While I think battery technology has progressed a lot in recent years, for long-haul trucking and even long-distance bus transportation, I think trackless trolleys along interstates and major highways. I know a lot of people discount the possibility — after all it is expensive to run thousands of miles of electrified wires along with all the substations required to supply the wires, but it could provide a an economical source of power on go, beyond what even a large battery bank could provide.
General Motors plans to completely phase out vehicles using internal combustion engines by 2035, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra announced Thursday. The automaker will go completely carbon neutral at all facilities worldwide by 2035.
Barra has frequently touted GM's plan for “an all-electric future,” recently increasing to 30 the number of pure battery-electric vehicles it will launch by the middle of this decade, but this marks the first time the largest Detroit automaker has set a hard target for completely phasing out gas and diesel engines for all light-duty vehicles, including pickups and SUVs.
I think Americans will like electric cars. They'll have good acceleration, with rocket-like starts onto the freeway if the drivers want to really wallop the accelerator. Battery packs are big and heavy, which necessitates larger, higher profile, longer vehicles. The demand for larger ranges and bigger battery packs might actually bring back some of the 220-inch behemoths that once ruled the road in 1950s and 1960s, especially for people who don't live in cities and have to parallel park.
It's unclear if there will be much of a push for efficiency standards with the new vehicles, especially right away, as electricity is so cheap and plentiful as gasoline once was, and the tailpipes for generating plants tends to be located outside of cities, so localized pollution is a lot less of an issue.
Automakers around the world, from Japan to Texas, are grappling with a global shortage of computer chips.
Volkswagen sounded the alarm about the growing problem last month. Now more automakers are reporting problems, including a ord plant in Kentucky that shut down temporarily, a Jeep plant in Mexico that extended its holiday shutdown and other factories that are trimming production plans based on their supply of semiconductors.
Fairly early in the development of the automobile, pioneer inventors seized upon the steering wheel as an ideal method of controlling a vehicle. (They were borrowing from the marine world, we presume.) But it wasn’t long until creative variations on the theme began to appear—square, rectangular, ovoid shapes. None of them ever caught on, but these unusual forms continue to appear occasionally to this day. Here are just a few examples.
The world of battery electric vehicles might seem like black magic. Electricity turns into motion with the help of controllers and inverters. However, as John Kelly from the WeberAuto YouTube channel explains, EV's are sometimes mechanically simple. Well, at least that's the case for the Chevrolet Bolt. Kelly tackles the Bolt EV’s brilliantly simple drivetrain in the latest video for his WeberAuto YouTube channel.
Electric cars are the future just because they will eventually prove much simpler to build and maintain. Gas motors with their cam shafts and transmissions are such a throw back to an earlier era of pre computers. It's so much easier to manipulate a 3 phase sine wave than have a series of gears and cam shafts to manipulate a gas motor.
The rarest of the rare. That's what's so special about the particular Corvair depicted in this Chevrolet-issued public relations photograph. When the photo was taken, however, it was just a typical production-line image of a new car being assembled. But due to early production changes, modifications were made to the Corvair shortly after it was released to the public that rendered early production models—as this Cascade Green sedan—much sought-after. And it's all because of those three little slots on the front valance.
Jaguar Land Rover is apparently very protective of its Terrain Response system, a patented technology that alters the behavior of its cars when driving on pavement, grass, gravel, snow, mud, sand, and rocks. The automaker is so protective, in fact, that it has laid down a challenge to several brands under the Volkswagen umbrella to assert that patent, requesting to block U.S. imports of Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, and VW SUVs which JLR says are using its technology without permission.