Category Archives: Stuff We Need

Stuff We Need: More U in EV SUVs

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My wife and I own an old Toyota Previa van, like the one pictured here, it has over 200,000 miles on it, it squeals loudly driving around town, it hums loudly at highway speeds, it probably needs around $1,000 worth of work right now to keep it truly road worthy, and yet I can’t imagine living without it.

There are very few things that we can’t fit inside it or strap to the roof rack, including this year’s 10-foot Christmas tree, it’s amazingly comfortable on long road trips, and you can sleep in the back in a pinch.

That’s one long-winded scenic route on the way to stressing that the operative letter in SUV is “U” for utility. (For purposes of this blog post, I’m defining Sport Utility Vehicles to include vans, pick-ups and other trucks.)

Back in July 2011, I wrote about the Suzuki Every Van and how it was doomed, because, as an EV (Electric Vehicle) it failed the U Test in a big, big way, offering a pathetic maximum range of 62 miles.

Well, today, via Inhabitat, there’s news from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, MI, about this:

…Via Motors unveil[ed] the company’s first extended-range electric vehicle, a full-size light duty pickup truck called the eREV VTRUX. [The] 100-mpg VTRUX attempts to replace a full V8 engine with a hugely powerful 402-horsepower electric motor (with 300 lb-ft of torque), a larger version of the same system that allows the Chevy Volt to beat EV range anxiety.

Now, the downside is that, like the Chevy Volt, the VTRUK is NOT a true EV, as Inhabitat mistakenly refers to it. It still utilizes a gasoline engine, hence the “100-mpg” rating, which clearly makes it a hybrid in my eyes.

That said, since SUVs are such notorious gas guzzlers, a 100-mpg pickup is nothing to laugh at, and the fact that Via Motors will also be producing a van and something that looks like a Chevy Suburban, might just win my seal of approval anyway, for how soundly they are winning the U Test.

If we are ever to completely replace gasoline-powered automobiles, automakers MUST make them affordable (who knows how much these Via trucks will cost), and they must pass the U Test. The average family must be able to drive their family members, their dogs, their stuff and their home and garden improvement supplies around, and they have to have good range, especially since charging stations are only just starting to pop up in a relative handful of places.

Stuff We Need: Scrapblasters!

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I haven’t posted a Stuff We Need installment in a while, maybe because I’ve been too overwhelmed with stuff lately, like moving 20 years of accumulated stuff from one house to another, and having been immersed in those stuff-filled days we call the holiday season.

But when I saw this, I knew I had to have one:

Scrapblasters are two guys from Seattle, Brian Westcott and John Brink, who do upcycling with great retro taste.

It’s not that I have a thing for vacuum cleaners, it’s just that a vintage vacuum cleaner repurposed as a boom box TOTALLY works for me.

And yet, looking around the Scrapblasters website and checking other things they’ve made, I came up with an idea I’d like more than a boom box.

Back in April, they posted this:

That right there is a speaker and sub-woofer in a 1910 suitcase, and what I’d really like is to commission them to construct a home theater sound system inside a collection various retro items that would sit around the TV room.

THAT would be so rad!

Stuff We Need: Solar Blimps

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Call ‘em blimps. Call ‘em zeppelins. Call ‘em dirigibles (if you can pronounce it). Call ‘em airships.

Whatever, if they are are solar and zero emissions and can carry cargo, we need ‘em!

Carbon emissions from cargo planes, ships, trains, and trucks is significant.

That a solar blimp can look really cool — always a plus for me — is yummy icing on the cake, but the fact that, according to Inhabitat, the makers of the SolarShip plan to demonstrate their vessels soon, in 2012 and 2013, is really exciting.

[SolarShip]…has taken the steps to bring its vision of a green shipping future to life, recently completing the initial test flights for its solar helium plane. The prototype blends the concepts of blimp and airplane by placing a blimp lined with solar panels over an airplane cockpit and landing gear, and using solar power to propel the plane into the air. SolarShip plans to build three sizes of this ship: the small Caracal, the mid-size Chui, and the 30-tonne cargo hauler Nanuq.

Now, sadly, these things won’t be replacing cargo ships and trains anytime soon. The largest of the three, after all, the 30-ton Nanuq, can only carry the equivalent of one 20-foot shipping container.

But it’s a step in the right direction, and in the meantime we get some great CGI eye candy to watch.

