Although the details are sketchy at this point, it looks like Toyota is planning on adding solar panels to the world’s most popular hybrid - the Prius.

Now don’t go getting too excited just yet. A few solar panels aren’t going to be enough fully charge the batteries pack of Prius, instead, it looks like these panels are going to be used to help power the air conditioning and other electronics.

That’s would probably make this car one of the most popular cars for hypermiling since those guys try to drive with the windows closed AND with the air conditioning off. If they could use the A/C without affecting gas mileage, I’m guessing they’d be in hog heaven.

Now one thing that isn’t clear is if this feature is going to be available in the United States (most of the details I got were from this Japanese newspaper and from the BBC)

I still think that if we’re going to be excited about something, it’ll be the plug-in Prius coming out in 2010 (only 1.5 years left to wait for all the cool 2010 cars we’ve been promised).

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I stumbled across this cool map of the United States color coded to show where the cheapest and highest gas prices in the country are - just like with a heat map.

By default, it’s divided up into counties, and you can see how prices tend to vary not only from from state to state, but from county to county within a state.

If you’re looking for the cheapest gas, you’ll want to visit Missouri, South Carolina, and Missouri. you’ll find the highest gas prices in California, closely followed by Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, and New York.

Want a solution you can use to start saving money on gas right now - perform a water conversion on your car and you can slash your gas bill by 40% or more.

Not that motivated? You could always get a gas rebate card. It’s an extremely easy way to start saving money on gas every time you fill up the tank.

Gas Prices heat map

You know those weeks where you get a Friday off or a Monday for a three day weekend? Well, if you worked for the state of Utah, you’d be getting a three day weekend every week.

Utah is becoming the first state to make the four day work week mandatory (for some branches of the government).

I wrote a while ago about ways that businesses could help their employees save money on gas, and in addition to telecommuting (still the best option), letting employees work four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days was listed as an excellent option.

According to the governor of Utah, it’s being done to “reduce the state’s carbon footprint, increase energy efficiency, improve customer service, and provide workers more flexibility.”

The change affects about 80% of state employees, 17,000 or so.

Of course, with the mandatory change, it benefits not just the employees of the state, but also the environment. Instead of just a few people working four day work weeks, entire departments and even some buildings can be shut down, significantly reducing the amount of energy they use on a daily basis.

And it’s been reported that four day work weeks reduce the number of sicks days taken (who hasn’t had a severe case of the Monday’s?) and also reduces job turnover.

If you’d like to read more, here’s a few more stories for you to check out:
Utah Four Day Work Week Environmentally Friendly
Utah Says Good Bye To Casual Fridays

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If you’re looking for a fuel efficient vehicle, and a used Geo Metro really isn’t your style, here are the ten most fuel efficient vehicles you can purchase right now. One of the best things about these vehicles is the fact that the most economical vehicles for fuel efficiency also tend to be some of the most budget friendly. With three choices costing less than $15,000 and with none costing more than $30,000, you can save gas without breaking the bank.

1 - Toyota Prius - 46 MPG - Cost $22,160

As expected, the Toyota Prius get the top spot in this list of the most fuel efficient vehicles. This car doesn’t have a lot of power, and really isn’t a driver’s car, but when it comes to fuel economy, especially in the city, this “king of hybrids” just can’t be beat. The next generation hybrid comes out next year which is making this a tough to get car since Toyota is capping production at just 180,000 units this year. Look for a plug-in version of this car in 2011.

2 - Honda Civic Hybrid - 42 MPG - Cost $23,270

Honda came out with the first production hybrid that enjoyed some success with the Insight. However, despite superior gas mileage to a Prius, it didn’t make it - probably because it looked kinda weird. However, that doen’t mean Honda gave up on building fuel efficient vehicles or hybrids. It’s Honda Civic hybrid comes in at #2 on our list with it’s combined 42mpg rating and 45mpg highway mileage. If you’re looking a car that doesn’t look like a hybrid - it looks nearly the same as the regular Civic, then this vehicle is a good option. Also, of note, it handles better than some of its hybrid counterparts.

3 - Smart Fortwo - 36 MPG - Cost $12,235

The third most fuel efficient and second cheapest car on this list - the Smart Fortwo. This car is tiny - every time I see one I expect to see eight clowns come piling out of it, but if you’re on a tight budget and need a fuel efficient car, this would be a good choice. This car has been deemed the “ultimate urban vehicle” and I’d definitely buy that. It’s a dream to park, and can easily squeeze into places impossible for anything but a motorcycle. However, this car is lacking in the power department and is the slowest accelerating passenger vehicle in the country, so if you do a lot of freeway commuting, you may want to look at some of the other vehicles on this list.

