TIME mag story on plug-in hybrids + biofuels

http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article...1069470,00.html

Breaking That Dirty Oil Habit An unlikely alliance of hawks, doves and greens has a plan to help america guzzle less gas. Could it work?
TIME Bonus Section, Inside Business, July 2005

Here are the excerpts we've put on the CalCars website:

A 500-m.p.g.-of-gas car may sound like a pie-in-the-sky dream. But in fact, it is technologically possible. Green-car enthusiasts in California are experimenting with innovative plug-in technology, while DaimlerChrysler will soon be testing its own plug-in van....Could it be that the motley coalition of tree huggers and hawks is on to something? ...Hanssen was approached last year by Felix Kramer for help in building a dashboard monitor for a Prius that he and CalCars, his group of plug-in advocates, had converted into a crude plug-in....Hanssen recently showed off his prototype at the 2005 Tour de Sol, a green-car race in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where it didn't win but did deliver a fuel economy of 102 m.p.g. over a 150-mile course. The cost of charging the batteries? A buck. EnergyCS and Clean-Tech have launched a start-up called EDrive Systems, which plans to sell by next year kits to convert the Prius into a plug-in (though the modifications will void the warranty).... Several U.S. utilities are supporting the technology. Plug-in cars would open a new market for electricity at night, when utilities have excess capacity. Ed Kjaer, director of electric transportation at Southern California Edison, argues that plug-ins represent a natural evolution of hybrid technology, which today essentially burns gas to generate electricity....George W. Bush, the former Texan oilman, has begun talking up corn ethanol and clean diesel and has endorsed a $4,000 tax credit for purchases of hybrid cars. That has not gone unnoticed by energy's new coalition of convenience, even if the President hasn't yet mentioned plug-in hybrids or bioethanol....Maybe 500 m.p.g. isn't so crazy after all.

We will have a downloadable/printable PDF of the scanned version of this TIME article at
http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html as soon as we get a print copy (joining the Business Week, Newsweek-Zakaria and other stories already available).

If you subscribe to the CalCars Newsletter at the URL below, you'll get full-text forwardable copies of major news.
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Felix Kramer [email protected]
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
PRIUS+ PHEV Conversion Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/priusplus/
CalCars-PHEV Newsletter
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/calcars-news
PO Box 61045 Palo Alto, CA 94306
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