Stuff We Need: Solar Bridges

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Apropos my post from July, where I assert that green energy and infrastructure projects, and the millions of jobs they could provide, are painfully obvious no-brainers, no-brainers that we ignore at our own peril, today I came across this, via CNN:

World’s largest solar bridge project gets underway

A CGI image of how the new solar panels will look on the roof of the new Blackfriars rail station in London

What a brilliant idea…and how very sad that the U.S. isn’t doing projects like this on a grand scale, all over the country, simply because we’re so paralyzed by political and governmental corruption and dysfunction.

When legendarily foggy and rainy London decides to invest in a solar project like this, you know the technology has advanced radically, that despite their sunshine deficit, as the article says, the solar panels will help reduce annual CO2 emissions by more than 500 tons!

Instead, here in the U.S., lobbyists for the dirtiest fossil fuel known to man might be successful in building a pipeline to pump the toxic sludge from Alberta, Canada, through the heartland of America, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, because they have a cozy relationship with the State Department.

Tragically sad.

Stuff We Need: OdeWire

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I’ve been a reader of Ode Magazine for years, and I regularly feel grateful for such a consistent source of positive news stories in a world dominated by negative-focused media.

All the more reason, then, to celebrate the launch of a new project from Ode, a news aggregator called OdeWire, that uses semantic search technology to cull news stories from all over the world that focus on positive developments; on people and organizations who are finding and implementing solutions to the problems that face humanity and our planet.

Now, I don’t agree with every single thing I read in Ode, but do I need to? Hell no! I don’t agree with everything I read in the New York Times, or in any other publication for that matter, so why should Ode be held to that standard?

Rather, there’s no denying that the stories on the whole provide proof that we all desperately seek, that good things happen everywhere, everyday.

And so now Ode brings us OdeWire, a kind of Google News for what Ode calls Intelligent Optimists. Divided into six major topic sections — Business, Energy, Food, Health, Technology, Life — I’m very impressed so far with the selection of articles and the variety of publications they originate from. I look forward to visiting the site often.

Here’s Ode Editor-in-Chief, Jurriaan Kamp, and Tim Musgrove, the mad scientist behind the semantic technology, talking about OdeWire:

Stuff We Need: The QBEAK!

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Thanks to one of my favorite websites, Engadget, I’ve come across a LOT of exciting Electric Vehicle (EV) news this past week, with six posts just in the past three days.

I thought I’d start out with the beauty you see here to the right: the oddly named QBEAK.

From Danish company ECOmove — be sure to click on the tiny British flag in the upper right corner of the page for the English version of the site…and Americans, yes, this is an indicator as to how the Danes feel about us — this tiny thing is cool looking and has several attributes that make it stand out.

Motors embedded in the wheels, compact suspension, seats 3 or 6 (in the case of the latter, exactly how is not clear) people, and it gets an impressive 186 miles to a charge (compared to the Nissan Leaf‘s 100 miles). That last spec is something that really stands out for me, because that’s enough range to get me from here in Bellingham, up to Vancouver, B.C. or down to Seattle, with plenty of power left to cruise around town for the day and then plug it in for a charge overnight. (Granted, that assumes readily accessible charging stations that will hopefully be more abundant in the next 5-10 years.)

Now, I have no idea how much the QBEAK costs, but according to ECOmove’s website I could reserve one, due out in mid-2012, for as low as EUR 270 ($382 US). This is important to me, as I’ve written before, because I feel that the key to worldwide EV replacement of gasoline vehicles, from both a consumer and producer perspective, is to make EVs as affordable as possible.

Moving on, we find news about:

  • a car that is likely the antithesis of affordable, a limited production Mercedes EV;
  • if you thought the QBEAK’s 186-mile range was good, Japanese startup SIM-Drive’s SIM-LEI might interest you, with a 207-mile range;
  • better yet, the Delta E4, a carbon fiber prototype gets 250 miles per charge;
  • a KIA concept car that, while shorter on range, at only 124 miles per charge, looks roomier than most EVs I’ve seen, with four doors and four seats, and it has cool tech features, like wipers that work using air jets rather than squeegees, and mini cameras and displays rather than sideview mirrors;
  • and finally, on the battery side of things, open for business in Israel is the first battery swapping station, where owners of the Renault Fluence Z.E. can drive into the facility and sit in their cars for three minutes, while robotic arms from below replace a depleted battery with one that is fully charged, expensive but very, very cool.