Members of the StreetCar car sharing service in the UK now have the option to rent a BMW from as little as £6.95 per hour. Like ZipCar and other similar services, StreetCar is a membership program that allows participants to rent cars by the hour, day or week and not have to pay for fuel, insurance or parking. Members get a smart card to remotely unlock cars they have reserved. The cars can be reserved online or over the phone using an iPhone application that also shows you where the car is.

Both the 1 and 3 series are now available from StreetCar and all models are equipped with BMW's efficient dynamics technologies like brake energy recuperation and automatic start-stop. The 1 series costs £6.95 (about $13) per hour while the 3 goes for £8.95 (about $16.83).



[Source: BMW]

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In the least surprising announcement of the day, Toyota has officially announced that it would recall 2010 model Priuses and Lexus HS250h models in globally along with the Toyota Sai in Japan to fix an issue the performance of the brake system. The latest in a series of safety-related problems with Toyotas became public last week when Toyota acknowledged that customers of the third-generation hybrid had complained of a loss of stopping power at low speeds.

Toyota also acknowledged that it had developed a software update to improve the blending of the regenerative and
friction braking systems and implemented into new production models sometime in January. The automaker did not, however, order a recall of vehicles in the field until more than a week after reports of the issue turned up in the media.

The Prius, Prius PHEV, HS250h and Sai (a Toyota-badged version of the Prius sold only in Japan) are all being recalled for the update. In total, about 400,000 vehicles are involved in this recall. First- and second-generation Priuses are not included since they have a different braking system.

In the same release, available after the break, Toyota also announced that it would recall about 7,300 2010 model Camrys to inspect a power steering hose that may sit to close to a brake hose and cause it to wear through.



[Source: Toyota]

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Back in October at the Tokyo Motor Show, Honda unveiled an electric vehicle concept called the EV-N. The EV-N design was inspired by the tiny N360 of the 1960s. While the EV-N may or may not provide a preview of an upcoming electric city car from Honda, a little custom car shop in Santa Rosa, CA has been working on the real thing.

Hector's Chop Shop has been working on an electric conversion of a 1969 Honda N360. The project has gone through many changes of direction since it started. Early on, the crew working on the project had planned to remove the cylinder head and crankshaft from the little front driver. The electric motor was to be mounted on top of the block with a dummy crank in the bottom of the block. The motor was to drive the dummy crank so that the stock clutch and gearbox could be used.

That plan obviously didn't work out and the DC motor is now being installed in the back of the body shell driving the rear wheels through a 1985 VW GTI gearbox. Check out the progress on the project at the shop's website.

[Source: Hector's Chop Shop via Clunkbucket]

Here at AutoblogGreen, we're no strangers to the mileage vs. consumption debate, but New York state could become the first in the nation to require fuel consumption ratings on new vehicles. For those not familiar with the concept, mileage measures how far you can drive on a given quantity of fuel. The standard measure in the U.S. for this rating is miles per gallon. Consumption, on the other hand, defines how much fuel is used to drive a given distance. Those in countries that use metric generally measure this in liters per 100 kilometers, while Americans would use gallons per 100 miles. When measuring fuel savings that result from increased efficiency, the consumption rating gives a linear representation of actual savings. The savings that result from improving the MPG drop geometrically as the mileage number rises. You can find a full explanation in this Greenlings article we published in 2009.

New York state senator Daniel Squadron (D) recently introduced a bill that would require fuel consumption window stickers on new cars. The intent is to show consumers how much fuel would be saved by taking most inefficient vehicles off the road. Going from 12-15 mpg reduces saves nearly six times as much fuel over a given driving distance as an improvement from 50-60 mpg. The bill has been passed out of a senate committee in Albany but no corresponding bill has yet been introduced in the assembly.

[Source: All over Albany]

Apparently, the old maxim about there being no such thing as bad press is still true, at least as far as the Toyota Prius is concerned. You might think that reports of issues with loss of braking power might turn off people shopping for the hybrid icon, but you'd would be wrong. This is what Edmunds.com has learned from people doing research on the site.

The staff at the online car-buying research site did some before and after analysis following the disclosure last week of a problem with the control of the brakes on the 2010 Prius. In the days leading up to the revelation, 7.4 percent of aspiring buyers considered the Toyota, a number that rose to 8.7 percent the day after the stories broke. Edmunds measures consideration by the percentage of people that go its Prius pages.

