“Whatever Can Be Done Will Be Done”

Thomas Friedman’s column today talks about the concept of “mobility miles,” a pilot model for electric cars being piloted by Shai Agassi’s Better Place.  Essentially, the concept works like this:  You lease a car, and pay a subscription to Better Place to take advantage of their charging stations (for trips less than 100 miles) and battery exchange stations (for trips greater than 100 miles).  The cost for subscription averages 6 cents per mile, or about half the cost of gasoline.  The system is currently in pilot stages in Israel, Denmark, Australia and Hawaii.

Friedman’s main conceit in the column is that the Big 3 are currently reacting like record executives investing in CDs on the eve of the iPod’s invention (GM declined to be a part of Better Place’s pilots)– that they are bypassing innovation, and will thus be passed by when Better Place and companies of its ilk demonstrate that they have a sustainable — in all definitions of the word — business model.

The most shocking revelation that Friedman makes in the column further underscores how entrenched Detroit’s business model has really been:

Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008.

Contrast the narrow focus of Detroit with the recent moves of T. Boone Pickens, the oilman who has recently started financing wind farms, calling wind “the next gusher.”

Michelin with a breakthrough in the plug-in Electric Car field

Hattip to Treehugger:

Well-known tire company Michelin is launching a new breakthrough in electric car technology- the “Active Wheel“

By placing the motor in the wheel, Michelin is making electric cars 70% more efficient in cities than their combustion-engine counterparts.  The wheel is being released in Europe as the drivetrain for the Heuliez Will, a modified version of the ubiquitous-in-Europe Opel Agila wagon.  The Will goes public for the 2011 model year, and is available for fleet buyers in 2010.

Despite the fact that the wheels, with motors, weight 90 pounds apiece, the Will weighs just under a ton, and 165 pounds less than its Opel cousin.

The Digestible Friedman

Tom Friedman’s interview with the Huffington Post does an excellent job distilling the arguments for massive investment in green tech.  This interview, taken together Van Jones’s excellent The Green Collar Economy lay out the immediate need for what Friedman terms “overwhelming force” in moving our energy economy away from fossil fuels.  Particularly trenchant is Friedman’s first response:

With oil or coal, no one ever said there had to be a payoff you had to pay it back in five years, but with something green, “What’s the payback? What’s the payback on that Prius?”

Well. What’s the payback on your Hummer?

The argument against massive investment in green-tech is often an elaborate version of “it’s way too far off, and our infrastructure isn’t ready for it.”   However, when JFK said we were going to the moon, our space program was in a similar state.  But the scientific community rallied and got it done.  Technologies like fuel cells and electric vehicles have been paid lip service in States of the Union addresses for decades now, but if we’re serious about energy independence, we need to make it reality now.

Neil Young turns a gas-guzzler into a Green Dream

In the Cars section in today’s Times is the story of singer/songwriter/friend of Crosby, Stills & Nash Neil Young’s project to turn a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a zero-emissions vehicle as part of Progressive Insurance’s Automotive X Prize, a national competition to create high-milage, low-pollution, production model cars.  The idea is to one-up normal engineering-class competitions that create one-off vehicles and create a competition that demonstrates the long-term use of alternative fuel sources

Young currently drives a converted Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil, and the LincVolt, as the re-purposed Lincoln is called,  will run on a combination of natural gas and electric batteries, capable of running 1,000 miles to the tank, and uses a smaller tank than most  natural gas vehicles.

The project is intriguing because it takes a notorious gas-guzzler, and re-uses it to demonstrate the capabilities of existing technologies– the car’s engine is a rotary motor, rather than classic piston-powered internal comustion engine;  as one member of Young’s team claims, “if we can go this with such a heavy car [the Lincoln is 5,000 pounds], imagine what we can do with a smaller car.”

UPDATE: InformationWeek recaps an appearance Young made with the LincVolt at a conference hosted by tech-Glengarry company SalesForce.  The article better describes the hybrid-drive system.