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At Witz End


At Witz' End: Notes from "The Business of Plugging In"

EV business may be booming soon I dropped by the Center for Automotive Research's (CAR) "The Business of Plugging In" conference in Detroit recently and came away with a collection of quotes and useful information from movers and shakers working to make vehicle electrification happen. Most reasonable observers understand that electric vehicles will not replace liquid-fueled vehicles in large numbers any time soon due to their three key disadvantages of high battery cost, limited driving range and long recharge times. But everyone ... Read more →

At Witz' End - Best of the Rest from the Center for Automotive Research automotive future forum

I reported last month on Nissan's LEAF EV plans, as presented by Nissan Product Planning VP Larry Dominique at the August Center for Automotive Research Management Briefing Seminars (CAR MBS) in ...

At Witz' End - A sneak peak at the "new GM's" critically important product future

It was probably mid-1980, soon after the federal government agreed to guarantee massive loans to financially struggling Chrysler Corp., when then-Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca invited groups of auto ...

At Witz' End: Turning over a new (Nissan) LEAF

Had lunch the other day with Nissan North America Product Planning Vice President Larry Dominique. He is the point man for communicating Nissan's green-vehicle vision, beginning with its soon-to-come ...

At Witz' End - scoping out magazine coverage of electric vehicles

With so much information (and disinformation) available on the Web, does anyone read magazines any more? Most are struggling to retain both readers and advertisers, and many are going upside down. ...

At Witz' End - Range Anxiety Q&A II 5 months ago on Autoblog Green

I really stepped in it last time by stating that GM never owned patent rights to Ovonic's NiMH batteries and never sold them to an oil company, and that no one sued Toyota. I believed those statements to be true at the time, but several of you straightened me out. However, since that complex ...

At Witz' End - Range Anxiety Q&A 6 months ago on Autoblog Green

There was a lot of feedback (50 comments at last count) to my column on EV range anxiety, some thoughtful and intelligent, some not. The few who accuse me of being anti-electric vehicles, which I definitely am not, were not. Neither were the two (same guys each time) touting the idiotic conspiracy ...

At Witz' End: My night with range anxiety 7 months ago on Autoblog Green

I left the dinner meeting around 9:00, with home roughly 60 miles away...no challenge for an engine-powered vehicle, even relatively low on fuel. You can always find an open station. Not so on this 1997 night. I was driving an EV1 development vehicle freshly equipped with an experimental ...

At Witz' End: Detroit Auto Show: Reality Check - Part II 8 months ago on Autoblog Green

In my first column reality checking the Detroit Auto Show, some of you questioned my assertion that even Toyota's relatively high-volume hybrids are probably not profitable. Of course, Toyota has lowered the costs of its Hybrid Synergy Drive components over many years and hundreds of thousands of ...

At Witz' End: Detroit Auto Show: Reality Check - Part I 9 months ago on Autoblog Green

This year's Detroit North American International Auto Show (aka NAIAS) was easily the greenest ever, greener even than the evergreen Los Angeles show two months earlier. Several automakers (most notably Nissan) were missing due to the weak economy, while others (Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz) ...



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