Nissan now has a zero emissions van that you’ll be able to buy in a couple years -if that’s what you’re into. We won’t judge. Either way, the company seems to be creating a brand identity for its electric vehicles.

Notice how there are vague cues that harken to the Nissan Leaf in the e-NV200′s styling? That’s not a coincidence. Creating this sort of common look between the Leaf and e-NV200 is certainly intentional, and don’t be surprised to see it on future Nissan EVs. It worked for Toyota and the Prius, so of course Nissan is going to try it out here. No details about cost, powertrain or anything worthwhile were announced, just that Nissan will be building it at the same Barcelona plant as the standard NV, and 700 workers will be hired.

I should go on vacation more often. No, really. Last time I took some time off, I accidentally caught a parade of BMW prototypes descending the Sellajoch in Italy’s Dolomite Alps. Then, just weeks ago when I was in Los Angeles with Bertel, I was driving along towards Venice when I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale camouflage that makes every auto enthusiast’s heart skip a beat. And then I noticed that it had no tailpipe…

Of course, the vehicle I caught wasn’t anything earth-shattering, just a prototype of Toyota’s first-ever EV for the American market. And here in California, where electric RAV4s have been running around since 1997, this prototype didn’t exactly bring traffic to a halt. Still, it’s a reminder that even EV skeptics like Toyota are already dipping a toe in the battery-powered market… if only as a “compliance exercise.” Plus, it’s more evidence that my employers should give me more time to get away from the computer and drive around unfamiliar places. Obviously these prototypes want me to find them…

Today, members of CHAdeMO congregated in the 7^th floor auditorium of Tokyo’s Big Sight for CHAdeMO’s  General Assembly 2012. CHAdeMO is a consortium of mostly Japanese companies with the target of establishing a standard for the charging of EVs. Also in the room was an invisible, but giant Godzilla. They called him “The Combo.” The combo is the product of (in Japanese views) an unholy alliance between U.S. and German OEMs which agreed on their own plug. The CHAdeMO and The Combo are utterly incompatible. Sparks are already flying.

CHAdeMO president Toshiyuki Shiga, normally COO of Leaf-producer Nissan, sets the tone of the meeting by saying that “in the U.S. and in Europe there is a movement to eliminate the CHAdeMO by making the combo a regional standard.” That snub probably is too subtle for American ears, but the Germans will get it and will be appropriately outraged.

The war of the plugs is on. Currently, it is only a war of words. “The Combo” was repeatedly derided today as “the plug without the cars.” This not-so-subtle putdown hints at the fact that the combo is still a nascent standard (the SAE is supposed to declare it a real one,) while CHAdeMO has been adopted by the tens of thousands who bought Nissan’s Leaf and some of Mitsubishi’s iMIEV.

When listening to proponents of either standard, one gets the impression that the plug is a matter of life and death, and fitting the wrong plug can mean the end of the EV as we know it.

Others don’t think so. CHAdeMO had invited Mariana Gerzanych, CEO of 350green, a company that builds electric car charging stations across America.

Allegedly, 350green will use the CHAdeMO plug. I ask Mariana Gerzanych what she thinks of the combo, and she thinks it is “good technology.” Asked which side of the plug wars 350green will be on, Gerzanych answers: “None. We will put both plugs on our fast chargers.”

Doing this is no big deal, various techies at the meeting tell me. The plug represents less than five percent of the cost of the system. Having two different plugs until the dust settles won’t be cost prohibitive. Technical differences of the battling chargers can be settled. CHAdeMO Europe’s Ronald de Haas and various others suggest that CHAdeMO should adopt The Combo’s “power level change during the session” and its narrower, but lower cost “voltage window.” This may sound like Greek to most of us, but at the conference, it did sound like a done deal.

CHAdeMO’s peace initiative does not sit too well with General Motors. At a public hearing convened last week by California Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett, GM’s Manager of Environment & Energy Policy, Shad Balch, asked for an embargo of the CHAdeMO. Balch said that “we need to make sure, especially because we’re talking about taxpayer money,” that ONLY the upcoming SAE combo standard is installed going forward. Balch was boooo’d at the hearing, and Torquenews notes that “the SAE committee is dominated by automakers who are fighting Nissan for electric vehicle dominance.”

Asking to leave California’s many Leaf owners stranded, and to favor still non-existent owners of still non-existent EVs that comply with a still non-existent SAE standard, amounts to a real declaration of war, and a rather hamfisted one.

PS: While a spiky-haired President of Japan’s EV Club is on stage selling the idea of a massive round Japan EV rally, a source that requested anonymity whispers in my ear: “Forget it. This is Japan and the charging stations are closed at night.”

