alternative fuel

Chevy Spark EV: 5x the Tesla Model S at 1/5 the Price?

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I had the opportunity to drive the 2014 Chevy Spark EV last month at a media event in Portland, Oregon. The drive route ran through the streets of the city, onto the highway, and out into the suburbs. This provided the Spark EV with an ideal setting for its virtues to shine.

It can be a trick to shoot media events like this. The schedule is extremely compressed and time behind the wheel is often limited. We set out from the garage of the Portland Kimpton hotel and headed to Electric Avenue. I hustled to get location shots and hung a pair of cameras on the car on our departure from the parking garage (although I only ended up using the external camera).

Spark EVs charging in the basement of the Portland Klimpton Hotel

Lets go out on a limb and call the Spark EV the first affordable electric hot hatch. Who could argue with 400 foot pounds of torque and a 0-60 MPH time of 7.5 seconds? With that much power, the engineers are clearly holding back its full potential, lest the front tires disintegrate into billows of smoke and shards of rubber.

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Can You Find a Fuel Efficient Used Car on eBay?

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Folks often ask me, “what’s the ‘greenest’ car?” This is one of my favorite questions, because it can spur deeper conversation. Some people are shocked when I reply that the ‘greenest’ car is a recycled car. “Wait a minute,” comes the typical response, “a used car … for real?”

They often expect that I would answer with “oh, a (insert the most common name here) hybrid or an electric car (like the one that’s caught the tech world’s fancy that real world folks can’t afford).” Truth be told, 40 mile per gallon (MPG) cars are nothing new. You can find a ten or fifteen year old Honda Civic HX or Volkswagen TDI on eBay that will get 40 MPG on the highway. The older VW Jetta, Golf, Passat, and Beetle TDIs can even run on 100 domestic renewable biodiesel. Vintage Mercedes-Benz diesels can run on biodiesel as well, and they can all be converted to run on recycled fryer grease. There are great bargains to be found on fuel-efficient Saturns, too …

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me an old fryer-grease-powered Mercedes-Benz. All my friends slobber over Teslas, I must make amends …

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MPG Video Series is a Go

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Thank you kindly for getting us to the starting line! The Kickstarter campaign for Ain’t Fuelin’ hit its funding mark last Friday and it’s taken me a week to recover and gather my thoughts about where it’s going. The three week campaign was a wild ride, and until the closing week, I was unsure whether it would fund. Locking down key sponsorships was crucial, but things didn’t start popping until the clock started ticking.

I’ve had this project on the back burner for more than three years. Over that time, I’ve had the good fortune to speak with a range of automotive professionals, from mechanics and race car drivers, through engineers and top-level executives. The premise of what we seek to prove is sound. The toughest part of this endeavor is producing compelling video on an extremely tight budget. Simply put, this has to be something that you want to watch and share with your friends.

Ain't Fuelin' is funded.

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The $1300 Civic HX That Got Away

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I’ve been looking for a cheap Civic HX coupe for months on end. When one popped up in North Jersey on Craigslist a few weeks back, it set my wheels rolling. It was exactly what I was after: solid, but with cosmetic issues. (It needed a fender and possibly a door.) The price was spot on: just $1300. I immediately emailed the owner, but didn’t hear back. I waited a day and emailed again. Finally, he got back to me … the car had been sold. With my hopes dashed for that specific car, I vowed to finally get this project in gear. I found another car in South Jersey that looked to be a likely candidate. It had high miles, but was relatively clean, other than one mismatched wheel. The price was roughly double that of the North Jersey HX. I watched it for a few days, before it sold, as well.

The Kickstarter campaign for Ain’t Fuelin’ reached two milestones yesterday, crossing the 50 backer and $1300 funding marks. Fifty backers and thirteen hundred bucks … a small crowd and the exact amount of the car that spurred me into launching the campaign. The car I currently have my eye on is nearly triple the price of the banged-up bargain car. It’s extremely clean but has over two hundred and twenty thousand miles on the clock. I should have my head examined for even considering the car at that price. That said, I’ve driven the car and it doesn’t feel like it has that many miles. It’s solid. But it’s not worth what they’re asking.

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Ain’t Fuelin’ – Kickstart or Die Trying

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This new video series has been in the works for a couple of years. I was getting ready to launch it in the third quarter of 2011, but when Google drastically slashed the amount of traffic it was sending to this website in mid-July of that year, I put the series on the back burner. This is the reality of life on the Internet. Google controls the bulk of the traffic to content websites. They decide who gets traffic and who does not. Is it fair? Absolutely not. Is it reality? Absolutely. The sites that do exceedingly well in the rankings today are big sites that can afford staffs that specialize in search engine optimization, as well as those that use tactics that optimize their rankings. Smaller sites, particularly one person operations, are simply out of luck in Google’s new world order. Quite simply, they determine what you see.

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