Just when we thought Tesla was dead, due to the large number of layoffs of key personnel, they have announced that they have met the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards on all fronts, in including the all-important crash tests.  Malcolm Powell, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Integration posted a set of pictures from the Tesla crash tests on his blog.

Maybe this car really will ship this year as they have recently promised.  It’s not a very practical example of an EV, since it’s quite expensive and insufficient for most normal consumer transportation needs, but we have to start somewhere with a real, shipping electric vehicle.  Most of the other examples being sold today are too slow or are classified as “motorcyles” to avoid having to pass federal standards.
Read More [teslamotors.com]

Bob Lutz has told Wired News that the promising electric vehicle known as the Volt may be closer to $40,000 than the original estimate of $30,000. Getting the first generation of the car out by 2010 has trumped the need to get the cost down into an affordable price range.  General Motors will then focus on pricing in the next generation of the car.

Quotes below from the Wired interview with Lutz:

WN: What’s the target market for the car? Will it be a high-end car, a mid-range car?
Lutz: I’ve always said I’d like to be able to sell it at around $30,000. The way things look now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be possible. It looks like it’s going to be more.
WN: How much more?
Lutz: I don’t know. You’d like to have it at about $30,000 for the customer, but what I’m hearing from the team is we’re not going to get there. They say we might get there on the second generation, and they say if they had a lot more time they might be able to cost-optimize it. I don’t want to wait for cost optimization. I’d rather come out in 2010, and if it costs closer to 40 than 30, well, that’s too bad.

Read More [wired.com]

People have built devices to create electricity from natural sources of energy, including solar, wind, and wave power.  But for the first time, a French scientist has proposed producing power from the impact of rain.

“We thought of raindrops because they are one of the still- unexploited energy sources in nature,” says Jean-Jacques Chaillout of the atomic energy commission in Grenoble, France.

Chaillout and his group managed to produce about one microwatt of power from their piezoelectric device that produces electricity from the impact of rain drops.  This tiny amount of power would not be very useful unless employed on a grand scale, which would be impractical, and then would only produce power during a rain storm.  It might be useful for powering a limiting set of devices, such as a rain sensor.  But for now, it looks like an interesting idea with little practical use.

Read More [treehugger.com]

A large five-year study that analyzed switchgrass produce on farms in three states has concluded that switchgrass can produce 540 percent more energy than the amount needed to grow, harvest and process it into cellulosic ethanol.  Switchgrass is a prairie grass with a great potential as a biomass fuel source.

Read More [sciencedaily.com]