This weekend, Ford will put its first Focus EVs on car carriers and ship them to dealers, Reuters heard.  Some 67 dealers in California, New Jersey and New York will receive 350 Electrics. Each dealer will get about six cars, one of which will be a demonstration model, the other for sale, Reuters’ sources said.

Ford did not want to comment on these enormous news. Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood only offered the sibylline statement that Ford is “still on track to begin shipping the Focus Electric this spring.”

The Focus EV will have a hard time. EVs are not necessarily flying off dealer’s lots. Nissan sold 2,103 of its all electric Leaf in the first four months of the year. In the same period, GM sold 5,377 of its not quite all-electric Volt.

Of course, some cars are not meant for rapid sales. They are more meant to fill a quota.

Once a year, there are people who compete for who gets fastest up a mountain. The mountain is Pike’s Peak, and the occasion is the International Hill Climb. It will happen on July 3-8, as it did every year since 1916, only interrupted by the occasional world war. This year, one of the most interesting races could take place on battery power.

In a way, Pike’s Peak is made for electrics. The race is short, a little over 12 miles, no range anxiety there. Gasoline-powered cars gasp for air en route to the 14,000 feet top. Electric cars don’t even feel it. Their torque advantage comes in handy in the hair needle turns.

The electric class is dominated by Japanese. Four out of seven entries are from Japan this year. Mitsubishi will field two electric racers.

Custom-built for the  Pikes Peak event, the i-MiEV Evolution basically uses the same motor, drive battery and other major components as the production i-MiEV.

The drivetrain is fitted to a a tube-frame chassis with a carbon fiber cowl. A single motor drives the front, two motors drive the rear wheels.

With its three motors and a 35 kWh battery pack, the car is good for 240 kW, or some 320 hp. The rest, including the driver, is built as light as possible.

The car will be piloted by Hiroshi Masuoka, a Dakar Rally veteran (overall winner 2002 and 2003.)  Masuoka works at Mitsubishi Motors where his many duties include vehicle development, the training of company test drivers and the occasional races.

At the Dakar, Masuoka piloted more traditional cars, such as the Mitsubishi Pajero, and later the Lancer.

The second car is an only slightly modded i-MiEV. That takes guts, because Mitsubishi’s electric offering is not known for winning any races – except the race to the super market to fetch some missing noodles. For the Pikes Peak event, the production model has received a more aerodynamic front bumper and roll bars. That’s it.The car will be driven by American off-road racer Beccy Gordon.

The 500 lbs gorilla in the electric class is a friendly Japanese senior citizen by the name of Nobuhiro Tajima. He is the true king of the mountain. Since 2006, “Monster” Tajima won every unlimited class race up the mountain, each year in a crazier Suzuki race car. This year, Tajima will enter in a Tajima Motor “Monster Sport Pikes Peak Special.”

Also on the entry list is Toyota. WRC rally driver Fumio Nutahara  is listed as the pilot of a yet to be announced Toyota. Trash talking racers say it will be the TMG EV P001 – the electric race car that did the Nordschleife in 7 mins 47.794 secs. We’ll see. So far, nobody at Toyota wants to confirm that the car will be entered.

Conspicuously absent from the race will be Nissan, maker of the Leaf. With the Leaf NISMO RC, Nissan would have a car with good odds. However, they won’t show.

“We set the new record in the electric production vehicle class with the Leaf last year,” says NISMO president Shoichi Miyatani. “Mission accomplished.”

With  a monster on the loose, staying home is probably a good strategy. Kudos to Mitsubishi for taking on Tajiama in a shopping cart. Who knows, his monster special could break.

Tesla Motors has almost used up funds from a Department of Energy loan program – but the startup car maker also says that they’ll start paying back the money at the end of 2012.

Regulatory filings made by Tesla show that the company still has nearly $104.5 million in DOE money left over, and claims that deliveries of the Model S will begin in June. Tesla’s CFO told Automotive News that the money is earmarked for the company’s third quarter, with re-payments starting in December.

The investigation into a Texas house fire that apparently started in a 2 month old Fisker Karma continues, with an EV expert weighing in with his opinion that the packaging of the combustion engine that drives the Fisker’s generator was likely the cause of the fire, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration saying it is looking into the incident, and the car’s owner and his attorneys firing back after Fisker initially implied there might be fraud or foul play.