4 - Nissan Altima Hybrid - 34 MPG - Cost $26,140

I’ve never personally driven or seen a Nissan Altima Hybrid which is probably because it’s only sold in California and seven eastern states. I live smack dab in the middle of the country, which means no Nissan Altima Hybird for me. This car is a good handling sedan and delivers even better performance than the standard Altima model. It also has a sporty sedan look which makes this a good choice for someone looking to have some fun while they save the planet.

5 - Toyota Camry Hybrid - 34 MPG - Cost $25,860

The 34mpg Toyota Camry Hybrid is everything you’d expect from a family friendly sedan. It’s quite similar to the gas powered Camry and handles well. When you decide to go with the hybrid package you also get stability control and the XLE interior package (minus leather seats).

6 - VW Jetta TDI - 34 MPG - Cost $22,650

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I’ve been hyping up this car for a while claiming that the only diesel car on this list will get 50mpg+. And now the official numbers have come up with a combined mileage of 34 mpg, so you’re probably wondering what gives. What’s interesting about diesel cars is that they typically end up getting better mileage than what is estimated by the EPA whereas hybrids end up getting lower gas mileage than what’s estimated by the EPA. If earlier models of VW Jetta diesels are any indication, this car will get over 50mpg on the highway and close to 40 in the city, but if we’re just using EPA data, this car ranks six on this list, but it’s still at the top of my list as a vehicle to buy even though diesel is rather expensive.

Of all the vehicles on this list, this one is probably the most fun to drive since you can get it with a six speed manual, and the diesel engine delivers plenty of power - it certainly won’t feel like you’re driving a fuel sipping vehicle.

7 - Ford Escape Hybrid - 32 MPG - $29,000

Here’s the vehicle for those of you who just aren’t ready to trade in your SUV for a car just yet. Perhaps, you like the cargo space or you just like the higher ride, but either way with the Ford Escape Hybrid you can have your cake and eat it too. With a starting base price of $29,000, the Escape Hybrid comes in as the highest priced vehicle on the list, but when you consider you’re getting a 32 mpg SUV for the money, you may decide it’s a deal you just can’t afford to pass up.

8 - Toyota Yaris - 32 MPG - $12,210

If you’re looking for an extremely budget friendly car that still excels in the gas mileage department, then look no further than the Toyota Yaris. This car may look tiny, but it’s surprisingly spacious inside and can a good amount of cargo - whether it be groceries or children. It’s really nothing too special, but it is a good deal for those who are budget minded and don’t want the minuscule Smart Fortwo.

9 - Mini Cooper - 32 MPG - $18,700

If you want a unique looking car that still gets great gas mileage, then look no further than the 32mpg Mini Cooper. Designed and manufactured by BMW, it’s no surprise that this vehicle has excellent road manners and is a pleasure to drive. The only downside to this vehicle is that the options can add up in a big hurry, but then again, you do get a whole lot to choose from when designing your Mini Cooper, and excellent resale value.

10 - Honda Fit - 31 MPG - $14,620

Coined a “mini-minivan” the 31 mpg Honda Fit is a great people hauler and offers plenty of storage space. Probably the biggest downside to fuel sipping vehicle is the fact that it’s ugly as sin. However, it’s actual not too bad when it comes to performance, and if you’ve got kids and stuff to move around, and don’t want minivan fuel efficiency or the higher price, then the Honda Fit would be a great choice

(MPG Figures are combined highway/city mileage - cost is base price listed by manufacturer)

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The Geo Metro, a joint effort between GM and Suzuki, was the most fuel efficient vehicle available in the U.S. for the years it was produced - 1989-2001. It was also one of the cheapest, and its 49 horsepower made it seem more like a go-kart than a car.

However, it’s real claim to fame was the fact that it could get up to 58 mpg, and one guy even modified his ‘89 Metro to get 75 mpg.

And while you’d think years later we’d easily have a fleet of vehicles that could outdo the mileage of the Metro, however years of dirt cheap gas prices have taken us in another direction entirely - we’re a nation of trucks and SUVs that get at best 20mpg.

However, $4/gallon gas has this much maligned car making a comeback on the used car market.

This car is in such demand that its been selling for 5 times its blue book value on auction sites like eBay.

People have even started up businesses where they’ll fix up old Metros and resell them for a nice bit of profit locally or on eBay.

The metro to this day still gives the Prius a run for its money in terms of gas mileage, and the nice thing about a Geo Metro is that it’s cheap. It may not get you where you’re going in style, but it will get you there, and the 40mpg+ that it delivers is a welcome relief for drivers accustomed to getting less than half that.

So if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford a Prius or other high gas mileage car, you may want to take a look at picking up a Geo Metro as your commuting car.

