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Toronto's Zenn Motors has laid out its plans for a freeway-legal car, and on paper it looks pretty good.

The CityZenn will hit a top speed of 80 miles per hour (or a 125 kilometers per hour as they insist on saying in Canada) but more importantly, it will be rechargeable in five minutes. That's an astounding breakthrough: Lengthy charge times have been one of the many reasons that electric cars have yet to go mainstream. Cars powered by lithium-ion batteries need a few hours to fully charge.

Electra glide in silver.

(Credit: Zenn Motors)

Zenn's car will be powered by an energy storage unit from secretive EEStor. EEStor has built an ultracapacitor that stores electrons better than a battery, the company claims. The company has said its component can also power electric cars for longer distances than batteries. Few people, however, have been able to test the company's technology, and EEStor has had to endure some delays. The secrecy and other factors have made some skeptical of EEStor.

The CityZenn comes out in the fall of 2009. While it will sell for a premium over similar gas cars, it will be affordable for mainstream buyers, the company says. Most likely it will come out in Europe first and the U.S. later. Zenn is expected to get its first samples of EEStor's energy storage units this year. Zenn is also an investor in the company.

Both Zenn and EEStor will collaborate to sell drive trains that will let car owners convert their gas-burners to running on electric.

Now for the qualifiers. EEStor may face further delays. Zenn will have to jump through several regulatory hurdles to get its cars on the road, so initial sales may be pushed past the fall 2009 goal.

Zenn, along with Tesla and a few others, has been one of the more realistic electric car companies. The company currently sells low-speed electric vehicles which get used as fleet cars on army bases and university campuses. The picture included here is a shot of its latest low-speed vehicle. CEO Ian Clifford has said that technical challenges have been one of the reasons electric cars aren't driving around in huge numbers on the streets today. (He doesn't talk about oil company conspiracies.) In other words, the company has a track record of actually selling vehicles and not overpromising.

So we shall wait and see. Either way, 2009 will be a huge year for electric cars. Tesla will be in mass production of its Tesla Roadster by then and will be starting to come out with (or finishing up) its Whitestar sedan. Tesla will make an all-electric and plug-in hybrid version of Whitestar. General Motors will be one year away from the Volt. And Fisker Automotive will start producing its sporty plug-in hybrid, the Fisker Karma.

Tesla Motors, the people who put the all-electric car on the map, are going to work with gas too.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based company will produce two basic types of its Whitestar sedan, due toward the end of 2009. One will run completely on batteries. The other will be a range-extended vehicle, or REV, CEO Ze'ev Drori said in an interview. In an REV, a small gas motor recharges the battery pack while the car is being driven. The battery pack on these types of cars only goes about 40 to 50 miles on a charge, but because it gets recharged while driving, the range of these cars will be longer.

"It is more than research. We intend to have it as part of the offering," Drori said. "The Whitestar can be all-electric or it can be an REV."

The idea behind coming out with an REV is to reach prospective buyers who are worried about range, said Elon Musk, Tesla's chairman. (Drori and Musk were holding a press conference at corporate headquarters to mark the delivery of the first commercial version of the Tesla Roadster. Musk owns it.). The all-electric version of Whitestar is expected to go for 150 to 200 miles on a charge.

If the competition is an indication, the REV version of Whitestar will go much further. GM was the first major car company to tout REVs with its Chevy Volt, due around 2010. The Volt is expected to go around 400 miles before completely conking.

Range has been one of the historical problems with electric cars. The distance an electric car can drive is controlled by the size and performance of its battery pack. The Tesla Roadster, coming out this year, can go more than 200 miles on a charge, but it costs $98,000. GM's fated EV1 only went 80 or so miles on a charge, CEO Rick Wagoner said in a recent interview.

The gas-electric version of Whitestar will cost a little less than the all-electric version, Musk added, but the difference will be fairly minimal. Building a gas-electric isn't cheap. Automakers have to insert generators. The battery pack also requires different cells.