Automotive News asked Jon Bereisa, CEO of Auto Lectrification, an EV consulting firm, for his opinion. Bereisa is perhaps singularly qualified to discuss electric vehicles, having been both the chief engineer of General Motors’ EV1 project and also the systems architect for the Chevy Volt. Bereisa told AN that based on a test drive and his examination of the Karma’s layout, he thinks the cramped engine compartment and excess heat most likely caused the fire, not the car’s battery pack.

“That engine is shoehorned into that bay, because they had to use a larger engine, because it was too heavy a car. As a result, there’s no room for exhaust routing and heat shielding to route the heat away… [the Karma is] using the hell out of that motor-generator.”

Bereisa also noted how tightly packed the exhaust system is. In those circumstances, a fuel, oil or even coolant (glycol is flammable) leak could ignite from heat or a hot surface. The consultant also pointed to the burned Karma’s owner’s remarks. Jeremy Gutierrez, the owner of the burned Fisker Karma, and CEO of iEnergy, an electrical power marketer, said that he smelled burning rubber just before the fire broke out.

Bereisa pointed out that, “You don’t smell rubber with batteries, but you will if it’s something on the engine.” Bereisa also said that since the car had just been driven on errands, the battery pack was likely drained and no longer contained enough energy or waste heat hot enough to ignite. “If the [battery] pack were to burn down the car, you would see where it started and reached the [battery] case… There’s more odds that it’s a conventional, heat-related problem in packaging and heat-related leaks.”

Fisker is agreeing that the battery pack, which uses cells manufactured by A123, wasn’t the cause of the fire, though it has sent a team of engineers to pore over the charred Karma’s hulk. That team is beginning to annoy Gutierrez, already a bit miffed that Fisker cast aspersions on his character, raising the possibility of “fraud or malicious intent”.

Gutierrez is so annoyed that he’s gotten his attorneys involved:

Mr. Guitterez fully accommodated the precise and somewhat peculiar demands of Fisker Automotive, who sent their self-proclaimed SWAT Team of engineers and inspectors (that included their own forensic cause and origin investigator) to the Guitterez home within 24 hours of the fire. They descended upon the Guitterez home in alarming numbers and immediately demanded a 24-hour lockdown of his home, including the remains of the Fisker Karma vehicle. They also cordoned off portions of the Guitterez home with non-transparent tarps to block the view from the public. Fisker even had access to eyewitnesses, who were interviewed by Fisker investigators and those investigators were shown video footage of the Fisker vehicle on fire before any other part of the garage.

Guitterez’s lawyers have demanded that Fisker to end its probe “immediately.”

For its part, Fisker still considers the cause of the fire as “yet to be ascertained.” A company spokesman said,

“There are myriad combustible materials that could be in the garage, in the wheel arch, or picked up on the roadside. They think the source is around the Karma, but they have not determined any cause yet. We have investigative teams, three insurance companies and the local fire chief all with their opinions. There are some question marks.”

When asked about Bereisa’s theories, the spokesman said, “The Karma has been through all regulatory and certification checks.”

Meanwhile, though Robert Baker, the chief fire inspector for Fort Bend County, Texas, continues to say that the Karma started the fire, his investigation is still incomplete, and NHTSA is started to show some interest.

“Yes, the Karma was the origin of the fire,” Baker said. “But what exactly caused that we don’t know at this time.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement that it “is aware of the incident and in contact with local authorities. The agency will continue to monitor the situation and take appropriate action as warranted,” though no formal NHTSA probe has been launched.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

Despite Toyota’s announcement of a new generation of RAV4 EV, mostly for CARB compliance, it seems that RAV4 EV production has never really stopped – at least not on a one-off basis.

Brian Driggs of Gearbox Magazine went looking through EVAlbum’s catalog of enthusiast-created RAV4 EV conversions. Some of them look identical to a standard RAV4, while others are more intricate. Witness the RAV4 EV, that appears to be a Toyota original. The big difference is that this photo, apparently dated in 2001, shows the RAV4 EV towing a trailer. Within the trailer is a Kawasaki 500cc parallel-twin motorcycle engine that powers an A/C generator. Range extender anyone? Yes, it’s a little crude, but also somewhat ingenious.

Tesla is sitting on more than 10,000 orders for its all-electric Model S sedan. Tesla might finally deliver the first units next month, slightly ahead of plan, says Reuters. The only thing that keeps the production from starting is a successful completion of crash tests required by U.S. safety regulators. If the car doesn’t bomb during the crash, customers can soon flaunt their high-priced environmental responsibility while tooling down the car-pool lanes in solitary fashion.

“Once we complete and document the tests, we will be able to sell our vehicles in the United States,” CEO Elon Musk told shareholders. Tesla will take a “slow, methodical” approach to the launch. By the end of the year 5,000 Model S sedans are expected to be delivered, half of the pre-orders.

