straubel is a huge loss for the company. He’s considered a co-founder of Tesla, as well as an expert on energy storage and propulsion—and in many intents and purposes has been Musk’s partner in Tesla’s rise. The Stanford grad has been the mastermind behind key decisions made on Tesla’s power systems and battery technology—decisions that have given the company a continued advantage in efficiency and driving range after other companies have created rival electric models. To this day he's considered one of the world's top experts in vehicle battery tech.

Straubel's public role for the company that often played well with Musk’s zeal. He was composed and engaging, often chiming in on company calls or presentations with smart answers to technical points, provided some deep-dive insight on the company’s tech in blog posts, and was approachable, helping provide rides and demos at product events. In a 2016 speech, prior to the launch event for the Model 3 and the hundreds of thousands of advance orders to follow, Straubel said, “I never imagined that things would scale or grow as quickly as they have.”

Tesla Model 3 design prototype – reveal event – March 2016

But Tesla and its share price did grow quickly, and it earned him tremendous wealth. According to Bloomberg, Straubel has offloaded Tesla shares eight times in the past nine months, in transactions netting him about $30.1 million.

After Musk announced the change Wednesday, Straubel chimed in and said, “Yeah, it’s been a great adventure, 16 years.”

“And maybe just to add a bit more to that, I'm not disappearing,” said Straubel, who was in his 20s when the company started work on its Lotus-based Tesla Roadster. “I’m not disappearing, and I just wanted to make sure that people understand that this was not some, you know, lack of confidence in the company or the team or anything like that.”

Musk reminisced briefly about the first meeting he had with Straubel, at McCormick & Schmick's in El Segundo. “If we hadn't had lunch in 2003, Tesla wouldn't exist, basically.”

The initial premise of that meeting, Straubel has previously said, was to get Musk to financially support Straubel’s electric airplane project. Electric cars were looking like a long shot for a startup in 2003; perhaps electric airplanes may take off in the next decade, with Straubel the pilot.

Honda plans larger, high-performance platform for US EVs

Honda is stepping up its EV game going forward—well, more than five years forward.

At a “Honda Meeting” company briefing for investors and media in Japan last week, the company revealed that it is working on a new dedicated electric vehicle platform.

The platform, which will first be used by 2025, will provide the basis for mid-size sedans to large SUVs and will add to the new electric lineup taking form with Honda's dedicated electric city car, the Honda E, which arrives in Europe in spring 2020.

At the event in Japan, Honda's managing officer in charge of power unit development, Ayumu Matsuo noted that the Honda E is designed to accommodate larger batteries that could give it a longer range, but that it's also designed for urban use, so the company has not decided to put larger batteries in it yet.
2020 Honda E prototype
2020 Honda E prototype

Although Honda says the Honda E has received 6,500 “expressions of interest” in Britain alone, it isn't big enough to attract many buyers in the U.S.

The new electric platform for mid-size and large cars, “has a different aim from the Honda E,” Honda's general manager and chief engineer for electric vehicle development, Tetsuya Hasebe, told the conference. “This one aims for intercity, long-distance travel,” he said, noting it has room for more batteries.

Honda E powertrain infographic

Like the platform under the Honda E, the larger one will be a skateboard chassis, with batteries housed flat in the floor. Unlike the Honda E platform, which will only support batteries from Panasonic, the new one will be engineered to use batteries from multiple suppliers, including Panasonic and Chinese supplier CATL, to give Honda flexibility in building the car around the world.

The basic format will be rear-wheel drive, to benefit sporty handling and give the cars a tight turning radius, but the Japan-developed architecture will be designed to allow a front motor for all-wheel-drive applications as well, Hasebe said.

In a release from the meeting Honda summed that the platform “will enable flexible product development, including body design, adoption of battery types to accommodate the desired EV range and whether to employ an all-wheel drive system.”

The EV vision also builds on a commitment Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo made in May—that it will expand its two-motor hybrid system, which underpins the company's plug-in hybrids, to its entire lineup in Europe.

The announcement echoes a similar move last month by Toyota, in announcing that it will develop a new large electric platform with Subaru, potentially for an SUV.

As emissions and fuel-economy standards around the world are set to tighten dramatically in coming years, and development of hydrogen distribution has lagged, Japan's big automakers who focused on fuel-cell development, rather than battery-electric cars, are scrambling to come around to build their own BEVs.

Electric Ford F-150 prototype shown towing a freight train

In Ford's first official tease of an all-electric F-150, released Tuesday—with a video here—a test mule is shown towing more than a million pounds.

The prototype electric F-150 pickup pulled ten double-decker rail cars, weighing that amount, a distance of 1,000 feet.

Then Ford loaded those cars up with 42 gas-powered F-150s, representing 42 years that the F-150 has been America's best-selling truck, and did it again—all overseen by F-150 chief engineer Linda Zhang. The company concludes its look at the stunt by specifically stating: “The all-electric Ford F-150 is coming.”

Ford F-Series electric truck prototype

Ford has been making references to an electric F-150 pickup, and it states that “development continues” on the truck, but it hasn't physically presented the project until now.

