Prior to the kick-off of frenzy of press conferences at the Detroit Auto Show, ABG had the opportunity to talk with BMW-North America CEO Tom Purves and another BMW representative. We discussed the company's diesel announcement along with their hybrid and hydrogen plans.

ABG: We're here with Tom Purves this morning and you are the CEO of BMW USA. BMW has got a big announcement today regarding diesel technology coming to the United States. Tom, welcome and would you like to tell us a little bit about what BMW is going to be announcing today.

Tom Purves: Yes, I would be delighted. We, being in the diesel business of course in Europe and other markets for many, many years we have been developing technology which will allow us to sell diesel in all 50 states. Diesel engines that actually would comply with the emission regulations right across the USA rather than just in 48 or 49 states and come the autumn of this year, October this year, we will be actually launching into the market two new vehicles we are showing for the time here.

You can read the rest of our discussion after the jump.

During the 2008 Detroit Auto Show, ABG sat down to chat with Malcolm Bricklin about his latest project Visionary Vehicles. Mr. Bricklin has been involved in the car business for four decades and could be described as a serial entrepenuer. Over the years his projects have had varying degrees of success including being the original U.S. importer of Subarus as well as importing Fiats in the eighties after the Italian company pulled out the U.S. market. He also pre-dated John Dolorean in attempting (and failing) to build and sell a gull-wing coupe. He also brought America the Yugo.

These days Bricklin is focused on building a series hybrid electric car and creating a supply and distribution base for upstart car manufacturers to tap into for electrically-driven cars. As usual, Bricklin has some grand plans and the name Visionary Vehicles certainly seems appropriate. Read on to find out what he has in mind.

ABG: We're here with Malcolm Bricklin at the Automotive X-Prize booth to talk about your latest venture. You are working on a new plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Why don't you tell us about the project?

Malcolm Bricklin: Actually, we are using the vehicle only as a way to sign up the dealers. But to truth of the matter is what we are really doing is trying to set up the infrastructure for electric vehicles and electric hybrid plug-ins. What we are doing is we are designing a vehicle as you can see right over there, which is going to be the size of a Mercedes S about the width of a Lamborghini that will get 100 miles to the gallon and sell for 40 grand. That, we think, will dispel everybody's thoughts that you can't build a big car and use electricity and get great gas miles and still sell at a decent price.

Continue reading about Bricklin's plans after the jump.

During Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe's speech at the Toyota Media reception at the Detroit Auto Show last Sunday night he mentioned the company hybrid sales goal. I didn't mention it in my own report of the event because I didn't consider it all that noteworthy since it's been discussed before. Evidently some other outlets and even Toyota felt it was important and did mention the subject, mis-quoting Watanabe at the same time.

In his speech, Watanabe re-stated the company's goals of offering hybrid variants of every model they sell as well as eventually reaching sales of 1 million hybrid vehicles a year. Where the Toyota Open Road blog and others erred was in the timing. They all reported that Watanabe said this would happen by 2010. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for Toyota's competitors) the company's goals are not quite that aggressive.

What he actually said is that they wanted to these levels during the 2010s. In other words Toyota wants to offer hybrids in every model line and sell one million a year during the next decade, or by 2020! It's a reasonable error to make given that, although Watanabe speaks English well, it is not his first language and the presentation came at the end of a grueling first day of the auto show and many of those in attendance were already starting to wind down with a few drinks by the time Watanabe took the stage.

[Source: Toyota Open Road blog]

The 2008 Detroit Auto Show is opening up to the public on Saturday and the media previews were chock full of announcements of new flex-fuel and diesel vehicles. The flex-fuel reveals ran the gamut from the wild race car based concepts like the Mazda Furai with it's ethanol fueled rotary to the soon to enter production Saab 9-4x. On the diesel side, BMW showed the upcoming 335d and X5 xDrive35d while Subaru didn't show anything but did discuss their U.S. diesel plans. Kia and Acura both showed the new diesels they will be installing in their cars in 2009 and 2010. The video team at DieselForecast and GreenFuelsForecast put together a couple of videos with all the highlights that you can check out after the jump.

[Source: DieselForecast, GreenFuelsForecast]

During the Detroit Auto Show, a Ford press liaison invited AutoblogGreen and around a dozen other journalists to an on-the-record dinner to talk about sustainability and related topics. As a guy who writes for AutoblogGreen, I couldn't help but notice that every single person around the dinner table had been at Cobo Hall during the day. The first day's schedule of jam-packed press events ended at around 6:30 at the show in downtown, and the dinner started at 7:30 on Southfield, which is 20+ miles away. So, for a relaxed discussion on Ford's commitment to sustainability, Ford made sure that we all needed to drive for half an hour. Nice. To be fair, it's not like Ford at home in Detroit, so maybe they didn't know that there are plenty of good restaurants downtown. Oh, wait.