Tesla needs the money. Tesla reported a first-quarter net loss of $89.9 million, or 86 cents per share, compared to $48.9 million or 51 cents per share a year earlier.

Toyota is only planning to sell 2,300 RAV4 EVs over the next three years! Can anyone say “compliance car”?

According to Yahoo’s Motoramic blog, Toyota sold that many RAV4s in one week last month. The RAV4 is a big departure from the first generation RAV4 EV sold in California.

The flat battery pack developed by Tesla means the car loses no cargo space. 60 mph comes up in 7 seconds (with Sport mode engaged – otherwise it’s 8.6 seconds). And the 100 mile range is competitive with cars like the Nissan Leaf.

Unfortunately, the RAV4 EV is expected to carry a $20,000 premium over the regular RAV4, and will be sold in very limited numbers – condemning it to irrelevance and a life of little purpose, save for meeting an obscure governmental mandate.

Even though the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i already have their own standard for “quick-charge” stations  - known as CHAdeMO, a standard supported by Nissan, Mitsubishi, Fuji Heavy Industries (parent company of Subaru) - the SAE is apparently pitching its own standard of quick-charger outlets (pictured above), creating a situation that would be akin to having certain cars only compatible with certain gas pumps.

Supported by  BMW, Chrysler, Daimler, Ford, GM, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, the new plug (above) is supposed to standardize charging across the world – even though CHAdeMO is already being used in significant numbers. While there is only one CHAdeMO station in the United States, Japan has adopted CHAdeMO as a standard, with 130 stations in Japan. The Nissan Leaf can be had with a standard plug and an optional CHAdeMO plug. The SAE system is being debuted at the May 6-9 EV Symposium – perhaps the opening salvo in the newest “VHS vs Betamax” spat.

Green Car Reports found only four EVs which their manufacturers really want to sell in appreciable quantities:

• 2012 Nissan Leaf
• 2012 Mitsubishi ‘i’
• 2012 Coda Sedan
• 2012 Tesla Model S

Most other Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs)  announced for 2012 through 2014 are only “compliance cars,” says Green Car Reports. Here is a list of EVs which don’t have the hearts of the manufacturers behind them:

• Chevrolet Spark EV
• Fiat 500 Elettrica
• Ford Focus Electric
• Honda Fit EV
• Toyota RAV4 EV

Why do carmakers make cars they don’t really want to sell? California requires that carmakers of a certain size show that at least a small portion of their volume comes from zero-emission vehicles–either battery electric cars or fuel-cell electric vehicles. Cars like the Chevrolet Volt , the Fisker Karma, or the Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid  don’t count as pure ZEV in CA. They have gasoline engines as well as plugs. However, plug-in hybrids with partial electric range help off-set a lack of ZEVs.

In the first round, only carmakers with high California sales have to worry: Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford, Nissan, and Chrysler.

Coda Automotive withdrew a Department of Energy loan application after two years of waiting. The $334 million loan was supposed to have gone towards establishing an assembly plant in Columbus, Ohio, but for now, production will continue in China.

The plant would have created as many as 2,000 jobs, but the DOE’s stalling means that production will continue overseas. Coda’s Forrest Beanum told Automotive News that

“It became clear to us after the Solyndra debacle that things in Washington as it pertains to this program were becoming quite politicized…Going into an election year, our objective was not to be unnecessarily scrutinized due to politics,” he said. Rather, its goal was to focus on the U.S. launch of its new EV this year, he added.”

Coda final assembly is carried out in California using “glider” chassis assembled in China. Speculating whether Coda would have really added jobs in the Midwest would just be conjecture at this point (Fisker, anyone). It’s encouraging to see Coda looking to add jobs in America, even if, as Ed points out, the car needs some work to be up to American market standards. Maybe their new tie-up with Great Wall will let them build an EV here without government help too.

Coda Automotive, a Southern California start-up that assembles EVs with Chinese components, announced at today’s Beijing Auto Show that it would partner with the Chinese OEM Great Wall to develop a new, lower-cost EV. Says Coda CEO Phil Murtaugh (who you might remember as a key character in American Wheels, Chinese Roads) explains in a press release

We’re excited to work with Great Wall Motors to develop the second product in Coda’s portfolio, to bring another solution to a global problem and together make high-quality clean technology accessible. Ultimately, this will enable drivers worldwide to go electric affordably and support our mission of putting an EV in everyone’s garage.

