Transportation

Ford is partnering with Azure Dynamics on a five-seater station wagon version of its Transit Connect all-electric vans.

Both companies announced the project Wednesday in time for the 2011 Los Angeles Auto Show.

The Ford Transit Connect Electric Wagon will be available in North America immediately, with plans to eventually sell it in Europe as well.

The Transit Connect vans, which went into production in 2010, are already in the fleets of AT&T, DHL, FedEx, and Post Norway, to name a few. The vehicle won the 2010 North American Truck of the Year award, to the surprise of … Read more

Environmentally conscious consumers these days have more choices when it comes to deciding on a greener car. Hybrid? Plug-in hybrid? All-electric?

Well, what about natural gas, says Honda. The automaker has been rolling out its Civic that runs on natural gas to more states. But how common are fueling stations with natural gas? (As with electric vehicles, it's all about the infrastructure.)

In the video above, SmartPlanet's Sumi Das talks to Jay Guzowski, senior product planner with Honda, about the automaker's plans to sell the Civic nationwide.

This video first appeared at SmartPlanet under the headline "… Read more

There's a constant tension at Google between fast-moving, nimble, disruptive projects and the more plodding established business.

Sometimes the entrenched part of the business comes out ahead, as when Google canceled Google Labs. But attempts to nurture a start-up ethos within the company continue, this time with a project called Google X digging into advanced robotics and more.

Word of Google X had bubbled up in recent months, via MG Siegler, formerly of TechCrunch, and Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider. But New York Times' Clair Cain Miller and Nick Bilton have just delivered a lot more detail with a … Read more

Lots of things have changed about cars over the past few decades. One that hasn't evolved all that much is the user interface that most of them provide. Garden-variety automobiles are still full of gauges and buttons and switches of the decidedly physical, old-fashioned sort.

And then there's Tesla's Model S. Due in showrooms next summer, the $57,400 sedan is the spiritual offpsring of the company's $108,000 Roadster sports car, in a more practical package. But when I checked it out today at GigaOM's RoadMap conference in San Francisco, I wasn't … Read more

The Alaska Air Group is joining the commercial aviation biofuel movement.

The airline launched two flights yesterday running on a blend consisting of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent petroleum-based fuel. The sustainable biofuel used for the blend was made from cooking oil.

One flight was via a Boeing 737-800 plane from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and the other a Bombardier Q400 plane headed from Seattle to Portland, Ore. Both planes were flown as part of a program to fly more than 75 flights on a cooking oil-based biofuel blend within the coming weeks on Alaska Air's Alaskan … Read more

It's been only two weeks since taking paying passengers skyward for the first time, but Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has already had its first mechanical glitch.

According to published reports, Boeing and All Nippon Airways--the Dreamliner's launch customer--are investigating a landing-gear deployment problem that hit ANA's first 787 on Sunday. The pilots of the next-generation plane had to "deploy the landing gear using a manual backup system," Reuters reported, "after an indicator lamp suggested the wheels were not properly down."

No passengers were injured, and the plane is said to have already been … Read more

The era of American commercial airliners flying on biofuels is here.

A Continental Airlines Boeing 737-800 from Houston yesterday became the first U.S. plane to fly passengers while using an algae-based biofuel. According to an article originally published in the Houston Chronicle, the Continental flight carried 154 customers while using the fuel blend, which was developed by South San Francisco, Calif.-based Solazyme.

"United Continental Holdings, the airline's parent company, estimated that the biofuel blend on the Chicago-bound flight reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equal to what would come from the exhaust of a car … Read more

Electric and hybrid cars grab all the headlines, but Honda's natural gas-powered Civic has been quietly running along, reducing CO2 emissions since 1998.

Of Honda's line of 2012 Civics, people are most likely to be unfamiliar with the Natural Gas version. The public in general is not aware that natural gas can power cars, in addition to heating houses and cooking food. Nor is the average man on the street likely to know that a gallon of natural gas is two-thirds (or less) the cost of a gallon of gasoline. That natural gas emits 30 percent less CO2 than gasoline is another little-known fact.

To spread some knowledge, Honda put me behind the wheel of its 2012 Civic Natural Gas for a drive that included city traffic, freeway merging, and some mountain twisties.… Read more

A certain safety feature in cars could cut the number of fatalities in single-vehicle accidents by almost half and by 20 percent in multi-car crashes, studies have shown.

Car crashes cost $300 billion a year, according to a recent AAA study, and the human cost is even greater. Consumer Reports says a technology known as electronic stability control can dramatically lower the number of deaths in car accidents. Not all vehicles are equipped with the safety feature; in the past, it was often offered as an upgrade. But starting with the 2012 model year, all cars must come with ESC. … Read more