Anyway, the chance to sit with Sue Cischke, Ford's Senior Vice President, Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering and Bill Ford, Jr. himself made the dinner too tempting and so I headed out to the restaurant (arriving a few minutes late because I always, always get lost when I drive in Detroit). I've put up a recording of the opening discussion we had with Bill (note: for this post, I'll use "Bill" to refer to William Ford III and "Ford" to refer to the company, just so there aren't any confusing sentences) and you can listen to it here (36 min, 25MB). The bulk of this post is written from what was said then and during the dinner itself.

Read all about it after the jump.

When Subaru announced their new diesel boxer four-cylinder engine, American Subie fans were disappointed to learn that the company wasn't planning to offer the engine here. Fortunately it looks like rising fuel prices and increasing fuel economy standards are causing Subaru management to have a change of heart. Just as General Motors is now looking at bringing their new 2.9L diesel V-6 stateside, Subaru is now looking to add the diesel to just-released second-gen Forester and Impreza models. At the Detroit Auto Show, Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru's parent company) president Ikuo Mori said the diesels should arrive here by mid-2010.

[Source: DieselForecast]

Click the Renegade for a high-res gallery

Of the three new Chrysler concepts on revealed at the Detroit Auto Show, the Jeep Renegade was certainly the best received as far as its design. The compact off-roader is immediately recognizable as a Jeep, with its round headlights, seven slot grille and bulging fenders. The two-seater takes a BlueTec diesel range extended EV platform and adds Jeep's "Trail-Rating" to create an environmentally friendly off-roader.

Related:

• Detroit 2008: Jeep Renegade diesel RE-EV
• Detroit 2008 Preview: Jeep Renegade Concept

click the ZEO for a high-res gallery from Detroit

The Dodge ZEO lies somewhere between it's Jeep and Chrysler concept siblings in aesthetic terms. Like its siblings, the ZEO gets drive torque exclusively from an electric motor, although this one relies entirely on electrons retrieved from an external source and stored in the lithium ion battery pack. No range extender for this sports coupe, if you don't have it when you pull the plug, you can't make it up along the way. The nearly horizontal windshield would likely present some significant issues with distortion although unlike the Volt concept aerodynamics would probably benefit.

Related:

• Detroit 2008: Dodge ZEO BEV sports car

click the ecoVoyager for a high-res gallery from Detroit

The Chrysler ecoVoyager was to this year's Detroit Auto Show what the Ford Airstream was last year in more ways than one. An odd-ball shaped one-"box" design, the ecoVoyager is specced out with a hydrogen fuel cell acting as a range extender for the lithium ion battery pack which provides energy to drive the front wheels. The fuel cell and battery are also packaged under the floor of the Chrysler. Unlike the Ford, this concept has a more mainstream interior design, unlike the Space Odyssey 2001/acid trip configuration of the earlier concept. Like the AirStream, the exterior of the ecoVoyager was still treated with derision by most who set eyes upon it. On the other hand it's definitely not as bad as the current production Sebring. Take that for what it's worth.

Sitting off to the side of the Kia stand at the Detroit Auto Show is a display of a 3.0L clean diesel V-6. This same engine has been in production in Korean market Kia and Hyundai models including the Veracruz. John Juriga director of powertrains at the Hyundai-Kia Technical Center (HATCI) near Ann Arbor, MI confirmed that the engine is currently running on dynamometers and in vehicles at HATCI. The display indicated that the engine is targeted for the new Boreggo SUV in 2010. At the introduction of the Hyundai Veracruz last year, the company indicated that the CUV would receive a diesel in the next few years and spokesman Miles Johnson confirmed that this engine is the one that will be used. The V-6 is equipped with particulate filters and urea injection to clean up the exhaust stream.

[Source: Kia, Hyundai, DieselForecast.com]

You can probably guess that the photo above was not taken anywhere near Cobo Hall during the Detroit Auto Show. Nope, that green Chevy Blazer is sitting in Lake Havasu, Arizona. The connection to Detroit is that Jim Stansbury, the founder and CEO of the Physics Lab of Lake Havasu, was in town to talk up his team's official contender status in the Automotive X Prize. Stansbury and Audrey Perry, the lab's VP of marketing, sat down with AutoblogGreen for about 20 minutes yesterday to describe why they think a modified Chevy Blazer (!) with a few off-the-shelf parts has a chance to win the Prize. Do you want to reread that? A Chevy Blazer as the green car for the new millennium? How is this possible? The best way to learn is to give Stansbury a listen here (19 min, 13MB).

Stansbury's idea is to convert the large Blazer into an electric vehicle and then outfit the beast with a few different technologies that will all "absorb the energy around us, namely the sun" and power the batteries. These technologies include small turbines in the front, photovoltaic panels on the sides and solar thermal collectors on the roof. What do the collectors do? They heat water to power a stirling engine that generates electricity. All this "free" energy will power electric motors in the front and the back of the Blazer. Oh, and one more thing: the Havasu team wants to place wings below the batteries and on the roof to exploit ground effect and provide lift.