Coda’s first product exemplifies the challenges facing the EV startup: namely a high MSRP (starting price $38,145) for a product that doesn’t quite meet competitive standards for the US. Great Wall may not bring a vast improvement in quality to the partnership (although it was the first Chinese OEM to pass European Whole Vehicle Type Approval), but it should be able to help Coda offer a more affordable EV to the US market. The new vehicle will be jointly developed, with Coda taking the lead on the EV powertrain development and final assembly, and GW manufacturing gliders at its plant in Baoding.

Meanwhile, plenty of questions remain. Will lower costs help Coda battle its way out of a brutally niche positioning? Will even cheaper Chinese vehicles meet American-market expectations? Will new product even make a difference to Coda, considering its dealer net is currently only four stores strong? Bertel and I will be meeting with Coda while we’re in the Los Angeles area this week, and we’ll be sure to bring you more details on its alliance with Great Wall as they become available.

If you want to see the future of the electric car, you have to go back a hundred years. In 1900, over a quarter of all new automobiles ran on battery. City cars? Around a third of the buggies of Chicago, Boston, and New York City were electric. They were decimated by cars running on smelly and flammable gasoline, because people wanted to drive fast and long distances. Hundred years later, little has changed. Ten to 20 years from now, something might change.

“Electric cars today typically can travel only about 100 miles on current battery technology, called lithium-ion (LIB). LIB technology stands little chance of being light enough to travel 500 miles on a single charge and cheap enough to be practical for a typical family car. This problem is creating a significant barrier to electric vehicle adoption.”

This is a quote from a group of researchers at IBM, and it is putting the problem mildly. In an electric car, the devils called cost, range, and weight are fighting each other, and nobody is winning. The IBM researchers think they know the way out. They are working on a battery that has the same energy density as gasoline.

In other words: A battery the size of a current gas tank will get us as far as a current tank of gas.

IBM’s lithium-air battery literally pulls energy out of thin air. It borrows oxygen from the air. Combined with lithium, electrical energy is created. When the battery is recharged, the borrowed oxygen is being paid back to the atmosphere. The battery can be much lighter, because it uses air as its most important component.

IBM’s research group is called “Battery 500”. The goal is a battery that can power a car for 500 miles. The researchers hope their battery will be ready “some time between 2020 and 2030.”

(Hat tip to Rick.)

Inspired by the compact fuel cells developed for the United States’ space effort, in the mid 1960s Dr. Craig Marks led a team of GM researchers in developing a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric vehicle. GM had already introduced the Electrovair, a Corvair converted to electric power and the original intention was to make a fuel cell powered Corvair. A car, though, requires much more current than a spacecraft and Marks’ team soon realized that they’d have to use a larger vehicle as a test mule. At the time, GM made a small van called the Handyvan which had sufficient space for the compressed hydrogen tank and other equipment. Despite that extra space, the new equipment took up so much room that the finished “Electrovan” was just a two-seater. That equipment included two super-cooled tanks, one for liquid hydrogen and one of liquid oxygen, 550 feet of copper piping, and 32 Union Carbide fuel cells, each capable of putting out 5 kilowatts for a total of 160kw.

Most of the Electrovan's cargo space was taken up by the hydrogen (red), oxygen (green), and fire retardant (black) tanks.

The Electrovan was a measured success, at least for a proof of concept. It had a top speed of 70 mph with a range of ~120 miles. Acceleration was sedate: 0-60 in 30 seconds. While that level of performance might have been good enough for an urban delivery van, the Electrovair was far from practical. Not only did the new “powertrain” take up most of the cargo capacity, it was also heavy, weighing twice as much as a standard Handyvan, explaining how a 240 horsepower small van could be so slow. It was also very expensive, since the system relied on several rare metals including platinum. The term “cost prohibitive” is applicable.

Electrovan being tested on the grounds of the GM Tech Center.

While as a proof of concept the Electrovan worked well enough to publicize, besides the bulk and mass of the system there were practical barriers to putting it into production. For safety reasons, the Electrovan included a large container filled with fire retardant in the event of gas or chemical leaks. Those leak and fire concerns were real, with Dr. Marks describing “brilliant fireworks” when the hydrogen leaks would flare up. Of even greater safety concern was the high pressure hydrogen storage tank. All the press events for the Electrovan took place at the Tech Center. Back in the day, the Electrovan never left the Tech Center. That’s because GM had concerns about driving it on public roads.

Those concerns, like those about leaks and fires were well warranted. Every account of the Electovan’s story includes the fact that while testing the Electrovan on the Tech Center’s roadways, a compressed hydrogen tank exploded. Nobody was injured but the explosion sent shrapnel and debris flying over a quarter mile from the explosion site.

