The Detroit Auto Show is open to the public this week. If you're the type of person who really wants to be there, but can't find the time or money to arrive, allow me to present you with a viable alternative. Sure, we already brought you news about the green cars that were revealed or are on display at the show, but sometimes you'd like to just aimlessly wander the aisles and see what you can find, right? If that sounds good to you, here's a way to do just that at your computer. Click on the gallery thumbnails below to begin a journey through 111 images shot by Newspress at the NAIAS. As I was posting these images, I felt like I was back in Cobo Hall. You can feel like you're there, too. Enter any time.
The first video below the fold is Mazda's Director of Design, Franz von Holzhausen talking about the Furai concept at the Detroit Auto Show. The Furai is a racing concept that runs on E100 (100 percent ethanol) and the car's design is inspired by the wind. The video includes a look at a really cool pop-up wing in the middle of the Furai.
The second video below the fold is the Furai on the race track with sounds you really have to hear. You will never believe that's corn ethanol making that noise. Also below the fold is a video that takes a look at the inside of the Furai and its very cool steering wheel.
Lori Harfenist, a really funny vlogger, was hired by GM to cover the Detroit Auto Show and she filed a report all about green stuff. You can watch Lori interview a GM's color and pigments designer, NASCAR racer Jeff Gordon, Designer: Project Runway winner Jeffrey Sebelia and Def Jam Founder Russell Simmons in the video above.
Indie singer Kat Parsons took a tour of the Toyota factory while on a trip to Tokyo. In the video below the fold, Kat takes a ride in a "self driving electric car" that tours the Toyota factory and passes by what may be an electric filling station. Seems Toyota has GM beat on the whole self-driving car thing.
The electric car looks like the Toyota E-Com which has a 60-mile range, charges in 2 hours and can go up to 62 miles per hour (electronically limited). According to this web page, E-Coms are currently in trials.
Bob Lutz had a long chat with bloggers at the Detroit Auto Show and you can watch the entire 20 minutes thanks to NextGear. Bob took questions on the GM+Coskata deal and how the Coskata process works (More on that later). Bob also took questions on why the Volt release and test drives were delayed. Seems the battery companies and GM software engineers are the ones to blame. Maximum Bob repeated a lot of what GM's Denise Grey told AutoblogGreen last week.
Update: Although Lutz refers to the A123 batteries having been delivered and tested, it is in fact the LG Chem/CPI packs that are in-house. A123 is providing the cells used with the Continental pack. The Conti/A123 packs have not been delivered yet.
Bob says Continental's batteries just arrived and A123 sent batteries but not enough for bench testing and test cars. Bench testing is going great on the A123 batteries but there is still a lot of testing that needs to be done. The second thing holding up the Volt test drive are the engineers that want more time to write better software. Bob wanted to develop limited software and just show the public a working car.
The Volt's engine will know how many miles you have to drive (I would guess from linking the engine to the GPS somehow) and the engineers wanted to write that software before the test drives. Bob was willing to show a car you would have to park on the side of the road and switch manually to charge the battery with the piston engine. The engineers convinced him when they said the drivable mules would get "zero to sixty in one minute" if they did not have more time.
Hey Bob, I think you are right and I would like to see the "zero to sixty in a minute mules." I would promise not write about performance, too. Heck, I would like to see the cut up Malibus waiting for electric engines because many of our readers don't believe GM is really honest about this at all. After all, there was an entire documentary about your first electric car that was not very positive on your role in its demise. Just a thought.
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.
Michigan Live caught up with popular custom bike maker and host of Monster Garage, Jesse James, at the Detroit Auto Show Wednesday. Jesse was at AutoWeek's annual design forum awards dinner promoting recycling and talked about his plans to break the land speed record this Spring with his hydrogen gas-fueled "Green Scream." Has Jesse gone green? Not quite.
Jesse says "we all want to go faster and have cooler, neater stuff, so we all have to pay our dues. ... That's just me trying to find some balance. ... I want my kid to be able to drive my 'cuda. So that's my preachy speech." Jesse also says Al Gore is still "a dork" and "I don't want to go to an electric Formula One race."
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.
The video above is GM chairman Bob Lutz eating a little crow on Bloomberg Television. In the past, Bob has said GM would beat Toyota by "a year" in the lithium-ion battery race. Now, that Toyota has said they will release lithium-ion plug-in hybrids ahead of GM's new EVs, Bob does not want to play anymore, saying it's "immaterial" who's first by a few months on next-gen EVs. The Bloomberg interview also has some juicy details about the Saturn Vue plug-in (it will have an 8- to 12-mile electric only range) and Bob says the Volt's internal release date is November 2010. Here is exactly what Bob said:
Bloomberg: Lets talk about Toyota. You know those guys. They came out yesterday and said they are going to have a plug-in electric car on the market by 2010. That's the year that you said as well. So who is going to win this race? Bob Lutz: Well, I think it's immaterial who comes out a couple of months ahead of somebody else. And notice that they said they didn't say plug-in electric car, they said plug-in hybrid. That will be our Saturn Vue plug-in hybrid which still relies mostly on the gasoline engine coupled to a hybrid system which improves your mileage and it will have about an 8 to, maybe somewhere between 8 and 12 mile electric range. Not to be confused with the Chevrolet Volt, which is a genuine electric vehicle, which operates electrically all the time with the engine only coming in, in case of absolute necessity to recharge the battery.
