Eideard

Toyota’s compact Aquion Prius due here in the US in early 2012
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Automakers Toyota and BMW on Thursday struck a partnership to share eco-friendly technologies, including in the joint development of lithium-ion batteries for next-generation electric cars.

BMW X3 Crossover diesel

Under the deal, the German automaker will also provide diesel engines for Toyota as the Japanese auto giant looks to boost sales in Europe, where more than half of passenger cars are diesel powered. Toyota has struggled to boost its European market share with its gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, despite its leading position in the low-emission technology.

Meanwhile, the pair will share development costs for batteries for electric cars as part of plans to roll out battery-powered vehicles…

Their pact comes after Toyota struck a deal in August to develop hybrid-vehicle systems with US-based Ford, while BMW inked a deal with France’s PSA Peugeot Citroen Group to jointly develop hybrid systems for subcompacts.

There is no denying that conversion to radical new energy sources for vehicle propulsion is expensive. Even if you’re an early leader like Toyota in hybrid tech.

Markets are funny things and sometimes consumers can only digest one change at a time.

Ford Fusion Hybrid

The General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees two-thirds of the 600,000-plus vehicles in the U.S. government’s fleet, is looking to save millions of dollars per year at the pump by bolstering its use of fuel-efficient vehicles. The 35,000 vehicles ordered by the GSA so far in 2011 consume 21 percent less fuel than the vehicles they replaced, according to the agency. The average miles-per-gallon rating of the U.S. government’s fleet of vehicles now stands at 23.4, up from 19.1 in 2010.

The Detroit Three are expected to reap most of the benefits of the government’s purchases. GSA administrator, Martha Johnson, says that, “We will be depending on innovative technologies and products coming out of Detroit to help us achieve these goals, and I am confident that American automakers will continue to rise to the challenge…”

This year, approximately 22,000 of the 35,000 vehicles ordered by GSA were advanced technology vehicles (i.e., electric vehicles, hybrids, flex-fuel capable automobiles and plug-in hybrids). Over the past two years, the government has more than doubled the number of hybrids in its 600,000-plus vehicle fleet.

Of course, we could elect a Republican government and move the fleet back to Hummers and Buicks.

Arabidopsis clones

Plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds. The research by UC Davis plant scientists and their international collaborators…is a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation.

Most successful crop varieties are hybrids, said Simon Chan, assistant professor of plant biology at UC Davis and an author of the paper. But when hybrids go through sexual reproduction, their traits, such as fruit size or frost resistance, get scrambled and may be lost.

“We’re trying to make a hybrid that breeds true,” Chan said, so that plants grown from the seed would be genetically identical to one parent.

Some plants, especially fruit trees, can be cloned from cuttings, but this approach is impractical for most crops. Other plants, especially weeds such as hawkweed and dandelions, can produce true seeds that are clones of themselves without sexual reproduction — a still poorly understood process called apomixis.

The new discovery gets to the same result as apomixis, although by a different route, Chan said…

Maruthachalam Ravi described the result as a step on the way toward artificial apomixis. The team hopes to produce crop plants, such as lettuce and tomato, that can fertilize themselves and produce clonal seeds. Applications for provisional patents on the work have been filed.

The work was principally funded by the National Science Foundation. You know, one of those socialist organizations the Republicans and the KoolAid Party wish to destroy.

RTFA for the details of how researchers proceeded. This could be a stellar result benefitting agriculture worldwide.

A Purdue University researcher has found a sort of fountain of youth for tomatoes that extends their shelf life by about a week.

Avtar Handa, a professor of horticulture, found that adding a yeast gene increases production of a compound that slows aging and delays microbial decay in tomatoes. Handa said the results…likely would transfer to most fruits.

“We can inhibit the aging of plants and extend the shelf life of fruits by an additional week for tomatoes,” Handa said. “This is basic fundamental knowledge that can be applied to other fruits.”

The organic compound spermidine is a polyamine and is found in all living cells. Polyamines’ functions aren’t yet fully understood. Handa and Autar Mattoo, a research plant physiologist…and collaborator in the research, had shown earlier that polyamines such as spermidine and spermine enhance nutritional and processing quality of tomato fruits.

“At least a few hundred genes are influenced by polyamines, maybe more,” Mattoo said. “We see that spermidine is important in reducing aging. It will be interesting to discover what other roles it can have.”

Savithri Nambeesan, who was a graduate student in Handa’s laboratory, introduced the yeast spermidine synthase gene, which led to increased production of spermidine in the tomatoes. Fully ripe tomatoes from those plants lasted about eight days longer before showing signs of shriveling compared with non-transgenic plants. Decay and rot symptoms associated with fungi were delayed by about three days…

“Shelf life is a major problem for any produce in the world, especially in countries such as in Southeast Asia and Africa that cannot afford controlled-environment storage,” Mattoo said.