Due to those legitimate safety concerns, and the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure for refueling the Electrovan project never really went anywhere. The fuel cell vehicle was just about forgotten, with the Electrovan sitting in storage until rising oil prices made alternative energy sexy again. Since then the electric van has been cleaned up and put on display, next to the Electrovair, at the General Motors Heritage Center.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

More details have been released about the explosion at a GM Tech Center battery lab yesterday that left one person hospitalized with chemical burns and a possible concussion. In a statement, GM said that while an “experimental battery” was undergoing “extreme testing”, gases were released from the battery cells. Something in the lab then ignited the gases and the subsequent explosion was severe enough to cause structural damage, blowing out windows and forcing open fortified doors. The battery itself was left intact. The Detroit News, according to an unnamed source, reports that prototype lithium-ion battery was made by A123, and that explosion happened during “intensive tests designed to make it fail”. The Warren, Michigan fire commissioner said that the lab was designed with safety in mind so damage was confined to the one laboratory. Though some of the 80 workers in the building were sent home for the day after the explosion, others continued to work. The 63,000 sq ft Global Battery Systems Lab has 176 test cells as well as 49 thermal chambers, where GM tests both production and prototype batteries. A HAZMAT team was dispatched to the facility, as were OSHA and MIOSHA inspectors, because of the injuries.

GM stressed that the incident was not related to the Chevrolet Volt or any other production vehicle. Since the electric version of the Chevy Spark won’t go into production until next year, the battery involved in the explosion might be a developmental version of the batteries A123 will be supplying for that project. It also might be a completely experimental prototype.

Two years after the Volkswagen Golf was launched, it received a fuel sipping diesel in 1976. I presented the launch campaign in Wolfsburg, and the ground shook. It wasn’t because of my campaign. It was because of the body stamping presses. The offices of the Zentrale Absatzförderung, VW’s advertising department, were two floors above.

I presented a campaign that was all on savings. The Golf D had one of the, if not the best mileage of all compacts. Herr Plamböck, the gentleman who had to vet the campaigns before the big boss would see them, looked at my grand savings plan, and said: “Let’s have lunch.”

Over a Currywurst, Hartmut Plamböck said: “Bertel, did you check the added cost of that engine?” I forgot how much it was, but it was a lot. “You will have to drive 80,000 kilometers to get your money back!” Mr. Plamböck thundered. The plastic forks jumped as Plamböck pounded the table. He looked around, lowered his voice and added: “And then, the engine will fall out of the car.” At that time, Volkswagens had a bit of a corrosion problem.

I was reminded of that story when I came across a story in the New York Times that provides a sanity check on savings at all costs. Rarely does one recoup the added investment into fuel savings. Little has changed since my Wolfsburg Waterloo. Fuel savings come at a price, and you have to decide whether you pay at the pump or to the dealer. Paying at the pump makes more economic sense, but more often than not, emotions trump math.

One of the worst investments, says the New York Times story that uses data compiled by TrueCar, is the Chevrolet Volt. Says the Times:

“The Volt, which costs nearly $40,000 before a $7,500 federal tax credit, could take up to 27 years to pay off versus a Chevrolet Cruze, assuming it was regularly driven farther than its battery-only range allows. The payback time could drop to about eight years if gas cost $5 a gallon and the driver remained exclusively on battery power.”

Mind you, the 27 year payback time is based on the TrueCar calculated $31,767 price of the Volt. Without the generous government rebate, financed by your tax dollars, the Volt would still be upside down long after it landed in a museum. At full retail, it would take 45 years to get you your money back. Payback is a bitch.

Driven fully on battery power, the Volt would needlessly drag around its heavy range extender machinery, but at least it would compete with Nissan’s LEAF in the ROI race. The Leaf takes 8.7 years to recoup the investment.

According to the study, “eco” upgrades usually are not worth the money. A Ford Fiesta SFE saves you $23 a year at the pump and on average. With these meager savings, the Fiesta actually beats the Volt in the senseless savings discipline. It would take 26.8 years to get you your money back.

As long as fuel saving cars carry huge premiums, you need to pray for higher gas prices, and you need to pray a lot. A survey by Lundberg says that gas prices need to go to $12.50 a gallon for the Volt to break even. The Leaf would be competitive with gas at $8.53 a gallon.

Are there savings that make sense?

If you really want to reconcile eco and economics, the sixth generation descendant of the Golf Diesel, the Jetta TDI,  would recoup the added money before the warranty is up, says the Times. So do the Lincoln MKZ Hybrid and the Toyota Prius. Not only is their mileage much better than the comparison model, their price premium is so low that it can be easily recouped. As Toyota’s Satoshi Ogiso demonstrated a few months ago,  savings at no added costs are the true engineering achievement.

