Cash for Clunkers helped sell 26,000 cars in New Jersey
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
By Leslie Kwoh/The Star-Ledger
October 21, 2009, 3:24PM
The popular Cash for Clunkers government program helped local auto dealers sell nearly 26,000 cars in the months of July and August.
The Cash for Clunkers program generated nearly 26,000 new car sales in New Jersey, reaping $50 million in sales tax and motor vehicle fees for the state, according to industry data released today.
The Garden State ranked ninth out of 50 states under the government program, with consumer rebates totaling $103.4 million, according to the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers, which published the figures.
Overall, new car dealers across the country sold more than 690,000 vehicles, with rebates totaling $2.88 billion.
The program gave the state’s auto dealers a much-needed boost amid a severe downturn in the industry.
New car sales had plunged 30 percent in the first half of the year, compared with the same period last year, the coalition said. Cash for Clunkers appeared to bring some relief in July and August, reflected by a sales decrease of only 7.5 percent.
On average, consumers purchased new cars with a fuel economy of 24.9 miles per gallon, an improvement of 9 miles per gallon over their old vehicles, according to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration.
That means annual fuel consumption savings in New Jersey of nearly 7 million gallons a year, the automotive coalition said.
Tags: 000 cars in New Jersey, Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Clunkers helped sell 26, helped sell 26
Toyota to sell 500 2-seater Lexus sports cars from end of 2010
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
Toyota Motor Corp said Wednesday it will globally sell 500 units of its premium two-seater Lexus sports car—the LFA—from the end of next year as it looks to revive a flagging market by returning to the roots of exciting-to-drive cars. The sports car, powered by a 4.8-liter, V-10 engine, is expected to be priced around $375,000 and will be the most expensive car of the Lexus brand.
The roaring engine noise is one of the highlights of the sports car as the vehicle accelerates from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in just 3.7 seconds. It can achieve a maximum speed of 325 km per hour. ‘‘Toyota will continue to pursue what vehicles should be like so customers can have dreams and aspirations and further fall in love with cars,’’ Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a press preview of the Tokyo Motor Show. In addition to the LFA, Toyota also displayed at the event a lighter and fuel-efficient compact sports car concept—the FT-86—which draws its inspiration from the carmaker’s 1980s Corolla Levin sports coupe, the AE86.
Tags: Add new tag, Toyota to sell 500 2-seater Lexus sports cars from end of 2010
Toyota, Honda go separate ways on sports cars
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
By Chang-Ran Kim, Asia autos correspondent
CHIBA, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese archrivals Toyota Motor Corp and Honda Motor Co have just found something else to disagree about: sports cars.
At the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday, Toyota took the wraps off the Lexus LFA, a two-seater supercar with a roaring 4.8-liter V10 engine that can reach speeds of 325 km per hour (200 miles per hour) and go from zero to 100 kilometers kph (60 mph) in 3.7 seconds.
It’s a car that flies in the face of the automaker’s image as a pioneer of greener vehicles but one that Toyota’s new boss, Akio Toyoda, says is crucial for cars to remain a product that consumers can get excited about as motorization spreads to more corners of the world.
Toyota, the world’s biggest automaker, is planning to limit LFA production to 500 units, between December 2010 and December 2012, taking orders for the $375,000 car starting on Wednesday.
“It’s our mission as automakers to offer cars that possess the ‘fun’ spirit that should be at the base of any car,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at the unveiling, noting he had been involved in the LFA’s development from its early stages.
Ask his counterpart at Honda, though, and the LFA is old-fashioned. The future, Takanobu Ito says, is about clean, sustainable cars, and sports cars are no exception.
“Sure, there are folks who like that ‘vroom’ of the engine out of nostalgia,” Ito told Reuters earlier this month. “But those people are stuck in the past.”
Japan’s No.2 automaker had been preparing a successor model for its legendary NSX sports car, also with a V10 engine, but ditched those plans last year citing an urgent need to save money amid the economic downturn and the growing consumer shift toward greener cars.
“The era of V10 engines is gone,” said Ito, who betrayed no sense of regret over the canned project despite having designed the ground-breaking all-aluminum body on the NSX back in 1990.
ZERO-EMISSION SPORTS CAR?
