Tag: vehicles

Cities Share Cars to Save Cash

  • Cities have started to use car sharing programs in order to save money (Photo by Ed Edahl, courtesy of FEMA)

Car sharing has long been considered a green
alternative to owning a car. Both in terms of
expense and the environment. Companies like
Zipcar have made this concept mainstream in
a lot of urban areas. Now some cities are
trying out car sharing with their municipal
fleets. Tamara Keith has more:

Transcript

Car sharing has long been considered a green
alternative to owning a car. Both in terms of
expense and the environment. Companies like
Zipcar have made this concept mainstream in
a lot of urban areas. Now some cities are
trying out car sharing with their municipal
fleets. Tamara Keith has more:

Karyn LeBlanc works in the Washington DC department of transportation, so maybe it’s not surprising that she was one of the first to try out the city’s FleetShare program.

“It’s this one over here, right here, says 6067 is the license plate on it.”

A white Honda Civic powered by natural gas is waiting for her in a parking lot behind a city office.

She went online to reserve the car and it’s expecting her. At least the very smart computer transponder thingie in the front windshield is expecting her. LeBlanc presses something that looks like a credit card up to the device.

“So, we place this right here and you hear that little click and the car opens.”

The tank is full, the keys are inside, and LaBlanc is off and running.

(sound of driving)

“I would say I use fleetshare 2 or 3 times a week for any meeting that I need to go to or that I need to get to. So I go where I need to go. I park it. I go to my meeting. I get back in the car and I go back to the office.”

For people who use Zipcar this process will sound very familiar. The company has simply brought its car-sharing technology to Washington DC’s municipal fleet.

So far DC has about 60 new cars outfitted with Zipcar gear. But here’s the remarkable thing, those 60 cars are replacing 360. How? The new cars are getting a lot more use than the old ones.

“We’re getting up to 71% utilization on all these cars.”

When we spoke to him, Dan Tangerlini was DC’s Deputy Mayor.

We’re standing in the middle of a municipal parking lot. On one side there are empty spaces where the fleetshare cars park – on the other side there are just a bunch of white city cars.

“You see all this white iron around here. All these DC government vehicles that are kind of sitting static because these are assigned to individuals and those individuals don’t have a reason to be in that vehicle right now.”

Tangherlini says this system will save the city about 6 million dollars over the next five years – which is welcome at a time when budgets are tight.

Which might explain why Scott Griffith’s phone keeps ringing. He’s Zipcar’s CEO and says the company is now in talks with 25 cities.

“They all have the same challenges, not enough tax money, too many cars. They do need to move people around during the day and we’re trying to make that happen in the most efficient way.”

But this isn’t just about money. Griffith says when people share cars they end up driving more efficiently. When they have to book in advance rather than a bunch of individual trips they stack all their stops in one trip.

Car sharing isn’t new for cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia. They’ve had programs in place for some time where city workers can use cars loaned out by private car sharing companies. They use the same one the public uses.

Eli Masser helped form the relationship in Philadelphia between the city and the non-profit Philly Car Share which he co-founded.

“One of the benefits of car sharing with municipalities or most businesses for that matter is residential demand is in the evenings and on weekends and most business demand and municipal demand is during the day.”

Which means those cars are busy well beyond the 40 hour work week. Critics say this model is far more efficient than what Zipcar is doing in DC. But Masser says there’s an even better model – a hybrid of DC and Philly.

Ideally cities would have a relatively small city-owned fleet of shared cars and even heavy machinery. But most city workers would car-share with the public.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Speculators Cause Spike in Oil Prices

The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:

Transcript

The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:

Right now there’s a huge glut of supply of oil – and at the same time, weak global demand for it.

Ruchir Kadakia is a global oil market expert. He’s with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

He says speculators are driving oil prices up.

“People believe that with positive economic growth in the future there will be greater demand for oil. So they start to buy up oil in anticipation of that demand recovery.”

So these speculators are making money while most of the economy is in a slump.

But Kadakia thinks the realities of supply and demand will eventually catch up and drag oil prices back down.

“The pain we’re feeling at the pump today is probably going to be the worst we feel all this summer.”

