Eideard

Fleets could have 200,000 electric vehicles in service by 2015, generating the volume needed to bring down prices and make EVs broadly practical, according to a new report released by the Electrification Coalition, a Washington, DC, group created in 2009 to promote development of electric-drive vehicles.

FedEx expects to see EV costs “overtake internal combustion light-duty vehicles in the 2015 to 2016 timeframe,” said FedEx chairman Fredrick Smith at a press conference called to release the coalition’s “Fleet Electrification Roadmap.” With advances in battery technology promising to cut initial capital costs for EVs, fleet operating characteristics could offer “per-mile costs that are 70% to 80% less than current [internal combustion vehicle] costs,” Smith said.

Looking at the 250-million personal vehicles in the U.S., Smith pointed out that the infrastructure for recharging EVs “at home or in parking lots” is already largely in place and that “the vast majority of fuel that would be used is already being produced and dissipated at night right now.”

Acknowledging GE’s announcement that it would purchase 25,000 EVs for fleet operations, Smith said the fleet roadmap outlined by the coalition “has real potential to move [conversion to EVs] much faster…”

“It is important to consider all of the applications where electric drive technology makes sense, and what we have found is that the case is very strong for a number of fleet applications over the next five years,” said Smith. “Fleet electrification alone will not solve our pressing energy-security challenges, but by bringing costs down, it will provide a critical boost to the consumer electric vehicle market.”

I saw Smith being interviewed about this, yesterday, on Bloomberg TV. Though FedEx already has halved their operating costs in urban markets by switching to diesel hybrids, they’re now ready to move those vehicles out into suburban markets – and replace them with pure electric-drive trucks.

Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert — it certainly was a long way to go without getting lost.

Two driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo’s journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.

The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.

The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.

“We didn’t know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we would have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy drivers or regular drivers, so we encountered the lot,” said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.

Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times — when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations.

Modern-day adventures in travel. Must have been a fun trip for the participating engineers.

I couldn’t find a photo of the incident; but, one of the best was a Moscow policeman who tried to give a “driver” a ticket – and found no one in the front seat.

World’s leading example of bunker architecture

The largest U.S. embassy in the world has very large problems keeping track of vehicles and millions of dollars of other equipment, from cell phones to medical supplies, according to a new State Department Inspector General’s report…

One glaring problem is tracking down vehicles or even knowing how many the embassy needs, according to the report. There are 1,168 standard and armored vehicles assigned to the embassy but 159 are unaccounted for and an additional 282 don’t show up on the official database.

“Motor pool personnel have struggled to ascertain the owners and users of these vehicles to properly inventory them,” the report says. “Denying fuel and maintenance to vehicles until they are accounted for may solve this issue.”

The inspector general warns too little oversight of medical supplies, especially of controlled substances, such as morphine and oxycodone, risks “a significant vulnerability for misuse and fraud.”

Millions of dollars of communications gear are improperly tracked, according to the audit. Cell phones that are unassigned still rack up monthly charges, wasting an estimated $286,000 dollars a year.

“Some assigned phones are underused or unused, and extensive charges for overseas calls have been associated with both assigned and unassigned phones,” the report says. The investigators calculated “the embassy could save more than $740,000 by disconnecting unassigned and underused phone lines and curtailing international calls…”

In other words, Embassy Baghdad is still being run like Congress. We get to pay for both.

If only the other manufacturers of diesel-powered vehicles had their act together as well as Audi, we’d be in a better situation here in the United States.

Diesel is cleaner, diesel is cheaper. We’d be saving money as families and as a nation. We’d lower our dependency on foreign oil – because there’s hardly anything easier and cheaper to produce than biodiesel. Yet, new biodiesel refineries are closing because of underutilization.

If you know anyone with a diesel-powered vehicle – who has tried biodiesel – they’ll tell you their critter ran better and cleaner with the veggie product than the stuff refined from petroleum.

Yet, almost every manufacturer who sells a diesel-powered car or small truck somewhere else in the world – is afraid to market it in the United States. Something else we can thank General Motors for – the crap diesel cars they sold decades ago ruined the market for the fearful.

Of course, like Toyota did with the hybrid, manufacturers like Audi [and Volkswagen] have the smarts and cojones to get the jump on everyone else and establish themselves as the source for clean, powerful, economical diesel-power ahead of all the others who could be doing the same.

Like Toyota, Honda, GM’s Opel, Ford – all candyass manufacturers with diesel cars and small pickups they could be selling here.

Colorado legislators gave initial approval to a bill requiring slowpoke drivers to pull over and let faster vehicles pass.

The House gave its preliminary approval to the measure, which requires slow-moving vehicles to pull over to the side of the road whenever five or more cars are lined up behind them.

The Denver Post said the proposal has been controversial in rural areas where representatives say it could be dangerous to pull tractors hauling chemical tanks or trucks loaded with hay off the road.

The bill has an amendment attached that would exempt farm vehicles from the law.

Of course, the bill is a laugher. You’d have to get a few county sheriffs willing to waste the time pulling over and ticketing someone who’s violating the ordnance.

Don’t hold your breath!