(Hat tip to my man in the mountains.)

When the wraps came off what is still called an “LE Concept,” a stunningly styled sedan emerged. It has sexy curves similar to those of the Emerg-e range extender that was shown in Geneva. A car like this, backed by the production prowess of Japan’s second-largest automaker, should worry prospective producers of all-electric luxury sedans.

Nissan’s Leaf provides the electric Infiniti with the all-important economies of scale. However, Nissan’s “Division General Manager of Exploratory and Advanced Product,” Francois Bancon, denies hackneyed intimations that the LE will just be a rebodied Leaf:

“The LE Concept is designed from the ground up as an Infiniti, not a re-badged Nissan. There will potentially be some shared components, but they will be configured specifically for use in the Infiniti EV.”

Range and performance are still kept under wraps.  “It will drive, feel and perform like an Infiniti,” says a sibylline Andy Palmer, who just recently was put in charge of the Nissan’s Global Infiniti unit. Name, production details, price are likewise kept secret.

Good looking as it is, this is not a show car. They call it a ‘production intent’ concept, a car they actually want to produce. Folks at Infiniti are positive that the yet unnamed electric Infiniti will be launched in 2014. Palmer says it is a global car that first “will be available in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.” He did not want to comment on China, understandable, given the in-flux state of Chinese production for Nissan’s luxury marque.

The LE will most likely be the first plug-in which you don’t have to plug in. In addition to a regular corded charger and a DC fast charge option, the LE can be charged without wires. Infiniti’s  U.S. VP Ben Poore explains:

“The LE Concept includes a built-in wireless charging system, we expect it to be the first home-based wireless charging system. All you have to do is park your vehicle over the charging pad with no need to connect cables.”

This is a truly exciting system: Through a coil in the garage floor, a magnetic field is created. This excites an electric current in a second coil in the LE, which then charges the batteries. Infiniti promises that the high-frequency charging is safe for children and pets, and can be installed easily in a home garage. The batteries will sit under the passenger compartment floor, delivering a low center of gravity, a lot of trunk space, and room for the high net-worth legs.

Since the early days of the Volt, the folks at GM loved to compare the car to putting a man on the moon. That analogy wasn’t without its problems. The moon program did cost more than three times its original budget of $7 billion, all it produced was a few rocks, and it ran out of money before it could get going in earnest. 40 years after Eugene Cernan and Apollo 17, the moon has remained untouched by human feet. But what the heck, GM loves the symbolism. To death.

GM likened the Volt to the moonshot in 2008.

GM likened the Volt to the moonshot in 2011.

They did it one more time in 2011.

A few days ago, the director of GM’s moon program, Bob Lutz, was at it again with his favorite moon analogy. Except that this time, Lutz asks readers to remember the “45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster that killed three of our hero astronauts.”

I am old enough to remember that Chaffee, White and Grissom were killed by an electrical fire. Maybe that moon analogy wasn’t so good.

Or maybe it was.

More and more of the daily news we consume is not written by people, but by robots and spiders. The people at Motor Trend will be painfully aware of that fact when they come back to work on Monday. Today, MT reports that “General Motors is investigating complaints that XM radios installed in Chevrolet Volts do not pick up the satellite radio service’s Fox station.”

Motor Trend goes on to say:

“The apparent defect was first revealed late Friday on the Fox News television broadcast, “Your World Cavuto.”

“Viewers of this network have called in to complain that Fox’s XM channel is not available on President Obama’s car, the Chevrolet Volt,” host Neil Cavuto asserted on his TV broadcast, which is simulcast on XM 114. “Does this sound to you like payback time to Barack Obama from Government Motors?”

“How dare Government Motors?” responded Ann Coulter, a guest on Cavuto’s show. “But I’m not the least bit surprised. This is a liberal car for left-wing liberal socialist Marxists.”

A read all the way to the end reveals that “a GM spokesman said Chevrolet engineers would continue to test Volts through the weekend to see whether they could pull in Fox XM and would issue a report by the end of the day today, April 1.” This, and careful consultation of the calendar, makes a halfway assertive human reader doubt that the article is real news.

The trouble is that a lot of the daily news is collected by robots. In the early hours of April 1, the alleged news item  already is  all over the Internet. Many publications that are proud of their editorial oversight carry the April fools joke as real news. The story is in AOL Money’s Daily Finance, and in the Businessinsider. Untouched by human hands (or aggregated by morons,) the story runs on Topix right underneath Jalopnik’s  “What April Fools Day Automotive Headline Do You Want To Read?”

