Every weekday, our guide to the Web takes care of business, tackling tech topics that really matter to everybody. From topic definitions to topical rants, Dan Gray\’s pieces inform as much as they entertain.
Ready or not, the dawn of the electric car era is in sight.
Electric car fanatics gathered at the Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008 conference last week in Washington DC. The event, hosted by the Brookings Institute and Google.org, packed the main ballroom of the Washington Hyatt on Capitol Hill.
A standing room only crowd heard words of […]
Would you drive a hybrid car?
Just a few years back, I never thought I would.
But here it is, Spring 2008 and I’ve just spent a month with four different hybrids — two sedans and two SUVs. I have two more on the way. I’ve made a pledge to deliver hybrid reviews of nearly all of […]
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard (or read) folks say that they “wouldn’t buy a hybrid until it gets 100 miles per gallon (MPG).”
A good bit has changed since I wrote about the CalCars.com mod back in the summer of 2005.
That good bit is the price.
Think 100 MPG is so tough to achieve?
Behold […]
It’s all about the green. We’re all getting squeezed these days. Even if you’re not worried about the environment, you’ve got to be concerned about the green that’s flowing at an ever-increasing rate from your wallet.
Kids can be forgiven for their cluelessness when it comes to wasting energy. Parents are often the ones running around […]
I spent a couple of days at the NY Auto Show press preview last week and have been busy cranking out videos on many of the cool concepts and upcoming releases. If I could use just one word to describe this year’s show, it would have to be electric…
The tiny electric Subaru R1e and Nissan […]
Did you know that diesel engines can be 30% more fuel-efficient than gasoline engines? Unfortunately, diesels have earned a bad rap for being noisy, smelly, nasty polluters. The good news is that a number of automakers have been hard at work designing engines that break the mold and dispel everything you may have thought you […]
“The rich are unlike you and I,” my mom used to say. “They buy luxury cars that actually get good gas mileage.” Well, okay… my mom never said it exactly like that. But there’s a certain thrift in old money families that determines what a dollar is worth and how many miles need to wrung […]
Ford makes just what might be the coolest minivan in the entire world. It has innovative exterior styling, a roomy interior (for up to seven people - five of normal proportions and two chimps), handles well, and gets great gas mileage for a minivan. Overall, it’s a minivan for people that need a minivan but […]
What American needs right now is a domestically-built pickup truck that gets fifty miles per gallon (MPG). That’s just crazy talk you say? Fifty mpg in a pickup! But not nearly as insane as the fact that we had a 45 MPG pickup truck built right here in the United States … twenty-five years […]
I penned a short article last week about a bunch of sport utility vehicles that actually get somewhat decent gas mileage. Now Chris was kind enough to include a link in his daily Pirillo’s Picks newsletter to the article. But oddly, the headline read: “Determining which SUV get the best gas mileage seems a bit […]
It’s not news that the common SUV carries the stereotype of gas guzzler … but not all SUVs are created equal. Some SUVs are far more fuel-efficient than others. While some SUVs get absolutely dreadful gas mileage, others are downright thrifty, considering the loads they can carry … pulling down as much as 26 - […]
There’s a nasty buzz building that gasoline prices may eclipse $4 per gallon here in the states by the time the summer driving season hits full stride. Now I know this is old hat to our European friends, but at what point do we stop driving around pointlessly? Although one might think that electric cars […]
When will the other shoe drop? Gasoline prices are flirting with the $3 per gallon psych-barrier as we sit back and take it in the wallet, once again. I just got back from a quick jaunt up to Killington, Vermont for a few days of spring skiing. The ride back on the New York Thruway […]
I saw a service station selling regular gas for $2.10 yesterday and thought, “wow, prices have really dropped!” The oil industry, no doubt, hopes that we think “wow, that’s really cheap!” But we all know it isn’t … no matter how hard big oil pushes our price/pain reset buttons. So when I read today that […]
My mailbox was stuffed with a tremendous response to yesterday’s rant about the laughable farce of the hydrogen economy. E-mail poured in from the around the globe. Read on and soak in the amazing things that the Gnome World has to share…
From Australia, Gnomie Peter wrote:
A good 4 cyl diesel should average over 60 […]
Fuel cell cars … they sound like pure magic, until you think about it. Ponder it long enough and you might come to understand that the whole idea of waiting decades for a hydrogen-economy to develop is pure something else (that I’m not allowed to say). Here’s why …
Everybody’s talking about these insane gas prices, but is anyone actually doing something about it? Heck, yeah! Did you read the story about the electrical engineer that modded (that’s hot rodded to this old schooler) his Toyota to get a cool 80 miles per gallon? And that’s just a start …
It’s summertime and like many families, we’ve been on the road. While we haven’t been able to take a monster road trip (yet), we’ve taken plenty of day trips to the beach. Needless to say, we’ve burned more than our fair share of gas. We were sitting at the pump this weekend, when I came […]