Blue Earth Blog

Brett,

Thanks for the announcement.

Should my wife and I buy a Nissan Leaf?

Why isn't Aptera selling cars?

I want electric, but still a bit nervous.

CL — Asked by Anonymous

The Nissan Leaf is an amazing electric vehicle built by a large trusted auto manufacturer. They really pulled out all the stops to make this a reliable and technically cutting edge car.

I especially like the work they have done integrating charging with mapping/route planning via GPS. This makes it very easy to plan your day so you can drive more than the 100-mile range. Depending on your habits, you’ll probably use this for all your city driving, and then you’ll still need to own or rent a gasoline powered car to go on long trips.

I think these cars will really hold their value, so even if you try it out on lease for 3 years at only $350 per month, you can always just hand it back in and move on.

The car is slightly funky looking because the engineers were going for the utility of a large internal storage capacity, and reduced wind drag/noise.

My friend Paul Scott, a long time EV driver and advocate (see the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?) will be selling the Leaf in Southern California out of Santa Monica Nissan. Check out his blog post about it here.

The Aptera project got bogged down with too many design changes, and my own opinion is that they will never deliver production cars. They have missed their window to be first with a really clever looking car, and now they will be relegated to the back seat so to speak.

Aptera

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We can cut emissions and health care costs while improving productivity if more people would ride bicycles.

Make sure your local government continues to promote sustainable transportation by adding bikeways and continuing to encourage citizens to walk and ride.

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Is Your Airline Fuel Efficient?

Airlines with higher fuel efficiency are financially more stable by being less affected by oil price hikes. Also, the more fuel efficient they are, the less fuel they have to haul around, which further improves efficiency. We, the flying public, also benefit from lower pollution levels from these airlines.

The two best airlines are Alaska Air and JetBlue followed closely by Continental and Southwest. They can fly you about 75 miles per gallon of fuel. The worst airlines are United and Delta, since they run only about 60 miles per gallon per passenger.

Next time you fly, give special consideration to JetBlue and Alaska Airlines. Your family’s lungs and your pocketbook will benefit in the long run.

For more information, check out this Wall Street Journal article.

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I see the recent rise of Tesla Motors as historically significant.

One of the most striking indicators that clean tech is approaching its tipping point is Tesla’s (TSLA) recent public offering. This IPO was one of the few this year in which the offering price was bumped up during road shows. It is miraculous for this to happen against the backdrop of a weak market, and the pall hanging over the US automotive business. In fact, the last company to go public making automobiles was Ford in 1956. After all, Tesla has lost money, sells only one product to the public (the Tesla Roadster), and has little experience manufacturing vehicles in significant quantities after selling only about 1,000 Roadsters around the world. So, why are investors bidding up the price for Tesla’s stock?

For one thing, Toyota invested $50 million in the company a few months ago and just announced Tesla will be supplying drive trains and batteries on a future Rav4 EV. Also, Daimler and Tesla have a development contract that has Tesla making battery packs and drive trains for Daimler’s electric car called Smart for Two, due for release next year in Europe. Certainly there is a trend here. Tesla is inspiring confidence that it can become dominant in a new era of personal electric transportation. Yet, Tesla also seems to be demonstrating the branding potential not only of a clean sexy car, but of the entire clean tech movement: I would wager that the general public is eager to buy the principle of smarter as well as cleaner.

Whether this startup becomes the Edsel of electric cars or more akin to the Apple of computing really doesn’t matter. Tesla is a harbinger of how clean technology will be commonplace in a future that forces naysayers to give up trying to stymie the march of progress.

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Subsidizing Electric Vehicles?

Should the government subsidize electric vehicles? I say YES, at least in the short term.

In my opinion, government should not subsidize any business venture for more than 5 years. The US government has been subsidizing the oil business for 80 years, which is obviously far too long. Not only do we subsidize Big Oil with direct credits, grants and reduced fees on drilling offshore, but we subsidize the oil industry by putting our military weight in places like the Middle East. We subsidize oil by giving companies who produce and distribute oil-related products a free ride by not paying for the health impacts of their business.

plugging in

Right now, you are getting a discount of about $1.50 on every gallon of gasoline because you do not pay for the true costs of transporting the fuel and burning it. No wonder renewables need subsidies to compete with heavily subsidized oil.

But hey, when you can get a discount, and push the cost off on someone else, even if it is your kids, in the form of a growing national debt, why not? — pardon the sarcasm, but this is basically what is happening when we remain oblivious about the true cost of fossil fuels.