The Toyota Prius is one of the cars targeted by the new regulations.

Late last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that it will now begin assessing new regulations for green cars, whose quiet engines may pose a danger to unaware pedestrians. This is the agency’s first major step towards implementing the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, which requires automobile manufactures to equip new electric and hybrid vehicles with sound systems that alert pedestrians of the approaching machines.

But the move has come under fire by some green car advocates, who stress a lack of studies showing that such warning systems would actually make the streets safer for pedestrians:

The difficulty is that there’s simply not enough data on actual pedestrian injuries and deaths attributable to quieter cars. Part of that reflects a lack of categories to reflect such a problem, and the low incidence of pedestrian injuries in general.

[A] 2009 NHTSA report highlighted its own weaknesses: It was based on data from only 12 states (the ones that record Vehicle Identification Numbers) and limited to injuries from 2000, when hybrids first entered the U.S. market. The result: a small, possibly non-representative sample set.

Read more at Green Car Reports. Listen to sample “noisemakers” at Scientific American.

Image: Flickr/M 93

At least now we know what the title of President Obama‘s self-help book will be: “Winning the future.”

Last night, in the third State of the Union Address of Obama’s presidency, he began by extolling the need for the country to compete with other rising nations for the jobs of the future (and using some version of his new catchphrase multiple times). The President hit many notes that have science and technology advocates smiling this morning, including his call to turn around yesterday’s sobering statistics about the lack of science proficiency of American students.

The world has changed, Obama told Congress, and the US will only retain its competitive edge over nations like China and India if it invests in a skilled workforce and cutting-edge science and technology: “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” [New Scientist]

Obama went on to urge parents to get their kids’ priorities straight, and uttered the line that may have tickled science geeks the most:

We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.

The President also called for more funding for biomedical, renewable energy, and other research to launch a wave of innovation. Obama deemed this our “Sputnik moment,” comparing it to the moment in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite and the U.S. raced to catch up to and then surpass Soviet space science.

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Twenty miles outside of Abu Dhabi, in the scorching desert of the United Arab Emirates, the new planned city of Masdar is nearly ready for its close-up. This weekend The New York Times reported from the experimental zero-carbon closed community, funded by stacks of oil money, which is now prepared to take on its first inhabitants. The urban design is simultaneously sleek and unsettling, raising the questions: Is this what the city of the future will look like, and would that be a good thing?

Masdar’s main designer, Norman Foster, hits all the notes that make green ears perk up: excluding any carbon-based energy sources, using simplified “sustainable” architecture, and learning from the lessons of the past, even going back as far as centuries-old desert settlements.

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The goal: 80 days, 18,000 miles, no emissions.

Yesterday, the Zero Race electric car world tour began in front of the United Nations Palace in Geneva, Switzerland. Four teams–from Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea–won’t actually race one another to cross a finish line. Instead, spectators and experts will determine the winner based on reliability, energy efficiency, safety, design, and practicality, as the tour is meant to show the feasibility of electric vehicles.

The race organizer Louis Palmer won the European Solar Prize after driving a solar-powered vehicle around the world in 2008. He says in a press release that the “race” is against climate change and disappearing fuel.

“Petrol is running out, and the climate crisis is coming… and we are all running against time.” [Zero Race]

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What looks like a giant helmet, can potentially zip through congested city streets, has eco-friendly bona fides, and can “talk” with other vehicles on the road? It’s the new 2-person EN-V, an “Electric Networked Vehicle” from GM–a concept car that the company hopes will change the way people in crowded cities drive in the future.

GM unveiled several models of the helmet-shaped concept vehicle in Shanghai. The 2-wheeled vehicles, built in collaboration with Segway and GM’s Chinese partner S.A.I.C., are powered by electric motors and can travel up to 25 miles on a single charge. The two-seater EN-V is also a third of the length of a regular car at 1.5 meters [about 5 feet]. It will be equipped with wireless communication and GPS-based navigation that will help it avoid accidents and pick the fastest routes based on real-time traffic conditions, GM says [The Wall Street Journal]. A driver could either control the car manually or could put it into the more relaxing autonomous mode.

Says GM executive Kevin Wale: “It provides an ideal solution for urban mobility that enables future driving to be free from petroleum and emissions, free from congestion and accidents, and more fun and fashionable than ever before” [The New York Times].

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Stanford University researchers think they’ve stumbled upon a way to transform ordinary sheets of office paper into batteries and superconductors. By painting a carbon nanotube ink, which can collect electric charge, on plain copier paper, and then dipping the coated paper into a lithium ion solution and an electrolyte, they can create a current and store it within the paper battery.

The scientists had previously experimented with making batteries using a similar process of painting nanomaterial ink onto a thin layer of plastic. But in an unexpected twist, they found that pores in paper fibers make it hold the ink better than plastic, for a more durable battery [The New York Times]. The research team, led by Yi Cui, found that you can even crumple up the paper batteries or soak them in acid, and they’ll still work just fine. They hope their technology, which was reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can usher in a new era of lightweight, low-cost batteries.

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In a move that may give electric cars a literal and figurative boost forward, five battery-recharging stations have been established on California’s Highway 101, which will give certain electric cars enough juice to drive all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles with one less-than-one-hour stop to recharge. But there’s a catch: At the moment, only Tesla Roadsters can charge at the stations [The New York Times].

