First Toyota invested $60 million in Tesla, then they upped it to $100 million. Now Elon Musk is telling reporters that his company is in talks with Toyota to finalize a $1 billion deal. A billion dollar deal would equal 40% of Telsa's current market cap. Could an acquisition be coming?

The move to hybrid and electric vehicles is being adopted in greater percentages by white people than African-Americans or Latinos. I get that. But an article today in the Atlanta Post, "an online news site about African-American business news", shows the kind of ignorance and misinformation that gets passed around the African-American community as fact.

A few excerpts:

A press release from the Pew Environental Group just hit our inbox showing an overwhelming 82% of Americans support an increased fuel efficiency standard of 56 MPG by 2025. The article refers several times to the automakers as being in favor of the 56 MPG standard... so why are they running all of those ads against the standard?

Full press release below with all of the survey results.

The What Drives Us podcast recorded live last week and covered everything from Volt vs LEAF sales to pudding. Yes, pudding. It's a trap!

We're now recording the show LIVE each week at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific if you would like to come on and join in the fun of a live chat room while we talk about all things with green cars. Visit us each week at http://whatdrives.us/live

The What Drives Us podcast recorded live last night and featured special guest Mike Granoff of Better Place, a company "accelerating the transition to sustainable transportation". Mike hopes that his company will help drive us to an oil-free future.

The What Drives Us podcast recorded live this past week. This week's episode discussed the automaker's push for additional federal money for hydrogen research, 5 things to hate about the LEAF, which automaker has the highest loyalty ratings, Prius resale values, and more.

We're now recording the show LIVE each week at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific if you would like to come on and join in the fun of a live chat room while we talk about all things with green cars. Visit us each week at http://whatdrives.us/live

I'll be taking a silent, ICE-less spin in Toyota's prototype RAV4 EV this afternoon here at the Sustainable Mobility Seminar. I have access to one of the RAV4's lead engineers so if anyone has any questions that I can ask, please reply in this thread and I'll try my best to get them answered.

My full write-up will be up later this week.

You can read more about the RAV4 EV here:

I'm here on-site at Toyota's 2011 Sustainable Mobility Seminar, and you can watch everything via live stream over on Toyota's ESQ site. For those not familiar with the seminar, it is an annual event that brings together a small set of journalists and some of the brightest minds from the business and educational fields to discuss today's energy challenges and future opportunies.

The What Drives Us podcast recorded live this past week and featured guest panelist Chelsea Sexton, who came on to talk about her continued experience with her Chevy Volt. This week's episode also discussed Fisker's plan to sell 15,000 Karma EVs annually, Honda's hybrid "road map" and their continued dependence on the IMA system, and Hyundai's decision to delay the Sonata hybrid in order to add a noisemaker "feature".

This post is written by Russell Frost, founder of  PriusOwnersGroup.com. Russell is also the co-host of the advanced car tech podcast, What Drives Us.

It looks as though Hyundai is having some problems rolling out their new hybrids. Despite previous announcements and delays, Hyundai has still not shipped any (or very many) hybrids here in the US. Even Nissan was willing to admit to only selling 87 Leaf EVs in January. Hyundai refused to disclose any sales of their hybrids.

So the question is why?