All in all, this is a very interesting project. I'll update this post with some more info once I get to a scanner (UPDATE: you can read what the Lab thinks the technology will cost by reading this letter). For now, enjoy the interview with Stansbury and contemplate just what it would mean if a freakin' Chevy Blazer won the Auto X Prize.

On Tuesday, ages after the major automakers had made all the glitzy announcements they wanted to make, USCAR (the United States Council for Automotive Research, a joint project of the Big Three) announced that - wait a minute. Announced is too strong a word here. Sure, USCAR representatives held a news conference, but there wasn't any news. Instead the chair and director of USCAR's Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP), David Mattis (who is also materials and corrosion engineering at General Motors) spoke for about eight minutes and sort of read the press release (pasted after the jump) to the room. You can listen to Mattis here (8 min, 6MB). Considering that the big "news" in the release is that, in America, 84 percent of cars (by weight) are recycled and 95 percent of vehicles go through the recycling process - something that we've known for a while - and I had to sit there and wonder why USCAR bothered to hold a press event at all.

Well, the answer dawned on me a bit later. The purpose was to get one simple message - "Did you know that cars are the most recycled product in America?" - out into the news. Sure, this message is as true today as it was last month and will in all likelihood be so next month as well, but USCAR had the chance to talk directly to a handful of automotive journalists and did so. Regular AutoblogGreen probably knew the statistics already, but there must be a few of you out there who can learn from this post that:

• End-of-life vehicles are the most recycled consumer product – both in terms of percentage and volume.
• More than 95 percent of all end-of-life vehicles go through a market-driven recycling infrastructure with no added costs or taxes to consumers.
• And more than 84 percent, by weight, of each end-of-life vehicle is recycled.
• Materials processed from end-of-life vehicles go back into making new cars, roads, buildings, consumer products and even garden mulch.

[Source: USCAR and the VRP]

Near the cutaway BYD F6-DM hybrid in the depths of the Detroit Auto Show, AFS Trinity Power Corporation is displaying a new hybrid SUV (actually a converted Saturn Vue) that gets more than 150 mpge thanks to something AFS calls the Extreme Hybrid (XH). The SUV recently achieved "more than 150 miles per gallon of gasoline based on the EPA Combined Urban/Highway Driving Cycle with 6 days per week of 40 miles per day in all electric mode and one day at 100 miles with assistance of the gas engine." The test reportedly returned mpge numbers of around 170, but AFS wants to use 150 so as not to leave people disappointed if they drive more aggressively or under different circumstances than the test was run in. How do you like them apples?

The XH-150, AFS' name for the SUV (the sedan there is the XH-250), can go 40 miles in EV mode and has a range of 400 miles with gas. Since AFS is making a point by outfitting these standard vehicle with the ultracapacitor-based hybrid system, they are looking for carmakers who want to license the technology and put it into production. AFS Trinity CEO Edward W. Furia said in a release (pasted after the jump) that, "If carmakers decide not to take advantage of this offer, AFS Trinity intends to raise the funds to begin modifying existing hybrids or manufacture its own 150 mpg SUV's and, eventually, 250 mpg sedans. We believe such production models could be available for sale in three years. The SUVs that we just completed that were outfitted with the XH(TM) drive train could have been any SUV made by anyone. The XH(TM) is a new generation of plug-in hybrid drive train ready to multiply the gas mileage of any SUV or any standard sedan." Furia also said that XH vehicles will be the first to pay for themselves in gasoline cost savings. While we like the idea and would most assuredly not be against an SUV that get 150 miles to the gallon, as we asked the other day: does this technology deserve the hype?

[Source: AFS Trinity Power Corporation]

One of the features of the HUMMER HX ethanol-ready concept is a number of very configurable body panels. Doors, fenders and much more can be taken off and change the look of the vehicle to suit the fickle mood of the hypothetical owner. On each day of the Detroit Auto Show, GM will be showcasing a different look for the HX, and we happened to be walking by earlier today when the switch was happening. You can see a schedule of what's coming in this picture. Actually, now that I look the list over, it seems the version on the floor today is really supposed to be here on Thursday. Anyway, the point is you can change the look of your car. Which one would use to be most aerodynamic and minimize fuel consumption when you're driving?

Related:

• Detroit 2008: Hummer HX Concept live reveal
• Detroit 2008: HUMMER HX Concept
• Hummer HX concept is ethanol-capable. Does that mean anything?

click the Passat CC for a high res gallery

Volkswagen has been offering their 1.4L TSI engine range in several of their European models for the past several years but has yet to make them available in the U.S. The TSI engines are reduced displacement, turbocharged direct injection engines that offer power comparable to larger engines with much improved fuel efficiency. The first of the TSI engines will arrive in the U.S. this summer with the launch of the new Passat CC. The coupe-like sedan will have a 200hp/207lb-ft 2.0L TSI as the base engine and deliver 29.8mpg. After the Passat CC hits the market the 1.4L TSI engines will get added to the Rabbit/Jetta lineups as well, probably some time in 2009.

[Source: Volkswagen]