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With all the talk about electric cars, hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cells, pretty much everyone has written off gasoline powered internal combustion engines as dead.

However, there’s a small company in Australia called Revetec doing some pretty amazing things with gas powered engines that may be the short term solution to our gas problems.

Not only have they created a new engine that is cheaper to manufacture than a conventional engine of the same horsepower, but its 50% smaller, 50% lighter, has 50% lower emissions, and here’s the best part – it gets double the gas mileage of its current counterpart found in cars today (and remember, it has the same horsepower so you’re not sacrificing power for fuel economy). And just for good measure, the engine is quieter too.

I realize this sounds too good to be true, but the engine really does exist, and it’s been independently tested in an actual vehicle to substantiate these claims.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not a gearhead, and when I start reading about rotating multilobate cams, and diametrically opposed pistons, I’m out of my element.

But here’s a link to a page that includes some animations of how the engine parts move, and here’s Revetec’s official website which will fill you in on all the gory details about how this technology works.

Right now it’s got me pretty excited thinking about 30mpg full size SUVs and conventional gas powered cars that get over 80mpg, but I’ll temper my enthusiasm just a bit since I know that there is plenty of cool technology out there that could help with our gas problems that never make it into real production vehicles.

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I came across a news story yesterday about the new BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics X5 Concept Vehicle (talk about a mouthful to say…) and was pretty excited. Finally, a company is coming out with a diesel hybrid vehicle.

It reminded me of a conversation I was having with some friends back in December about why I thought was the best progression for us to not only lessen our dependency on foreign oil but to use less oil in general.

I contended that since electric and hydrogen fuel cells aren’t quite ready for prime time that we should take advantage of what we currently have available to us - diesel engines. Diesel powered vehicles are no longer the smelly, noisy vehicles you may be picturing. In fact, many of the new diesel cars are just as quiet as their gasoline powered counterparts.

And to give you an idea of how much more efficient diesel cars are than gas powered vehicles, the VW Polo (not available in the United States… yet) is a diesel powered cars that gets 70mpg+. Compare that to a Prius which only gets about 50mpg at best, and you can see the advantages that diesel has over gasoline and even over gas hybrid cars. Not only that, but the Polo sells for less than $20,000 while the Prius starts at $21,500.

So my thought is that in the short term we should be aiming to drive diesel cars, then diesel hybrid cars, and diesel plug-in hybrid cars. Adding hybrid capabilities and other technology on the horizon to efficient diesel engines could easily push some vehicles into the 100mpg range. And at the kind of mileage you probably wouldn’t care that diesel costs more than gasoline.

Making these changes would greatly reduce the amount of oil we use and need to import on a daily basis, and none of it requires any technology we don’t already have. Heck, just having everyone switch to diesel would make a dramatic difference.

And from there we could move towards fully electric vehicles which draw their power from our electric grid which is a far more efficient way to generate power than to use our internal combustion engines. Also, leaving power generation to the power plants is also far more enviromentally friendly.

And while I just posted about hydrogen fuel cell cars yesterday, I’m not convinced that hydrogen fuel cells are the future of our vehicles. However, I’d be happy to see us driving hydrogen fuel cell / plug-in electric hybrids. That way, we’d still be leaving the bulk of the power generation to the electric grid (trust me, that’s a good thing, the power grid is constantly getting cleaner and more efficient unlike our engines) and we’d still be able to drive across the country by filling up with hydrogen, and our cars would be zero emission.

And while that may be a bit far out right now (probably 20-30+ years), diesel hybrids will be here shortly. Let’s get back to talking about the BMW X5 that inspired me to make this post in the first place.

A typical BMW X5 that you can buy today gets about 18mpg. It may be a pleasure to drive, but it gets crappy gas mileage just like so many of its SUV brethren. The new BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics on the other hand gets over 40mpg with its diesel hybrid engine. In addition to the the hybrid system (which is an innovation in this vehicle itself), it also takes advantage of solar panels mounted on the roof to help charge the batteries, and even the wheels and tires are designed to help you improve gas mileage.

Right now it’s looking like you’ll have to wait until 2010 to get one of these in the United States, which as you already know if you’ve been a long time reader here is going to be a great year for “green” cars.

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Honda has begun the first commercial production of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and plans to start delivering the vehicles to customers in July.

Before you get too excited, though, Honda only plans on producing 200 of these vehicles over the next three years. (For comparison’s sake, Toyota makes about 200,000 Prius’ each year.) Also, unless you live in Southern California or Japan, your chance of getting one of these vehicles is pretty much zero, since Southern California is the only place in the U.S. with enough hydrogen equipped filling stations for such a vehicle to make sense.