He thinks gas prices might actually get back below two dollars a gallon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Funding for Hydrogen Vehicles Hit Hard

  • Mercedez-Benz A-Class F-Cell at the 2009 Washington DC Auto Show (Photo source: IFCAR at Wikimedia Commons)

The Department of Energy wants to cut funding for the development of hydrogen powered vehicles. Mark Brush reports the Energy Secretary has decided that cars powered by hydrogen are too far off:

Transcript

The Department of Energy wants to cut funding for the development of hydrogen powered vehicles. Mark Brush reports the Energy Secretary has decided that cars powered by hydrogen are too far off:

Six years ago, President George W. Bush proposed spending 1.2 billion dollars to develop hydrogen power cars.

Now, Stephen Chu, President Obama’s Energy Secretary, says hydrogen powered cars aren’t yet practical for today’s market.

Chu says they’d rather spend money on things like plug-in cars and cars powered by biofuels. Things that can hit the road now instead of 20 years from now.

People working on hydrogen powered vehicles aren’t too happy about the cuts.

Patrick Serfass is with the National Hydrogen Association.

“I’d say the hydrogen industry is perplexed. The administration has a lot of smart people in it and they have done a lot of great things for many parts of the renewable energy sector. But the proposal to eliminate the hydrogen vehicle program is a mistake.”

Serfass says hydrogen powered cars are not as far off as the Energy Secretary might think. He and his group are trying to persuade members of Congress to put research money back into the budget.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Compromise on Cash for Clunkers

  • In order to qualify an old vehicle must get less than 18 miles per gallon. (Photo source: IFCAR at Wikimedia Commons)

After a meeting with the White House, Members of Congress appear to be close to a deal
on a so-called “cash for clunkers” program. But Tamara Keith reports critics say the
compromise members have come up with won’t do much for the environment:

Transcript

After a meeting with the White House, Members of Congress appear to be close to a deal
on a so-called “cash for clunkers” program. But Tamara Keith reports critics say the
compromise members have come up with won’t do much for the environment:

The “cash for clunkers” program has wide support as good for the environment; good for
the ailing auto industry.

Car owners would get a voucher towards a new fuel efficient car when they scrap their
old gas guzzler. In order to qualify an old vehicle must get less than 18 miles per gallon.
But a new car that does just 4 miles per gallon better earns a $3,500 reward. A
10 MPG improvement brings $4,500.

Critics say many of the new replacement vehicles would fall well short of the
government’s average fuel economy standards.

Congressman John Dingell from Michigan says the critics are missing the point: the new
cars will be more fuel efficient than the ones that are getting junked.

“What they aught to ask is, ‘what is this going to mean in terms of increased fuel
efficiency and reduced CO2 emissions.’ The result will be substantial.”

Of course the deal isn’t really done until it is approved by Congress. If it passes, the
President is expected to sign it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Gasoline Goes Low-Carbon

  • Today almost everything that goes into your car's gas tank started as oil (Photo by Shawn Allee)

How you fuel your car could change pretty quickly. California air regulators are requiring gasoline producers to reduce greenhouse gases by 10% by 2020. That could force big oil companies to invest in alternative fuels. Tamara Keith reports when it comes to environmental regulations, what happens in California usually spreads from there:

Transcript

How you fuel your car could change pretty quickly. California air regulators are requiring gasoline producers to reduce greenhouse gases by 10% by 2020. That could force big oil companies to invest in alternative fuels. Tamara Keith reports when it comes to environmental regulations, what happens in California usually spreads from there:

Today almost everything that goes into your car’s gas tank started as oil. But in the future it could be very different.

“The fuels that we will be moving towards are electricity, biofuels and hydrogen mostly.”

Daniel Sperling is a member of the California Air Resources Board which voted in the new rule.

Sperling says the goal is to reduce the overall greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle fuels. That could mean oil companies might even have to buy credits from power companies for electric cars.

“You start transforming the oil industry, getting off of oil. I mean that’s what we talk about and this is a policy that will actually do it.”

The California rule even looks at how much greenhouse gas pollution goes into making corn ethanol.

