Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Nissan, Renault and Better Place team for electric cars, charging points in Israel

While there are many rational and irrational reasons for the delays we've seen in production of a mass-market and massively adopted electric car, most of the major issues seem to be addressed by this new initiative going down in Israel. One of the primary problems with electric cars is refilling, and that's going to be nicely addressed by entrepreneur Shai Agassi's Project Better Place, which will build a charging network of 500,000 plug-in points across the country. Other issues were a bit more easily addressed: since Israel is a small country, the limited range of electric cars isn't as much of an issue, and the government subsidies should make prices competitive -- with the eventual cost of ownership significantly less than gas cars to sweeten the deal even further. Nissan and Renault plan to built the cars, naturally, and hope to port the concepts into other vehicles in other countries in the near future. The plan is to launch the first cars in Israel around 2011.



Source: http://www.endagets.com

Friday, January 11, 2008

Tata Nano Isn't a Music Player or Tits, Nay, It's a $2500 Car


The words Tata Nano have nothing to do with tiny music players, but the car going by that name's price and size are still nearly small enough to dance on the head of a pin. Introduced in India for $2500, another feature of the car worthy of the word "nano" is probably going to be the amount of time until it needs to go back to the shop, and ultimately the junkyard. But what do you expect from a car with a name that sounds to our ears like a pair of tiny tittles? [gizmodo.com]