A Tesla Roadster prototype

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)

Whitestar is expected to sell in the $50,000 to $70,000 range, depending on the configuration (some of the all-electric cars will have bigger batteries than others and vary in price, for instance). The car will likely compete against luxury sedans from companies like BMW. Later, Tesla will also come out with an economy car, Musk said.

Still, the REV concept can be used to lower prices. GM wants to sell the Volt for around $30,000. The Volt is expected to go 400 miles before completely conking out.

Tesla has hinted that it might go the REV direction. As reported earlier, Tesla executives complimented the design of the Volt, calling it elegant, back in December. At that time, however, executives only said that Tesla was looking at all options.

(Credit: General Motors)

While it still won't get you the 45 mpg of a Toyota Prius, the new version of the Chevrolet Silverado hybrid may make you feel less guilty about driving a large pickup.

General Motors unveiled the 2009 Chevy Silverado hybrid at the 2007 LA Auto Show on Wednesday.

The full-size pickup looks identical to the regular Silverado, but features guts that lessen its carbon footprint.

The 2007 Silverado hybrid, according to the EPA's fuel economy Web site, got about 15 mpg in the city and 19 mph on the highway. That's not much of an improvement over the efficiency of the regular Silverado pickup: depending on which engine you choose, that truck gets at the very worst 13 mpg driving in the city and at most 20 mpg on the highway, according to GM's own specs.

The 2009 Silverado two-mode hybrid will be about 25 percent more fuel efficient overall than its regular counterpart, according to GM. No official figures have been given out, but it's possible that this pickup could get about 21 mpg on the highway.

"We get asked often about why we're making hybrid versions of big trucks and SUVs. There are two answers, and they're both simple: because Americans still need, buy, and love trucks; and because we want to do what we can to lessen the environmental impact when we drive them," Ed Peper, general manager of Chevrolet, said on the company blog.

Peper also gloated about GM's Chevy Tahoe hybrid being a finalist for the LA Auto Show 2008 Green Car of the Year Award.

(Credit: General Motors)

Honda is upping its production of gas-electric hybrid cars, but has no immediate plans to develop the kind of hybrid that would recharge from an electrical outlet, the company announced Tuesday.

Honda CEO Takeo Fukui also publicly criticized General Motors for its pursuit of the Chevy Volt at a press conference on Tuesday in Japan.

If that kind of high-performance battery power is possible then carmakers would be better served making a completely electric vehicle from an environmental standpoint, said Fukui, according to the The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Honda is scheduled to release several environmentally friendly vehicles at the 2007 Tokyo auto show this week. Among them may be a hybrid sports car and a diesel-engine car that gets 60 mpg.

GM has been touring its Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid electric car that it plans to make available to consumers by 2010, across the U.S. since its debut at the Detroit auto show. The Volt could possibly run off lithium-ion battery power alone for about 40 miles, according to GM.

Many critics have raised questions as to whether that battery type, more commonly used in laptops, could be cost effective and energy efficient for car use. GM has said it's developing the necessary technology to make a lithium-ion battery hybrid successful and plans to test out the Volt as soon as spring 2008.

The news follows statements made Monday by Toyota that it's taking its time to develop a plug-in hybrid to address questions of cost, efficiency and consumer interest.

Questions about expense, reliability and profitability are good reasons for Toyota to take its time on a plug-in electric hybrid, a company executive said Monday.

Yoshitaka Asakura, project general manager in Toyota's hybrid vehicle system-engineering division, said Monday in an article in The Wall Street Journal that Toyota is taking into account that not all consumers, despite vocal environmentalist groups, may be interested in a car that has to be re-charged daily.

Toyota executives spoke at several break-out sessions on emissions reduction, battery technology and design strategy on Monday at the 2007 Tokyo International Automotive Conference, of which Toyota and The Wall Street Journal are sponsors.

Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota's president, is scheduled to give a speech at the conference Tuesday to outline his company's goals.

The company's attitude toward plug-in electric hybrids is noticeably more conservative than the one that rival General Motors has put forth.

GM has promised that its Chevy Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid car that will run on lithium-ion batteries, will be tested in spring 2008 and available for purchase in 2010. The company has been touring the concept Chevy Volt car around the U.S. to promote its future sale.