Bloomberg: So, you are going to argue we're still going to be #1 when we get to 2010 coming out with an all electric plug-in car? Bob Lutz: Yes, we are coming out with two. There is a great deal of confusion, frankly, among the media and the public, the difference between a plug-in hybrid and an extended range electric vehicle. We're doing both. The Saturn Vue is going to be a plug-in hybrid which will get about 8 to 12 miles purely electrically before it starts operating on the piston engine. The Volt is an electric vehicle, which in many circumstances will never use the piston engine at all.
Bloomberg: Lets clarify about the Volt though. Because it depends on a lithium-ion battery. You're still trying to figure out how to fully develop that technology. You're still sure you are going to have that ready for 2010? Can you give me a guarantee right now? (Smiles and laughs.) Bob Lutz: (Sighs.) Yes and no. Yes, I guarantee that the official internal General Motors target date is November 2010. You know, so far, the batteries are not a hold up. All of the testing, bench testing we are doing on battery packs, they fully meet our expectations.
Bloomberg: When do you start production then? You gotta start production of those batteries sometime in 2009 to have them ready for the Volt. When do you start production?
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.
Back in October, Mercedes-Benz made something of a splash in California when they re-introduced the E320 to the California market. It was the first new diesel available in the state in over two years. However, it now appears that the E320 BlueTec is not actually technically legal in California or four other states that use the same emissions regulations. The current E320 BlueTec is not equipped with the urea injection system meaning it does not meet California regs. Mercedes received a waiver from CARB that would allow them to lease the cars in the state for two years. At the end of the lease, the cars cannot be re-sold in California or the other four states. When the ML, GL and R class BlueTec models go on sale late this year, they will have urea injection and be truly fifty-state legal and can be sold in California. The E-Class won't get urea injection until the next-generation model debuts in the next couple of years.
The video above includes a chat with clean tech investor Vinod Khosla at the Detroit Auto Show. Vinod Khosla has backed ethanol company Coskata, which announced a partnership with GM at the Detroit Auto Show. Vinod says oil companies will get into the ethanol business because they are really energy companies.
GM CEO Rick Wagoner talks about Coskata in this video below the fold, also from the Detroit Auto Show. Rick says "we think the promise (of Coskata) is terrific." WARNING: The video below the fold includes Bob Lutz dancing.
In this video, Ford's American President, Mark Fields says Ford is making smaller cars. Mark says three years ago, 70 percent of Ford's sales were trucks and SUVs. At the end of 2007, though, crossovers and cars represent half of Ford's sales. The small cars Ford has at the Detroit Auto Show, Mark says, shows that Ford is moving in "a big way" towards smaller cars. Ford just needs to work on the "perception" of Ford as "truck heavy," concludes Mark.
If all of the AutoblogGreen coverage isn't enough for you, you can see all the new cars at the Detroit Auto Show, in a live, one-hour special tonight at 9 PM Est on CNBC.
The video above is a close look at the interior and back of Toyota's concept hybrid truck, the A-Bat. WARNING: In the video above, after CNBC takes a look at the A-Bat, they laugh at a miscalculation in the Chrysler's stampede stunt involving gay ... you have to watch.
This video is an interview with Jim Lentz, Toyota's U.S. president, where he confirms Toyota will show two new hybrids cars at next year's Detroit Auto Show. Jim said this while standing next to Toyota's new non-hybrid SUV, the Venza.
Yesterday we told you about what looked liked an early press release about the Dodge Ram Hemi hybrid. MSN Autos has great videos from the 2008 Detroit Auto Show, including this video which confirms the news that the Dodge Ram (as you can see in the screen grab above) will be made into a hybrid in 2010.
Not excited yet? Then check out THIS VIDEO with Kid Rock and stars like the Chevy Volt and an E85 coupe rockin' on stage. There are screen grabs of the Volt and Couple below the fold. Stay tuned for much more coverage of green cars at the Detroit Auto Show.
GM-Volt.com is at the Detroit Auto Show and they write that Bob Lutz says a drivable Chevy Volt "looks more like June" and not Easter as had Bob promised. You might recall the post where Bob was quoted saying this:
By the time the Easter Bunny delivers his or her first egg shipments we hope to have demonstrated initial prototype drives that demonstrate the feasibility of the 40 or 50 miles on pure electric drive.
...Somebody is going to have egg on their face and I personally don't like that. So, somehow I don't think it's going to be us but watch that with interest because around Easter time somebody is going to lose credibility.
Click the Verve for a gallery of high-res shots from the reveal
The U.S. version of the Ford Verve Concept is unveiled in Detroit today. To mark the stateside debut of the European-based Verve concept, Ford released a few audio snippets from FoMoCo group vice president Jim Farley about the car. You can read them after the jump or listen to them mashed into one audio file here (1:30 min, 1MB).
Basically, Farley says that if people want to understand what kinds of B Car Ford will be bringing out in 2010, checking out the Verve is a great way to see into the future. This concept isn't exactly like the car that will be released in a few years, but it is a 70 to 90 percent accurate preview of what's coming.
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