Oil companies say fuel prices will definitely go up in California.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Going Car Free in a Car-Crazy Society

  • Kathryn Stewart and her boyfriend Roger Williams have gone car-free in Phoenix. They live 30 miles apart, so it can be a very long bike ride to see each other. (Photo by Rene Gutel)

The cars we drive pump out a lot of pollution. The average car puts out about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. So whenever we drive, we’re adding to the global warming problem. To cut down on that pollution, there are some people who are giving up their cars altogether. They’re joining a movement called the “World Carfree Network.” Rene Gutel reports on one of their members:

Transcript

The cars we drive pump out a lot of pollution. The average car puts out about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. So whenever we drive, we’re adding to the global warming problem. To cut down on that pollution, there are some people who are giving up their cars altogether. They’re joining a movement called the “World Carfree Network.” Rene Gutel reports on one of their members:

Kathryn Stewart doesn’t own a car. She’s never even had a driver’s license. She’s an editor at a publishing company and commutes mostly by bus and by bicycle.

And while you might think you know plenty of people like Stewart, especially in big cities such as New York or Chicago, consider this: Stewart lives in Phoenix – the land of freeways and strip malls and summers that top 115 degrees.

“Honestly it’s really difficult in Phoenix. It’s challenging but not impossible if you’re really committed to it. It takes a lot of advance planning.”

(sound of street)

Stewart’s work is just a few miles away, but it takes her half an hour to get there.

She says one of the hardest parts of being carfree in Arizona are those broiling summer days. But she has a secret weapon – a heat-shielding umbrella that she daintily refers to as her parasol.

“My parasol is great. I don’t care how I look – it’s amazing.” (laughs)

But major cities in the US aren’t necessarily built for people who like to walk to work. This is especially true in the West.

Carol Johnson is a planner for the city of Phoenix. She says this is due, in part, to a theory that was popular in the 1960s, when everything was planned for the car.

“This is my opinion, maybe there were some efficiencies of scale in terms of infrastructure – if you only had to put one road in, even it was six lanes wide, that was more efficient.”

But a lot of cities now are trying to get people out of their cars. They want to cut pollution and ease traffic problems.

The mayor of New York, for example, proposed a fee on cars to get more people to take public transit. And San Francisco hosts “CarFree Days” where they promote walking, running, and bicycling.

(sound of biking outdoors)

Okay so this may all sound well and good, but what does being carfree mean for Kathryn Stewart’s social life? How does she meet people and have any fun in this city built for cars?

Turns out she manages. She and her boyfriend – Roger Williams – see each on weekends. They like to take bike rides.

“We going right or left, Roger? Take a left. After these cars.”

They live about 30 miles apart – not a long car trip, but by bike, the ride can take two and a half hours. Williams owns a car, but he figured out pretty early on in their relationship that a willingness to be carfree was a good way to impress her.

Williams: “The first real date that we did, I surprised her and she was asking me questions, oh what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? And I’m like, it’s a surprise but we’ll be able to walk the whole date.”
Gutel: “So you were like the carfree Casanova?”

Williams: (laughter) “I love it! I saw the opportunity and I seized the opportunity.”

Stewart and Williams also encourage each other to be healthy and have less of an impact on their environment by the foods they eat. But being carfree, that’s the main sacrifice.

“I really feel like I’m making a big dent, cause, you know, there’s a lot that people say you can do, make small changes, do this, do that, but when you don’t have a car, it’s automatically, like, a big change.”

Stewart says she realizes it’s big change most people would have a hard time with. But it’s a choice she’s dedicated to in order to do something about global warming.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rene Gutel.

Related Links

Under the Hood of Cash for Clunkers

  • Congress is trying to work out a bill that would mean bring in a clunker, get cash towards the purchase of a new high mileage car (Photo source: Flicka at Wikimedia Commons)

On Capitol Hill, there’s growing momentum for legislation called “Cash for Clunkers.” In fact, there are several bills circulating in Congress and the details are in flux. But the general idea is to use tax dollars to encourage people to trade their old gas guzzling clunker for a new fuel efficient car. The hope is to help the slumping auto industry and the environment at the same time. Tamara Keith gives the environmental claims a test drive:

Transcript

On Capitol Hill, there’s growing momentum for legislation called “Cash for Clunkers.” In fact, there are several bills circulating in Congress and the details are in flux. But the general idea is to use tax dollars to encourage people to trade their old gas guzzling clunker for a new fuel efficient car. The hope is to help the slumping auto industry and the environment at the same time. Tamara Keith gives the environmental claims a test drive:

At DarCars, a Toyota dealership in Silver Spring, Maryland people are shopping for cars.

But business is down.

Tammy Darvish is vice president of DarCars automotive group. Here’s how she describes “cash for clunkers.”