Toyota has not given a timetable for when its plug-in electric car will be available to consumers, though it has been working on pilot projects with household plug-in cars in Japan.

The company has also said in the past that current battery technology may be too expensive at this point to make a plug-in electric commercially viable. Some have estimated that it costs about .

In answer to critics' questions of battery expense, GM has said a new business model of leasing a car's battery may be introduced to release its car at an affordable price.

All the rhetoric comes amid an ongoing battle of some automakers against new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that would require them to raise the average mpg per product line from the current 25 mpg to 35 mpg by 2020. The bill requires automakers to either improve the mileage of trucks and sport utility vehicles and/or introduce more efficient cars in their lineup to bring down their overall fleet average.

Will a new anti-theft tool from General Motors and OnStar be enough to make your car not worth the hassle of stealing?

The Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, a new feature added to OnStar, takes away the ability to use a car's gas pedal, while allowing braking and steering controls to work.

OnStar, which already communicates with a car's engine through software, will now use that platform to bypass a driver's foot on the gas pedal and automatically slow down a car by preventing any further acceleration.

OnStar said it will only enable the service if a situation meets a "required criteria," such as a police request while pursuing a stolen vehicle, or if a child has accidentally been kidnapped by a person stealing what they assumed was an empty idling car.

Protocol for activating the service will require a car owner to first report the vehicle stolen to the police, then call OnStar and request the Stolen Vehicle Slowdown service be activated. OnStar will then use GPS-tracking to first locate the vehicle and give police a chance to get in its vicinity. Once police have reported the vehicle in sight and requested a slow-down, OnStar will activate a signal that causes a car's powertrain system to reduce engine power and ignore acceleration from the gas pedal.

"Safeguards will be in place to ensure that the correct vehicle in slowed down," OnStar said in a statement.

The new feature, which will be implemented in about 1.7 million of GM's 2009 model year vehicles, is an extension of OnStar's pre-existing Stolen Vehicle Location Assistance feature that first came out in 1996.

OnStar is also giving owners the choice to opt out of the service if they don't want it on their car.

OnStar currently receives about 700 requests to activate the Stolen Vehicle Location Assistance feature each month and has used it on over 28,000 cars since 1996, according to a company statement.

Besides Toyota Motor and BMW, automakers haven't done a great job of building fleets that emit less carbon dioxide, according to an Environmental Defense report.

The organization's 80-page report, called "Automakers' Corporate Carbon Burdens" (PDF), evaluated the carbon dioxide emissions of vehicles from major automakers between 1990 and 2005. Companies graded were: Ford Motor, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Honda Motor, Nissan Motor, Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, Volkswagen, BMW, Subaru and Mitsubishi Motors.

"The rate of carbon dioxide emissions from new cars and light trucks in the U.S. dipped for the first time in two decades, but their overall contribution to global warming has continued to grow steadily since 1990," Environmental Defense said in a statement.

BMW achieved a 12 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions across its entire fleet of cars, more than any of the other car companies included in the study. Environmental Defense attributes the drop to the company's addition of the low carbon dioxide-emitting Mini Cooper to its lineup, as well as efficiency improvements made across its entire line of cars.

Toyota was rated the second best, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 3 percent overall during that period, due in large part to its introduction of the Prius hybrid to its lineup and efficiency improvements made to the Corolla.

The report also rated the overall "carbon burden" that automakers placed on the environment, based on factors that included the emissions of their cars and the number of cars sold.

In this area, GM ranked No. 1, with a 6.5 percent reduction in overall carbon burden. Environmental Defense, however, attributed this to GM's loss of market share, not to the carbon dioxide emissions of its overall lineup, which actually rose 3 percent. In contrast, Toyota, while low in its 3 percent carbon dioxide emissions reduction rate, grew its carbon burden by 125 percent, due to an increase in overall sales.

Environmental Defense combined the average over an entire lineup of cars and light trucks from 1990 to 2005 to determine an automaker fleet's average carbon dioxide emissions rate:

• BMW, reduced 12.3 percent.

• Toyota, reduced 3 percent .