Ito has other ideas for what a sports car for the next generation could look like: a zero-emission fuel-cell car like Honda’s FCX Clarity, which is currently on lease in limited numbers in the United States and Japan.
Honda has never billed the sleek, hydrogen-powered sedan as a sports car, but Ito said it had all the characteristics to qualify.
“It’s light because it’s not weighed down by a ton of batteries,” he said in a jab at the battery-powered electric sports machines built by U.S. start-up Tesla Motors.
“When you weigh a car down like that, it undermines the characteristics of a sports car.
“But if you have a light car like the FCX Clarity that’s powered by a motor, you get maximum torque from a zero start and acceleration is incredible. In a way, that’s a sports car.”
(Editing by Chris Gallagher)
Tags: Honda go separate ways on sports cars, Toyota
Japan’s Big Three Rev Up Green Cars
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU And MARIKO SANCHANTA
TOKYO—As the competition for greener cars ratchets up,Toyota Motor Corp. signaled its strong endorsement Wednesday of a new generation of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles that may serve as a successor to its best-selling Prius.
Toyota, along with rival Honda Motor Co., is pursuing plug-in hybrid technology. Such cars can be recharged via an electrical socket and drive many miles on electricity but have a gasoline engine that charges the battery when it runs out of power. Ordinary hybrids such as the Prius run on a combination of gasoline and internally generated electricity but can travel just a short distance on electricity only.
“The plug-in hybrid vehicle… can be driven without anxiety about how much power might remain in the battery or whether there may not be charging facilities nearby,” said new Toyota President Akio Toyoda at the Tokyo Motor Show, as he unveiled the Prius plug-in hybrid concept car. “We believe the plug-in hybrid is more than ready for a full-fledged adaptation in the near future.”
Also Wednesday, Toyota Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada said gasoline-electric hybrids would account for 30% of Toyota’s global sales by 2020. Within that group, the new generation of plug-in hybrids would claim a significant share, he said. He didn’t provide details but said plug-in electric hybrid cars should “spread the way the Prius has.”
Plug-in hybrids still face a high-cost hurdle, but Toyota says it will try to contain that by giving them a relatively short electric-only driving range, limiting the amount of expensive battery capacity they need. The plug-in Prius prototype can go only about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) on battery power, then would operate like a regular hybrid, it says.
The push comes as Japan’s Big Three—Toyota, Honda and Nissan Motor Co.—gamble on the future of vehicle technology. Missing the next big thing could mean years of development and heavy spending to catch up, which many rivals faced when the Prius unexpectedly caught on earlier in the decade.
All three car makers also demonstrated all-electric battery cars at the Tokyo show, which opened to the media Wednesday. They include Honda’s boxy EV-N, Toyota’s FT-EV II mini four-seater and Nissan’s skinny two-seated Land Glider.
But behind the scenes, only Nissan appeared to stake its future on full electric cars—which, unlike hybrids, can travel only as far as their battery charge lasts—while Toyota and Honda executives expressed skepticism over that technology. Toyota’s Mr. Uchiyamada said the company believes full-electric battery cars “will likely gain only a highly limited share” of the global auto market.
Honda Chief Executive Takanobu Ito said fully electric cars “are likely to face difficulty in becoming a mainstream solution in the foreseeable future.” Honda, he said, is therefore “devoting our energy in getting the most fuel-efficiency out of the battery system and electric power motors to come up with a truly compelling hybrid.”
Critics of all-electric cars cite the high cost of batteries and the likely need for sizable government subsidies and incentives to make all-electric battery cars affordable. The lack of a wide network of battery-charging stations also could be an impediment.
Both Toyota and Honda say a full-electric car may work for certain consumers if they are willing to treat it as a town car with limited driving range. They also say the ultimate green car over the long run will be hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, which they believe will be more efficient than full-electric battery cars. Fuel-cell cars would create their own electricity through a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen.
By contrast, Nissan on Wednesday underscored its confidence in electric vehicles by unveiling a fourth battery-only concept car, a tiny, two-person vehicle that is envisioned for urban use.
Nissan already sells an Altima hybrid midsize sedan in the U.S., but the car uses licensed technology from Toyota. To close the gap, the auto maker has been developing a few hybridmodels on its own and is expected to launch them in the U.S., Japan and possibly elsewhere over the next two years.
Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, acknowledged his company was late to jump onto the hybrid bandwagon, and now plans to concentrate on battery-only cars. “We have had a period where we have had to catch up, but now we will exercise our technological power,” he said. “We are aiming for leadership in [electric vehicles].”
Nissan believes it has found a way to make electric cars—such as the Leaf, a hatchback it plans to start selling late next year in the U.S., Europe and Japan—nearly as affordable as a gasoline-fueled compact cars.
Nissan hasn’t yet disclosed the Leaf’s business model, but one way to realize such a low price for a full electric car is to sell it without its on-board battery pack. Instead, Nissan may lease the battery pack to the customer for an affordable month fee, among other means, its executives said.
But Nissan executives also stressed that government support is necessary to launch the Leaf, which it aims to sell world-wide in 2012.
“We are asking governments to cover [the investment] up to the point when we can reach volume momentum—this will take several years,” said Carlos Tavares, who heads Nissan’s Americas operations. Mr. Ghosn estimated that this would take three to four years.
Write to Norihiko Shirouzu at norihiko.shirouzu@wsj.com
Tags: autos, green cars, Japan's Big Three Rev Up Green Cars
High Hopes for Battery Recycling as Key to Affordable Electric Cars
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
By Josie Garthwaite - Earth2Tech
We don’t usually see recycling as much of a money saver for big ticket consumer electronics. Some electronics makers still charge a premium for devices that count ease of recycling among their green credentials, and some companies charge to reclaim their equipment for recycling. (For example, I’d have to pay $30 for Apple to take back my laptop for recycling unless I buy a new Mac to replace it). But for plug-in cars — overgrown consumer electronics in many ways — recycling the battery could be one of the keys to reducing cost.
According to electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place, whose plan involves buying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of batteries to “swap” into subscribers’ vehicles, manufacturing costs for plug-in car batteries won’t drop below €8,000 ($11,440) until after 2012. And at the end of eight years on the road (a “fairly conservative” estimate, says Better Place spokesperson Julie Mullins), a typical battery will have degraded down to 80 percent of its original capacity, and thus reached the end of its life in electric cars. But much of its value as an energy storage device remains. Enter: Recycling and reuse.
Rather than all of the battery costs being passed onto car buyers, what if they pay for only the small percentage of the value they’re getting, and automakers can gather the rest in the battery’s post-vehicle life? That’s how Nissan hopes its new battery recycling joint venture, unveiled on Tuesday, will help it get an edge in the nascent market for electric vehicles.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Nissan is forming a joint venture with Japan-based trading house Sumitomo to recycle lithium-ion batteries from electric cars (some 50,000 of them per year by 2020) to be used in energy storage devices for backup power, in an effort to help make plug-in models like the upcoming Nissan LEAF more affordable for the mass market. The announcement is the automaker’s latest move to try to capture the total value chain for lithium-ion batteries, following initiatives to make the cells through another joint venture, to deploying the cells in its own electric car, the 2010 LEAF sedan, and models from partner Renault.
Bolstering the secondary market for vehicle batteries could also serve to open more financing options for plug-in car buyers. That’s because a good chunk of the potential residual value (the car’s projected worth at the end of the lease) for these cars will hinge on estimates of how much the battery’s value will depreciate. That figure, in turn, could be affected by how much value it holds for emerging energy storage applications after its useful life in vehicles runs out. Rather than waiting on rating agencies and banks to be convinced of the LEAF’s resale value and the secondary markets for batteries, Nissan plans to provide the financing (and set the residual value) for most or all of the LEAF sedans in its initial rollout.
Better Place, meanwhile, is still working on the second part of the battery value equation. According to Mullins, the company is “evaluating both second life applications for used batteries” and working with automakers, battery vendors and recyclers on “emerging technologies” for recovering and recycling most (95 percent) of the materials in batteries that are “no longer operational.”
Will the startup work with Nissan? (Better Place already has a partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance.) It’s an option, says Mullins, but there probably won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for all of the company’s batteries. “Recycling may differ on geography base, given both global and local regulations need to be followed,” she said. “Better Place is evaluating its recycling partners based on its target markets, and given our battery relationship with the joint Nissan-NEC venture AESC, we will also discuss recycling options with the new JV.”
Tags: High Hopes for Battery Recycling as Key to Affordable Electric Cars