Similarly, shoppers indicating "purchase intent" went from 10.1 to 11.2 percent. Edmunds speculates that the cause may be bargain hunters hoping to negotiate a better deal while thinking the problem will be addressed quickly.

That analysis is certainly possible, but we must also remember that this is a very small sample size based on a single day following the first reports of an issue. This may change if new revelations about safety problems and Toyota's response to them continue to come to the fore. We'll have to keep watching this in the coming weeks and months.



[Source: Green Car Advisor]

Up until now, General Motors has remained deliberately vague in public about the scheduled Job 1 date for Chevrolet Volt production. Given the complexity and new technology involved in the program, we certainly can't fault GM from wanting to get locked in until much closer to the appointed day. After all, when you don't know what the future holds or what problems will crop up, who would want to give a date and time years into the future when something might happen.

Internal schedules, on the other hand, are something else all together. Every program has to have deadlines so that people will know how much time they have and how many resources to apply to a task. Those internal Gantt charts have undoubtedly had the magic date on them for several years. Among the stakeholders that need to know when a vehicle will launch are dealers that have to schedule orders for inventory. Around about this time of year, automakers let the dealers know when the current model year vehicles will end production and new ones will start.

With less than ten months to go, GM has put November 1, 2010 as the Volt's Job 1 date on the production start list for dealers. By September, dealers will have start giving GM an indication of how many Volts they want to order so the head office can determine allocations. Interestingly, the GM chart indicates that dealers won't know their allocations until two weeks after production starts and won't be able to start placing orders until then. Typically, those last two items happen about two months before production starts. The timing for start of production is still far enough out that those dates may yet change in the coming months.

A final item of interest is that the Cruze, which was originally slated to launch in April and then pushed back to September, is listed as TBD.



Photos Copyright ©2009 Sam Abuelsamid / Weblogs, Inc.
[Source: GM-Volt.com]

With the Winter Olympic games set to kick off next week in Vancouver, British Columbia, many of the visitors to the ski resort of Whistler (just north of the city) will be getting zero emissions transportation. BC Transit has deployed 20 hydrogen fuel cell buses in Whistler as part of its ongoing effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The silent electric drive buses have a range of over 300 miles between fill-ups that take 8-10 minutes.

The buses are nearly twice as efficient as existing diesel buses, consuming 28 liters of hydrogen per 100 kilometers driven compared to 52 L/100 km for the diesels. New Flyer built the bus chassis with Vancouver-based Ballard Power systems providing the fuel cell system. This should be an interesting test of fuel cell technology with the fuel cell buses operating in cold weather conditions and mountainous terrain. BC Transit expects the new buses to operate for 15 years. Check out the video after the jump.

[Source: Ballard]

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A group of Hawaiian high school students has completed their second electric vehicle conversion in three years. Seabury Hall, a prep school on Maui, offers students the opportunity to participate in a number of classes that involve significant engineering products. There are currently three major projects going on, in addition to improving the original electric car students built three years ago. The biofuel project involves growing crops, producing biodiesel and converting a car to run on the fuel. The three-wheeler team is working on an electric motorcycle.

The AC Car team has just finished installing an electric powertrain into a 1995 Toyota Corolla. Energy storage is provided by a 144 volt nickel metal hydride battery pack. The team is hoping the battery pack gives the Corolla a 60-mile range per charge with a top speed of 75 miles per hour.

The original conversion (dubbed the yellow car) has accumulated 3,000 miles and, along with the new green Corolla, will be instrumented to provide data back to the University of Hawai'i. Check out the video after the jump. Thanks to Martin for the tip!

[Source: Seabury Hall]

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Audi is about to thrust its new flagship A8 sedan upon the world but UK magazine Autocar has already had a chance to sample one. At launch, the all-wheel-drive sedan will have three engine options: a pair of 4.2-liter V8s in gas and diesel flavors and a 3.0-liter TDI diesel V6. The 3.0-liter is a familiar configuration for Audi, but the unit in the A8 has apparently been re-engineered. With 250 horsepower, it provides ample performance for the big sedan.

The A8 also gets automatic start-stop capability with its eight-speed automatic transmission and brake energy recuperation. Bringing all this technology together, the magazine saw 35.6 miles per gallon (U.S.) in combined driving. We don't know if Audi will include the diesel when the A8 crosses the Atlantic later this year, but we certainly hope so.



[Source: Autocar]