The Honda FCX Clarity runs by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and as a by product produces only water vapor.

While you may not be getting a fuel cell vehicle anytime in the near future, this is still a big step in the quest to make hydrogen cars a reality. Honda has said they hope to begin mass producing these vehicles in ten years – so hopefully by 2018 seeing a fuel cell car driving down the street will be as common as seeing a Prius now.

As you know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I think plug-in electric hybrids are a far more viable option for the near future than hydrogen cars, but I do hope that my children are able to drive fully electric cars or electric hydrogen hybrid cars since they’d give off zero emissions and would allow us to be fully self sufficient as a nation in terms of our energy needs.

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With news that oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia are reaping record profits, most people think that record high oil prices are great news to oil producing countries. And while that may be true in the short term, it’s not going to be in the future.

Think I’m crazy? Maybe, but let’s look at the facts:

$3/gallon gas prices didn’t really affect oil consumption in the U.S., however, $4/gallon gas has certainly seen people using less oil.

Public transportation use is at record high numbers.

More people have started working from home or telecommute a few days a week so that they don’t need to drive to work every day. Many businesses and even some local governments have started allowing employees to work four 10 hour work days instead of five 8 hour days which allows them one less day of commuting.

Gas guzzling SUV sales have plummeted with brands like Hummer seeing a 36% decrease in sales and several other large SUV lines seeing similar declines.

All this translates into less consumption which means that we need less oil. While the reduction in oil use hasn’t become dramatic, it is certainly making people clamor for alternatives, and they’re willing to pay for it.

And in the capitalistic society that we live in, companies will go where the money is and the money is in alternative fuel technologies right now. Just yesterday I posted about a company that is using bacteria to turn waste products into oil. Last week I talked about a car that gets 300mpg, and several car companies are working on bringing electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells to the market.

Right now it’s looking like 2010 is going to be an excellent year for ultra fuel efficient vehicles with GM releasing its Volt platform which can run for 40 miles on battery power before the gas engine kicks in and VW releasing a car that gets of 200mpg and several other car manufacturers will be following suit.

All this means less oil being consumed, and many countries are working on making themselves self sufficient on oil as well, further reducing the need for foreign oil. And for those who think that emerging countries like India and China will pick up the slack if we reduce our demand for oil, in our global economy, we’ll be happy to export our technology to those countries to help them use less oil as well.

So when I heard that Saudia Arabia had decided to ramp up oil production to 10 million barrels a day (the highest in its history) it only made sense to me. Oil is pretty much the only resource that Saudi Arabia has, and it’s a resource that has made the country incredibly wealthy. However, if the global demand for oil declines, that means that prices will drop. And the higher oil prices go, the faster we’ll transition to technologies that don’t have us depending on oil or that help us use far less of it.

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Gas Prices

Why go through the trouble of shipping oil dug up from the ground when you can produce it from stuff you were just going to throw away for less?

That’s the attitude of LS9, a company specializing in the production of “DesignerBiofuels.”

LS9 is using genetically modified strains of bacteria (industrial yeast, or non pathogenic strains of E. Coli) that produce crude oil as a by product. You can feed them pretty much any food that can be broken down into sugars, such as wheat straw or wood chips, and they’ll provide you with oil.

They’ve deemed the renewable petroleum produced by the bacteria “Oil 2.0.”

Advantages of LS9 DesignerBiofuels Technology:

- Unlike with hydrogen fuel cell technology, this technology would not require our current infrastructure to change since we’d still be using oil, it’d just be coming from a different source.

- LS9 also claims that their oil is runs at a carbon negative which means that the amount of carbon thrown into the atmosphere by burning the oil is actually less than the amount of carbon the plant from which the oil is made initially absorbed.

- It requires less refining. The refining process of light sweet crude is a fairly energy intensive process. The oil produced by LS9 bacteria requires minimal refining and could theoretically be put into your tank without any further refining at all.

Disadvantage of LS9 DesignerBiofuels Technology:

- Of course, it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, because just like the first computers, it’s a rather space intensive process. A plant that could supply all of our oil in America would require a plant that covered roughly 200 square miles – about the size of Chicago.

- A full scale commercial facility won’t be ready to go until 2011, so even if this technology took hold, it’s still probably a decade from putting a major dent in the amount of oil we need to import from foreign countries.

While there may be greener technologies in the pipeline, I am still encouraged to see this type of technology being worked on. While one type of alternative energy like solar or wind power may not take over 100%, if all these new technologies did a little, we could greatly reduce the amount of oil we use on a daily basis, and could produce enough of our own oil that we wouldn’t need to import it from foreign countries.

If I hear anything further about this technology, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

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