Maybe this is what’s keeping Ozzie on stage so long?

Fundamentalists with 14th Century minds feared Burpee’s hybridization techniques when they came along. Feared the same disasters – cripes, even made the same monster movies to hustle those fears.

Sony, which currently manufactures compact lithium-ion batteries, will spend 100 billion yen in the next few years to set up a high-volume production system for high-capacity batteries, according to Sony Executive Deputy President Hiroshi Yoshioka.

There have been several deals between the electronic and automobile industries in producing high-capacity lithium-ion batteries — on which EVs depend for power — such as that between Panasonic and Toyota. With Sony one of the last major electronics corporations to join the race, all eyes are on who will become its partner.

Sony currently manufactures 41 million compact lithium-ion batteries for laptop computers and cell phones every month at six factories in Japan and abroad. Last August, it spent 40 billion yen to reinforce its production capacity at two domestic plants, with plans to increase production to 74 million batteries a month by the end of October. Plans for increased production were halted, however, when business performance rapidly declined after the Lehman Shock last fall.

However, “the world economy is on its way to recovery,” according to Yoshioka, leading Sony to decide not only to reinstate the investment plans that had been put on hold, but also to begin manufacturing high-capacity lithium-ion batteries, which are used for storage batteries in EVs and solar power generators, hoping to help haul itself out of its rut…

Asked about potential partners in the automobile industry, Yoshioka seemed confident that options were still available, indicating that Sony is hoping to shop its prototypes to various car manufacturers. “The collaboration of electronics and automobile companies over lithium-ion battery production for EVs is still a relatively new phenomenon,” he said. “And while we are considered late in entering the market, we still have plenty of chances to have our case heard.”

I understand that by 2012 they will consider researching these new-fangled electric wristwatches.

These are the guys passing the laws

For decades, automakers have been on a quest to make cars quieter: an auto that purrs, and glides almost silently in traffic.

They have finally succeeded. Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren’t noisy enough.

So safety experts, worried that hybrids pose a threat if pedestrians, children and others can’t hear them approaching, want automakers to supply some digitally enhanced vroom. Indeed, just as cellphones have ring tones, “car tones” may not be far behind — an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit.

“One possibility is choosing your own noise,” said Nathalie Bauters, a spokeswoman for BMW’s Mini division, who added that such technology could be added to one of BMW’s electric vehicles in the future.

The notion that battery E.V.’s and plug-in hybrids might be too quiet has gained backing in Congress, among federal regulators and on the Internet. The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, introduced early this year, would require a federal safety standard to protect pedestrians from ultra-quiet cars.

Rolls-Royce used to advertise that “When one of our cars passes by the only sound you hear is from the tyres – because we don’t make tyres.”

On the other – I admit I already have stepped out in front of a Lexus RX400h in a supermarket parking lot. Scared the bejeebus out of myself. The only noise was the sound of his tyres. And he was too polite to blow the damned horn.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Less than three years: that’s the wait time left for a plug-in hybrid from Toyota at commercial scale, according to reports this weekend from Japan’s Nikkei. The news that Toyota plans to start churning out at least 20,000 to 30,000 plug-in hybrids in 2012 comes just one month after the company first detailed plans to lease plug-in hybrids based on the latest Prius model with lithium-ion batteries.

Toyota’s plans to move forward with mass production of its plug-in hybrid vehicle within the next few years — at a price comparable to Mitsubishi’s planned electric vehicle, according to the Nikkei’s sources — represents another major milestone for a technology that’s widely seen as the future of electric car batteries…

Battery makers also may face a changing competitive landscape as a result of Toyota’s plug-in hybrid ambitions. As we noted last month, the plug-in hybrid lease program announced in June marked the first time that Toyota is using lithium-ion batteries (as opposed to nickel-metal hydride) for propulsion in one of its vehicles. Mass deployment of lithium-ion batteries (developed and manufactured by Toyota’s joint venture with Panasonic, Reuters reports) in the upcoming plug-in model — and in the all-electric Toyota FT-EV subcompact also slated to launch by 2012 — could mean a massive competitor, but potentially also new opportunities.

Those opportunities could result from Toyota’s lithium-ion and plug-in plays increasing pressure on competing automakers to turn to startups. The idea would be to secure a quick fix for technology in an attempt to speed plug-in models to market (something Daimler described as part of the reasoning for its investment in Tesla Motors). On the other hand, with mass-scale production, ramped-up battery production from Toyota’s joint ventures with both Panasonic and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (which now makes the nickel-metal hydride batteries for the regular hybrid Prius and aims to start out capacity for lithium-ion batteries this year) could present tough competition for smaller startups without the same manufacturing capacity or resources.