Chairman and family scion Bill Ford first alluded to the electric truck last September, when he told a gathering of investors and media: “When it comes to building the best trucks in the world, we never rest. Whether they're gas, diesel, hybrid—or when the time comes fully-electric—we will ensure they power the world in a sustainable way.”

Then in January, the company confirmed that it will build the electric F-150. It is expected to debut in 2022.

Ford F-Series electric truck prototype

In April, Ford announced a $500 million investment in rival electric truckmaker Rivian, but it says that investment is part of a separate program to use Rivian's technology rather than its hardware. The company has also said it is working on its own electric SUV, tentatively called the Mach E and plans to roll out a hybrid F-150 in 2021.

In the meantime, cross-town rival GM has confirmed it is working on its own electric pickup.

Relatively low-speed pulls like this should be taken as stunts, as they don't entirely prove what a vehicle is capable of at highway or in hard use cycles. They merely demonstrate the vehicle's available torque, multiplied through available gear ratios.

Tesla sets world record towing Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner

For instance, Tesla in 2018 demonstrated the towing prowess of the Model X by towing a Boeing 787 and set a world record in the process. And Toyota in 2012 used a gasoline Tundra to tow the space shuttle Endeavor to its final resting place at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Choice of new BMW CEO solidifies automaker’s electric plans

BMW is doubling down on its strategy of building electric versions of its mainstream cars, rather than a separate line of EVs.

That strategy was pushed by Oliver Zipse, who will take over as CEO from Harald Krueger on August 16, and it gives the company more flexibility to produce electric cars—on the same assembly lines as internal-combustion and plug-in hybrid versions.

Incoming BMW CEO Oliver Zipse

The new approach has a template: BMW has built its battery production facility as part of a flexible space inside its main car factory in Dingolfing, in case demand for electric cars doesn't materialize. That also saves billions of dollars in engineering as the company faces the need to develop new self-driving cars (some in partnership with Daimler) alongside new electric powertrains and the surrounding support infrastructure.

According to its latest plans, BMW expects to build 25 new plug-in models, including 13 all-electric cars by 2023, the first of which will be the all-new 2020 Mini Cooper SE.

2018 BMW i3s

The approach is quite a course change from BMW's former electric-vehicle trajectory. With the i3 and i8, introduced in 2014 and 2015, respectively, BMW became an early leader in electric cars. It made grand plans for some of the ancillary points, laying plans to develop a support network of car-sharing programs, charging infrastructure, and apps to support them. But the weight-saving carbon-fiber bodies for these vehicles are expensive to build, and sales of the i3 have continued to lag early expectations.

Although little of the surrounding infrastructure came to be, critics have charged that the company squandered that early lead when it ceased developing new dedicated EVs after those models, and focused instead on developing slow-selling, short-range plug-in versions of its existing sedans and SUVs.

Perhaps with the flexibility to produce electric versions of nearly its entire lineup, the brand might regain some of that lost momentum.

CO2 emissions in US could fall again in 2019, federal agency projects

A new report by the U.S. Energy Information Agency forecasts that for the first time in two years annual carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. will decrease.

The report, issued last week, forecasts that U.S. CO2 emissions will fall by 2.2 percent in 2019, in what it says is the largest decrease since 2015.

After rising by 2.7 percent in 2018, the EIA also predicts that U.S. CO2 emissions will fall by a further 0.7 percent in 2020.

The agency chalks up the drop to more coal-fired powerplants being retired and replaced by natural gas plants. Coal currently makes up 27 percent of U.S. power generation, which the EIA forecasts will fall to 24 percent in 2019 and 23 percent in 2020. Natural gas generates 35 percent of American electricity in 2018, which is expected to rise to 38 percent in 2019, before falling back slightly in 2020.

Part of the slowing decrease may come from the scheduled retirement of five nuclear reactors in 2020, the EIA report says.

EIA expects U.S. CO2 emissions to fall in 2019

Renewable energy is also forecast to grow over the next few years. Wind and solar power make up 10 percent of U.S. power generation in 2019, which the EIA expects to rise to 11 percent in 2019 and 13 percent in 2020. (Hydro power is forecast to remain flat, at 7 percent.) Recent reports have shown that the cost of installing new wind and solar power has dropped below the cost of keeping old coal plants running.

With all these improvements, why are the decreases so small? The EIA Annual Energy Outlook shows that while efficiency continues to improve for all types of energy use, the demand for energy continues to rise with economic expansion, population growth, and increased travel, making the switch to cleaner and more efficient fuels more imperative. Indeed, the International Energy Agency says worldwide energy demand grew by 2.3 percent in 2018.

Carbon dioxide is an unavoidable byproduct of combustion, so the only way to use it is to reduce the use of fossil fuels. That could come with more electric cars and more renewable generation of electricity.

2019 EIA Annual Energy Outlook transportation energy usage

The EPA lists transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, at 28.9 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions in 2017.

The drop in U.S. CO2 emissions comes despite efforts by the Trump administration to pull out of the global Paris Climate Accords, which seek to limit global temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial levels by the year 2100.

Even then, the U.S. improvements likely won't be enough. The International Energy Agency reported that worldwide CO2 emissions rose 1.7 percent in 2018.