Most lazywebs from Carnewsarchive to Car Newsticker run the piece and pay the price for automatically scraping automotive sites in the hope for Google dollars. Even AOL News has the story. It is only a matter of minutes before the story will be eternalized in “verifiability, not fact” Wikipedia.

The sad part is that Motortrend’s persiflage already is way behind the times. Other observers had noted a puzzling U-turn at Fox. Usually, the channel poured vitriol over the car. A month ago, Fox drove a Volt and ran out of juice in the Lincoln Tunnel.

Then suddenly, a few days ago, Fox loved the Volt. Fox lauded the Volt as a car that can “help win the war in terror.” Steve Doocy, drove a Volt and attested that the drive was “smooth as glass.” A few days earlier, Foxbusiness declared the Volt the best electric car on the market” and could find only one flaw: The price.

Speaking of price, some people point to the fact that GM had started running Volt ads on Fox.

Truth is funnier than April fools jokes.

Says Brett Smith, CAR’s co-director of conferences:

“Some could look at this as the industry is dead and no one cares about this anymore.”

Not completely true, says  Smith. The newness of plug-in vehicles is wearing off, and with the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid and the Nissan Leaf EV on the market, “we don’t need the message of how they will fit in. They’ve got to live or die on their own.”

According to AN, “car companies are seeking to distance themselves” from electric vehicles. CAR also has lost interest. The Business of Plugging In conference won’t return for 2013 either, Smith told AN, claiming “that CAR knew from the beginning it would have a finite life span.”

The brand unveiling took place at BYD’s headquarters in balmy Shenzhen, on the other side of the Hong Kong border. Carnewschina is miffed that they were not invited to the shindig. What should I say, I am in Shenzhen and nobody told me. I am glad I did not go.

Today, the Chinese counterpart of Denza was unveiled: Tengshi.

Further unveiled was a logo. It looks like a drop of something, kind of strange for an EV.

Finally unveiled was a slogan: “EV the Future.”

The Denza website is a low-budget affair that looks like it was put together with Microsoft Word at the last minute.

If Daimler and BYD have paid more than $1,000 for logo, slogan and website, then they wasted money.

Message to Daimler: All this is shockingly pedestrian, and an embarrassment. It does not at all reflect the class and refinement that usually goes into Daimler branding. If the car reflects the haphazard branding, then I don’t want to see it.

I guess the car will look like an old B Class anyway.

Last December, Toyota and BMW announced “a long-term technological partnership.”  Ostensibly, it was about developing batteries together, and about BMW supplying diesel engines, in that order. Four months later, the priorities seem to have changed a little.

In a joint press release, Toyota and BMW announce that they just now have signed an agreement on collaborative research for lithium-ion battery cells. Research has started, and this being research, it can take a while.

The diesel engines will come earlier, and in earnest. Toyota has contracted BMW as the supplier of highly efficient 1.6 liter and 2.0 liter diesel engines, and BMW will start shipping in 2014. Toyota has realized that diesel is a big seller especially in Europe, where it holds 50 percent market share. Diesel is making inroads in India. Even in Japan, diesel cars are beginning to appeal to customers. Toyota has its hands full with hybrids and other new generation technologies and does not have the bandwidth to tinker with its own diesel engines.

New and old media feigned outrage about the crapload of money the Chevy Volt supposedly saves its drivers if the new testimonial ads are to be believed. Honestly, we don’t give a crap. GM’s agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners probably told the client that in order to cut through the clutter, you need some shock value. When that didn’t work, the admen most likely put up a PowerPoint that showed that a YouTube video with “crapload” will receive 695.5 times the clicks of an ad that uses “a whole lot of money.” That would clinch it with Joe Ewanick, who wants to save a true crapload of money by increasing the efficiency of GM’s ad dollars.

No, being Thetruthaboutcars.com, we think the ad is shit, because the statement simply is not true.

We don’t want to bore you with cost of ownership calculations. They would most likely overtax mathematically challenged GM groupies anyway. The $40,000 Volt does not save you money. Not a crapload. Not even a little bit. Thanks to a generous $7,500 tax credit and gasoline savings,  when all is said and done, the Volt will cost you as much as an average car. Says Tony Posawatz, line director for the Chevy Volt. He told Bloomberg in an interview:

“The Volt’s cost of ownership matches the average car when including the $7,500 U.S. tax incentive and gasoline fuel savings.”

Not a word about a crapload of savings. That revolutionary car ends up costing you as much as an average car.  But only because each car costs the tax payer that crapload of money.