Interesting, useful news from the widespread perspectives of motorhead – and investor – in my own household. Earth2Tech is a source I check on a daily basis. All the GigaOm sites are productive and interesting to geek investors. If I wasn’t such a cheapskate, I’d sub to GigaOm Pro.

BTW – most of the green geeks are being sucker-punched by this announcement just like Honda was by the 2009 Priuses. If you believe the publicized price and range, electric or otherwise, is cast in stone – go invest your hard-earned dollars in the Chevy Volt. Har!

Their meat will not be reaching the Sunday lunch table any time soon and nobody would dare get close enough to try to milk them. But a herd of “super cows” descended from animals bred in Nazi Germany is making an impressive sight on a farm in the south-west of England.

The “Heck” cattle were designed by brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck in an attempt to recreate the extinct European wild ox, the aurochs, an important beast in German mythology.

Only a few survived after the second world war, but farmer and conservationist Derek Gow has imported 13 of the animals from Belgium to Broadwoodwidger, on the Devon-Cornwall border, where they have joined a growing collection of beavers, polecats and water voles.

Rather than allowing his Heck cattle to be hunted, as some of the Nazi leaders wanted to do, Gow will be offering photographers the chance to take pictures of the animals.

He also hopes to begin his own breeding programme because he believes the Heck cattle may one day have an important conservation role to play, taking the place of the aurochs in the cycle of life.

One of the pleasant results of throwing cows off the bosque of the Santa Fe River – along with the reintroduction of willows and cottonwoods – many varieties of birds, especially raptors have returned as have beavers. And they did it on their own.

All that’s been required from the community of La Cieneguilla is a bit of stronger fencing for those of us living alongside the river bosque. The beavers almost took out one of our apricot trees.

Everyone in business knows that selling on price is a downward slope to non-profitability, but with profit out of reach for many automakers these days, ignoring price-oriented marketing is pure folly.

In this respect, Toyota appears to be in a conundrum. Its Prius, the darling of eco-minded consumers everywhere and by far the best selling hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) anywhere in the world, finds itself a bit overpriced now that Honda has shown up with its similarly styled and configured, albeit smaller sized Insight. Starting price for the Insight, when it goes on sale globally on April 22, Earth Day not coincidentally, will be a mere $19,800 in the US. That’s $2,200, or about 10-percent less, than the US-market Prius.

Rather than reduce the price of its already value-packed Prius, Toyota may have another solution, or so says industry insider Automotive News. The Detroit-based news service is reporting that Toyota is planning a Yaris hybrid to undercut Honda’s newest HEV, information garnered from Toyota’s chief engineer Akihiko Otsuka.

See a pattern here? Obviously prices won’t drop by 10-percent with every new model, as has been the case since the hybrid’s inception, but like electronics technology, hybrid technology is maturing, build processes are becoming more streamlined and sales numbers are increasing, allowing for better value to the consumer and more profit to the manufacturer, theoretically, at least…

The question that remains isn’t whether or not the Yaris hybrid will do battle against the upcoming Insight, as they’re two HEVs targeting very different market segments, but rather at what price point the new Yaris HEV will go out the door for when it takes on Honda’s upcoming Fit hybrid, a model that Honda CEO Takeo Fukui announced during his mid-year address in Tokyo, May of last year, when also announcing the upcoming CR-Z sports coupe and a small hatchback HEV we now know of as the Insight.

I like it, I like it. Competition producing better product, more affordable vehicles for consumers. Too bad there isn’t much evidence for American auto manufacturers getting into the scrap – at a competitive level.

AT&T will spend up to $350 million over five years to buy more than 8,000 Ford Motor Co. vans and trucks, then convert them to run on compressed natural gas.

It is the largest commitment by a U.S. corporation to vehicles using alternative fuels, the phone company said.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but burning it produces 25 percent less carbon emissions than using gasoline, AT&T said. Compared with oil, the U.S. produces a greater proportion of the natural gas it uses.

The company said it will spend the money over five years. While AT&T will buy the chassis from Ford, it has not yet selected a vendor to perform the conversion to natural gas.

The vehicles will be used by technicians who perform installations and maintain the telecommunications network. The company will build 40 natural-gas filling stations to keep them rolling.

AT&T will also spend $215 million over 10 years to replace 7,100 passenger cars with hybrids, and eventually cars powered by other fuel sources, it said.

When they pass through Santa Fe, we already have a couple of CNG filling stations waiting for them.