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Recharge Wrap-up: Ford HQ gets giant solar array, Chevy City Express gets 24 MPG city

Ford will be building Michigan's largest solar array at its Dearborn headquarters. With funding from DTE Energy, the solar carport will provide covered parking, as well 30 charging stations for electric vehicles. The array is expected to generate 1.13 million kWh per year for Ford's operations, and offset 794 metric tons of carbon emissions. Read more in the press release below. Chevrolet announced the fuel economy for the 2015 City Express, at 25 mpg combined. The cargo van is rated at 24 mpg in the city, and 26 mpg on the highway. Chevy credits the van's inline four-cylinder engine and continuously variable transmission for its impressive city mileage. For its customers - which are mainly businesses - "The fuel economy of the City Express will help stretch their dollar at the pump and give them the flexibility to invest the savings back into their business," says Chevrolet's Ed Peper. The City Express starts at $22,950. Read more in the press release below. Engineers at the University of Wisconsin have developed an efficient engine that runs on a diesel-gas blend. The engine, which uses a computer to control the blend proportions, is about 15 percent more efficient than the any diesel engine according to mechanical engineering professor Rolf Reitz. The team has put the experimental reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) engine in a demonstration car - a 2009 Saturn. "This vehicle can do 50 miles per gallon," says Reitz, who believes the system could be improved further. Read more at Wisconsin Public Radio. The Southeast Alternative Fuel Conference and Expo will take place in October in Raleigh, North Carolina. Held at the NC Clean Energy Technology Center from October 22-24, the event will feature a variety of exhibitors, speakers and, most importantly, alternatively powered vehicles. "The three day conference will be a one-stop shop for fleet and transportation related decision makers to learn about return on investment, efficiency and alternative transportation fuels such as biodiesel, electricity, ethanol, propane and natural gas," says Anne Tazewell of the NC Clean Energy Technology Center. If you can't make it to Raleigh for the Expo, you can still enter to win a free two-year lease of a Nissan Leaf at the Center's website. Learn more about the event in the press release, below.

Defying Trump, major automakers finalize California emissions deal

WASHINGTON — The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and major automakers on Monday confirmed they had finalized binding agreements to cut vehicle emissions in the state, defying the Trump administration's push for weaker curbs on tailpipe pollution. The agreements with carmakers Ford Motor Co, Volkswagen AG, Honda Motor Co and BMW AG were first announced in July 2019 as voluntary measures prompting anger from U.S. President Donald Trump. A month later, the Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into the agreements. The government ended the investigation without action. The Trump administration in March finalized a rollback of U.S. vehicle emissions standards to require 1.5% annual increases in efficiency through 2026. That is far weaker than the 5% annual increases in the discarded rules adopted under President Barack Obama. The 50-page California agreements, which extend through 2026, are less onerous than the standards finalized by the Obama administration but tougher than the Trump administration standards. The automakers have also agreed to electric vehicle commitments. Volvo Cars, owned by China's Geely Holdings, said in March it planned to join the automakers agreeing to the California requirements. It has also finalized its agreement. The settlement agreements say California and automakers agreed to resolve "potential legal disputes concerning the authority of CARB" and other states that have adopted California's standards. In May, a group of 23 U.S. states led by California and some major cities, challenged the Trump vehicle emissions rule. Other major automakers like General Motors Co, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Toyota Motor Corp did not join the California agreement. Those companies also sided with the Trump administration in a separate lawsuit over whether the federal government can strip California of the right to set zero emission vehicle requirements. Ford said the "final agreement will reduce emissions in our vehicles at a more stringent rate, support and incentivize the production of electrified products, and create regulatory certainty." BMW said "by setting these long-term, predictable, and achievable standards, we have the regulatory certainty that is necessary for long-term planning that will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but ultimately benefit consumers as well." 

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.