“It’s money from heaven.”

Well, from angels in Congress anyway. Bring in a clunker, get cash towards the purchase of a new high mileage car.

“I think they were talking about $4,000 or $5,000 or even $2,000. Whatever it is. Any incentive that you could add to the manufacturer incentives and the dealer incentives just make it all the better deal for the customer.”

And as we walk around the lot, Darvish points out plenty of cars she figures could qualify as fuel efficient replacements for clunkers. Like this one that gets 35 miles to the gallon on the highway.

“So here’s a Corolla and it’s not a hybrid technology vehicle and it’s still getting great gas mileage and all the manufacturers have vehicles, you know in those ranges.”

But not everyone is sold on the merits of a cash for clunkers program.

Dan Sperling heads the Institute for Transportation Studies at University of California Davis.

“What it mostly does, and we should be honest about it is it stimulates vehicle sales.”

He says this is more an economic policy with a green polish.

“It is supporting the use of more low carbon efficient vehicles, that’s good. It is supporting the automotive industry. That’s good. The problem is, it’s a very expensive way to do that.”

Whether a federal cash for clunkers program will be able to claim environmental success will largely come down to what counts as a clunker – and just how fuel efficient the car that replaces it needs to be.

For example, one version of the legislation would allow any car 8 years old or older to be junked in exchange for cash.

But an 8 year old car isn’t exactly a gelloppe. That’s younger than the average car on the road.

Bill Chameides is dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

“I would say that cash for clunkers programs that only put a requirement on the age of a car, from an environmental point of view is a real clunker, if you pardon the pun.”

To really analyze the environmental impact of a program like this Chameides says you also have to consider what it takes to manufacture a new car. And it turns out a lot of greenhouse gas emissions come from building a car.

“When you drive that new car out of the showroom, you already have 1 year of carbon dioxide emissions already in the atmosphere.”

So, to make up for those emissions, he says cars getting junked have to be real gas guzzlers, and the new cars need to be gas sippers.

“If we want to sell this as an environmental program we need to make sure that it’s focusing on really making a difference in the amount of gasoline we use, the amount of CO2 we emit. And therefore we need to have a limit on the miles per gallon of the scrap car. It need to be way down at the bottom of the spectrum. And we need to have a limit on the new car. It needs to be up high on the spectrum.”

There’s disagreement in Congress about what the mileage requirements for the program should be.

It’s one of those details yet to be worked out, that will determine just how green cash for clunkers will really be.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

A Hummer That Gets 100 MPG

  • Raser Technologies has been showing off its electric hummer that can get 100 miles per gallon. (Photo courtesy of Raser Technologies)

A technology company is showing off its 100 mile-per-gallon Hummer to Wall Street. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

A technology company is showing off its 100 mile-per-gallon Hummer to Wall Street. Lester Graham reports:

Today, the honor of ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange went to Raser Technologies – and the company brass parked a Hummer-H3 out front.

It’s powered by Raser’s completely electric drive-train. The system uses a gas-powered engine, but only for generating electricity to recharge the battery.

David West is the Vice President of Marketing at Raser Technologies. He says they modified a Hummer, but that’s just one example.

“It was designed appropriately not just for the Hummer H-3, but it’ll power a Ford F-150, a Chevy Silverado, a Dodge 1500. These are the top-selling vehicles in America.”

Raser Techonologies side-steps questions about price, saying if automakers used the system in a production model, a vehicle’s price would be in the range of a fully-equipped pick-up or SUV.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Automakers Push a Gas Tax

  • These Suzukis at Ken Butman's dealership, which were in high demand last year, are now sitting unsold (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Chances are, you haven’t bought a new car this year. Auto sales are down across the board – including in the small car and electric-gas hybrid markets. Now some dealers and automakers are proposing a way to move some of those cars: increase the gas tax. Samara Freemark explains why the same people who sell cars might want to make driving them more expensive:

Transcript

Chances are, you haven’t bought a new car this year. Auto sales are down across the board – including in the small car and electric-gas hybrid markets. Now some dealers and automakers are proposing a way to move some of those cars: increase the gas tax. Samara Freemark explains why the same people who sell cars might want to make driving them more expensive:

It was almost exactly this time last year that Ford dealer Ken Butman
traded in his pickup for a Suzuki hatchback.