• Volkswagen, up 1.3 percent.

• Subaru, up 1.6 percent.

• General Motors, up 3 percent.

• Mitsubishi, up 4 percent.

• Honda, up 4.4 percent.

• Ford, up 4.7 percent.

• DaimlerChrysler, up 4.8 percent.

• Nissan, up 9.2 percent.

• Hyundai, up 17 percent.

• Kia, up 30 percent.

General Motors may lease the battery packs for its Chevy Volt electric car to make it more affordable, according to a news report.

The Volt is unveiled at the 2007 Detroit auto show.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

GM's electric car will take lithium-ion batteries which are known to be expensive and have a limited lifespan compared with the life of a car.

Bob Lutz, GM's global product chief, has said that the company hopes to make the car available in the $30,000 price range.

While GM has several leading battery technology developers and manufacturers onboard in its effort to build an affordable, long-range rechargeable battery for the car, critics have pointed out that the price point could be a challenge given the technology needed to go into it.

To achieve that price point, GM may rent the battery packs needed to run the Chevy Volt, The Financial Times has reported.

GM announced in early August that the company will be ready to test the Chevy Volt in spring 2008 and is still on track for a late 2010 sales availability.

Chevy Tahoe hybrid

General Motors is banking on the increasing demand for fuel-efficient cars by launching hybrid versions of two of its full-size SUVs: the GMC Yukon and the Chevy Tahoe. And although the cars aren't slated to go on sale until this fall, GM is already busy building buzz.

The new models, available in both two- and four-wheel drive, use a "two-mode" powertrain designed jointly by GM with BMW and Daimler-Chrysler. This Hybrid Operating System (HOS) allows the car to operate either on electricity or gasoline, depending on the power needs of the car.

Allocation of electric power versus gasoline power is determined by a combination of factors, including driver input, speed and terrain. GM claims the Tahoe can run with gentle throttle input (that is, no punching down on the gas pedal) up to about 32 miles per hour purely on electric power. If the driver reaches higher speeds, accelerates quickly or starts up a steep grade, the internal combustion V8 engine will kick in to deliver more power. The two-mode system also provides enough juice to tow up to 6,200 pounds.

Like other hybrids, the Tahoe and Yukon use regenerative braking to help recharge the car's 300-volt nickel-metal-hydride battery when the car stops or slows down. Two electric motors power an electronically variable hybrid transmission.

GM hasn't released numbers in any detail yet, but the company claims the new hybrids are 40 percent more fuel-efficient in city driving alone, and 25 percent more fuel-efficient overall than their nonhybrid counterparts. The big discrepancy between city and overall performance is due, in part, to the fact that the car relies more heavily on electric power at slower speeds, and because city driving requires more braking, which charges the battery more often.

GMC Yukon hybrid

While the two-mode system seems to provide ample power, it's hard to believe the typical full-size-SUV owner would use these cars in a manner that would achieve maximum fuel efficiency. Passengers and cargo, as well as towing, affect gas mileage drastically. Even with a light load, fuel efficiency can vary greatly from driver to driver -- lead-footers will see that fuel gauge needle drop much faster.

Even under optimal driving conditions, a mere 25 percent overall improvement in fuel quality is a little disappointing. The 2007 nonhybrid models of the Tahoe and Yukon are rated between 15 and 22 miles per gallon, depending on the trim level. That means, at their best, the new hybrids will perform 3.75 to 5.5 miles per gallon better overall (although GM says city driving alone yields an improvement of 6 miles per gallon).

That said, continued consumer demand for horsepower and a simultaneous increase in environmental awareness must make it incredibly difficult for designers and engineers to strike a balance between fuel efficiency and performance, especially with vehicles this size. With these seemingly conflicting interests in mind, the Tahoe and Yukon do a fair job pleasing some without alienating others. And while GM's hybrid models are a step in the right direction, the reality is, at this point in time, gigantic SUVs still aren't good for the environment.

GM plans to unveil hybrid versions of other cars and trucks over the next couple of years, including hybrid Saturn and Cadillac models. Could a fuel-efficient Escalade be on its way?