One of the biggest concerns regarding all-electric cars is the limited driving range provided by a fully charged battery. The Tesla Roadster, for example, can go about 250 miles before pooping out, inspiring the new term “range anxiety”–the fear of running out of juice far from your home recharging station. This project is meant to demonstrate that ubiquitous availability of fast-charging stations could make that point moot [The New York Times].

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The Department of Energy is handing out nearly $8 billion in loans today, and $465 million of the funds will go to Tesla Motors to produce its Model S electric sedan, the company’s first attempt at a mass-market car. The company already manufactures the Roadster, a high-performance electric sports car. Nissan and Ford Motor Company will receive the other loans; they’ll get $1.6 billion and $5.9 billion, respectively, to help produce fuel-efficient cars.

Nissan will use the funds updating a plant in Tennessee to produce the company’s upcoming electric sedan, and Ford’s loan will help expedite production of cars that go farther on less fuel. Tesla was perhaps the wild card in the funding equation because it is a small startup. The company has delivered slightly more than 500 Roadsters to customers, and the government loan will help pay for a Southern California manufacturing plant for the Model S sedan, due in 2011. A second plant in the Bay Area will make battery packs and electric drivetrains [The New York Times].

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The electric car under development at General Motors has been heralded as a potential savior of both the American car industry and the environment, but in aftermath of the automaker’s bankruptcy filing many questions are being raised about the Chevy Volt’s future. GM executives swear that the cutting edge vehicle is still on track to reach auto dealerships late next year: GM executive Jon Lauckner says that the bankruptcy filing “has no bearing on the Volt, quite frankly…. We’re not anticipating any changes. November 2010 remains our date with destiny” [Wired.com]. Lauckner added that engineers have already begun assembly of the pre-production Volts that will be used to test handling and durability, and for crash tests. But some outside experts wonder whether bankruptcy courts will permit the expensive Volt program to continue.

The Volt could revolutionize driving for many commuters, allowing them to cruise to and from work without ever stopping by a gas station to fill up. Different than traditional hybrid or plug-in hybrid vehicles, the Volt can go 40 miles on a single charge on the electric engine and then a smaller, gasoline-powered combustion engine generates electricity for the motor, acting as a range extender [GreenBiz.com]. GM has said that the Volt should be able to drive 400 miles on a full charge and a full tank. The car is expected to sell for around $40,000.

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The dream of hydrogen fuel cell cars has just been put back in the garage. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced yesterday that his department is cutting all funding for hydrogen car research, saying that it won’t be a feasible technology anytime soon. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said [CNET]. While innovative new cars are a high priority, Chu declared that his department will focus on efforts that may pay off sooner, like plug-in electric cars.

Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells have been a staple of clean energy dreams, as they’d produce only a trickle of water as a waste product, instead of sooty exhaust and carbon dioxide gas. The retreat from cars powered by fuel cells counters Mr. Bush’s prediction in 2003 that “the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.” The Energy Department will continue to pay for research into stationary fuel cells, which Dr. Chu said could be used like batteries on the power grid and do not require compact storage of hydrogen [The New York Times].

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The fast growing plant switchgrass has been heralded as the next generation of biofuel stock: Unlike fertilizer-dependent corn, researchers say it’s highly efficient to grow the grass and process it into ethanol. But a new study suggests that there’s an even better use for switchgrass and other plants. Rather than turning them into ethanol to fill the gas tanks of cars, plants should be burned in power plants to generate “bioelectricity,” which can power electric cars.

Using a sophisticated computer analysis, researchers found that a small sport utility vehicle could do 9,000 highway miles (14,484 km) on the energy produced from an acre of switchgrass converted into ethanol. But converting that biomass into electricity allowed a battery-powered SUV to get 14,000 miles (22,531 km) on the highway…. “One of the driving factors that lead to this result is that the electric motor is much more efficient than the internal combustion engine,” said the lead author of the study, Elliott Campbell [Reuters].

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General Motors and Segway have unveiled the prototype of their new collaborative effort: a tiny electric vehicle that the companies say could, maybe, one day, revolutionize urban transportation. The two-seated, two-wheeled pod is called PUMA, which stands for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility. G.M. executive Larry Burns says the PUMA is part of the company’s effort to remake itself as a purveyor of fuel-efficient vehicles. If Hummer took GM to the large-vehicle extreme, Burns said, the PUMA takes GM to the other [AP].

The companies will show off the PUMA at the New York International Auto Show this week, but say there’s a lot of work to be done before it will show up on city streets. “This is a prototype, not a product,” said [James] Norrod of Segway. “We have not made a decision to commercialize it” [The New York Times blog]. But if all goes well, the PUMA could eventually be sold for between one-fourth and one-third the price of a traditional car, G.M. executives say.

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The Silicon Valley startup that’s seeking to revolutionize the automobile industry has unveiled the prototype for its all-electric sedan, which the company, Tesla Motors, describes as the first mass market all-electric car. But the cars won’t be rolling off the assembly line any time soon–because the company hasn’t built the assembly lines yet. Tesla couldn’t build a factory for the sedan, called the Model S, until it rounded up more money, which became more difficult over the last year as the economic climate worsened.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, says he hopes the first cars will be delivered to customers in 2011. The company plans to produce 20,000 cars a year. However, Tesla has yet to secure finance for the project. It says it is confident of negotiating a $350 million US government loan from the $25 billion bailout package approved by the Department of Energy last year. The government fund is intended primarily to help struggling carmakers to make more fuel-efficient cars [Times Online].

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