His Ann Arbor, Michigan
dealership had been selling Suzukis for a couple of years. But they got
really popular last spring when gas prices jumped. Butman ordered a big
shipment to keep up with the demand.

“These are the Suzukis. These little cars get good gas mileage. And
they’re so cute. Look at them. Look at this one here. It’s got a little
rack for your skis. Look at
that.”

But those cars – the ones Butman ordered a year ago – most of them are
still here. They’re still sitting on his lot. Not moving.

“It was strange because they were so hot. For awhile there you couldn’t
give a big car away. And everybody was rushing to the small cars. And then
just as quickly, about when the price of gas came down again, we saw a
complete reversal. Like a light switch. That’s how fast it cut off.”

It’s been like that all over the country. Dealers who last year had
waiting lists for hybrids and small cars suddenly have a lot of extra
inventory. Sales of hybrids are way down from last April, mostly because
gas costs about half what it did last year.

Brett Smith is an auto analyst with the Center for Automotive Research. He
says consumers only really care about fuel economy when gas prices are
high. When gas hits about 4 dollars a gallon, consumers switch to fuel
efficient cars. When prices drop again, so do sales of efficient cars.

“Look at what’s happened every time we’ve had an energy crisis. We’ve
gone to smaller cars for a couple of years, and then the consumer has gone
back to larger cars. Why? Because at that fuel price they can get away with
it, they can justify it.”

It’s a real problem for dealers. It also worries auto manufacturers who
have poured money into developing hybrids and have a lot of new models due
to come out this year.

And that’s why some people who sell cars have begun to push for
increasing the gas tax.

Dealers and auto executives might not seem like the first bunch to line up
behind a tax hike. Traditionally they’ve lobbied hard against anything
that makes driving more expensive.

But a high tax – and therefore, higher gas prices – could get all those extra
hybrids moving again.

Michael Jackson is the CEO at AutoNation. That’s the
nation’s largest chain of dealership.

Jackson wants to see gas at four
dollars a gallon – the figure at which many analysts say consumer behavior
changes. And he thinks the government can keep prices at that magic number
with a floating tax.

Auto makers have been a little more cautious. But some top executives at
American companies have called Jackson’s ideas ‘smart’ and ‘worth
looking into’.

Smith says they believe that higher gas taxes could
stabilize the market for fuel efficient cars – making investment in new
technologies a safer bet.

“The car companies will rarely come out and loudly say, things like, ‘we
think there needs to be a gas tax.’ But almost all of them will say on the
side, if you want people to drive more fuel efficient cars, the best way to
do it is a gas tax.”

For now, though, it might not take a big tax to bring gas prices back up.

Oil trader Anthony Grisanti is the president of GRZ Energy. He says an
economic recovery would do pretty much the same thing.

“Shouldn’t be any doubt about it, once the economy picks up, say,
beginning of next year or year after that, you’re going to start to see oil
prices go higher.”

And that means prices at the pump would go up too.

Proposing higher gas taxes – especially of a couple of dollars a gallon – can
mean career suicide for politicians. So a big hike in the gas tax seems
iffy. But if gas prices rise as the economy recovers, dealers might see
those fuel efficient cars move off the lot again.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Gas Tax vs. Efficiency Standards

  • Some think that a gas tax is the only way to get consumers to buy fuel efficient cars (Photo courtesy of the US Department of State)

Some in the auto industry are proposing a hike in the gasoline tax. The idea is this: if you want people to buy small cars, make gasoline more expensive. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Some in the auto industry are proposing a hike in the gasoline tax. The idea is this: if you want people to buy small cars, make gasoline more expensive. Lester Graham reports:

Car dealers and manufacturers say a higher gas price is the only thing that gets people buying more fuel efficient cars. So, a tax hike makes sense.

But, a guy who has a lot of sway on the idea of a gas tax hike is not going there.

Congressman Ed Markey chairs a House subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

At a forum at MIT he said the plan is to stick with CAFÉ — the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards – to get better mileage cars.

“That’s the route that we’re taking rather and an increase in the gasoline tax. We’re moving towards a mandate and 35 miles per gallon is the minimum that we intend on reaching by 2020.”

And under the stimulus package, new tax credits amounting to thousands of dollars get kicked-back to anyone buying a fuel efficient car.

The more efficient, the more you get back.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links