Nice Propaganda. Then we have the reality of no Keystone Pipeline...

Sorry. All the artificial recalculations in the world don't change the fact that EVs do nor yet have the range that is useful enough to all potential buyers. When it is sufficient, the buyers will provide the proof. "If wishes and wants were candy and nuts, we would all have a Merry Chrsitmas."

I really grow weary of Leftist Party Line Science. I am offended when these politically correct non scientists justify their Party line, as Science. They compound the problem and criticize anyone, including this Scientist as being anti-Science for criticizing this political tripe. We have had Trofim Lysenko's genetics; James Hansen's phony CAGW; Dr Woo Suk's fraudulent embryonic Stem Cell Research; Rachel Carlsen's critique of disease carrying insect control; various scares of trace amounts of ALAR, Mercury, Lead, along with the "organic foods" overemphasis and general anti-technology nonsense et cetera. Now we have the anti-technology of fossil fuel extraction by fracking. If these Party line phonies don't like the World, Please do us all a favor. Please adopt and exercise their existential hero paul Sarte and his Leftist solution. Commit Suicide. Thus ceasing condemning to poverty and killing vast numbers of innocent poor people.

If the Europeans had actually implemented toxic cleanup regulations similar to the US, there would be no need for such useless exhortations. Such appeals are about as effective as exhorting all Cubans by Fidel, to go and assist in the sugar cane fields; or Mao advocating the peasants to create backyard blast furnaces, to make steel. These stupid exhortation exercises would not be neccessary, as their Air Quality would be much cleaner. Instead they chose to bray about cleaning up; and not actually doing it. Instead, the politicians sought to gain revenue by taxing fuel to no effect, except to force the choice of dirtier diesel fuel. The Euro politicians chose taxing relatively harmless CO2 to no effect, except to once again feed the ravenous maw of growing government. Someday in 2016, Europe will finally join the effort to cleanse their Air, with the adoption of rudimentary EU VI toxic emission regulations. Then sometime in post 2030, they might actually adopt the next step, the regulations that the USA has been using for a decade and half, is using today, that improves the ambient air quality in the tailpipe to almost breathable status. But before 2015, the USA is preparing to tighten further to the final endpoint regulation, requiring simply clean pristine air, making ICE emissions indistinguishable from EV emissions.

Excellent observations. It does make a difference when the short trips take place. Someday the electric BEV might prove practical. But for the forseeable future, the PHEV or EREV is the technology that preserves mobility, and civilization, while substantially increasing the fuel economy and or displacing petroleum. We are not condemned to return to the caves. If the USA had to depend only on its own domestic production at todays production levels, the VOLT makes that entirely possible. But the good news, dispite the all too prevalent doomsday blarney, is that the North American oil production will make the area once again petroleum independent within the decade thanks to the advance of technology extraction methods. Together with the enormously growing reserves that can be commercially extracted with that technology, are making the day of reckoning from petroleum exhaustion, recede into the next Millenium. PHEV technology is still a car/battery generation or two from equality with ICEs prices, but that gap is not anywhere as large as it once was, and shrinking.

Like the new Ford Fusion, this Dodge Dart is remarkable technological progress. These are two high volume designs that significantly improve the real world fuel economy of the offerings available to Americans. If the DOE's RICO "Achieved CAFe for Model year 2011" when available, doesn't report we have already met the 2020/2016 CAFE targets, the addition of these two models will insure that the "Achived CAFE for Model year 2012" does do so. In any case, we can be confident that Oil Demand in America will continue its decade long decline, and maybe decrease even more quickly. Together with improved extraction technology,and domestic production, it does seem that North America may cease importing petroleum by mid-late decade.

Technological progress continues. This looks like another hit by the domestic auto makers.

What a useless study! Who cares what the CO2 emissions are, when the real toxic killers are almost unregulated in Europe? What were the SOx releases? What were the NOx releases? What were the CO releases? What were the PM10 releases? What were the PM2.5 releases? All these will kill you. CO2 is a harmless trace gas and a necessary plant food. Anyone's breath contains up to 44,000 ppm CO2. In fairness, Europe is one of the places in the World where Man does put CO2 on net, into the atmosphere, so they should be mildly concerned with it, but only AFTER the real killers are in control. In Europe they most definitely are not being controlled as they should. But then the government dweebs can't tax any of the killer toxics, while taxing CO2 makes them appear to be heroes, due to their propaganda.

Anothe rcontrol microprocessor firm recenlty released thie new 32 bit microcontroller family. Thsi is great news. One of the reasons that we don't hve HCCI an dPCCI iCEs is the cost ofand powe rof the engien micorcontrol processors. So there is anothes ignificant improvement in efficiency of the iCE coming, as well as a reduced amount of toxic emissions. Progress is slow, steady and incremental; but it is progress, nonetheless. In this case, enabling progress on a key component for improved ICE efficiency, clean Air, and reduced imported Oil consumption. All good things.

Engineer-Poet, Yes, you can certainly generate fast neutrons with a fast-spectrum or breeder reactor. You could do that with a non critical particle accelerator as well. But if you have problems obtaining the permission to create even safer LWRs, like the Gen III+, a fleet of older LWRs which 480 odd worldwide, have been running safely for twenty years, killing no one, it would be problematical to create the one or two "Actinide Burners" needed to solve completely, for all time, the highly radioactive, long lived, waste problem. Plus it would be very expensive to engineer such a reactor for so few instances of needed implementation. The total amount of long lived waste, the Transuranic Actinides, like Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium, etc., is quite small. It is less than 0.04 % of all radioactive waste, that lasts for thousands of years. All the rest, activated materials or fission fragments, decay much more rapidly, and are safe in short times like a hundred years, or so. Times with which our civilization routinely stores materials safely, like our precious metal repositories. Meanwhile we have tremendous numbers of "No Nukes" environ-Mentalists who have absolutely no idea of what we are discussing, or talking about. They have purposely been kept ignorant, of the already being used, partial solution to long lived radioactive waste, as that might invigorate the nuclear fission power industry. Others think the massive costs that terminated reactor Gen II reactor construction, would apply under today's laws and regulations. Such is not the case anymore. Back then you could sue and everything stops except the meter registering rented money costs, the interest, continues running. You could do this repetitively, time after time, and the DEMOgogues did, until the Utility cried "Uncle" and quit. You can't do that legally any more. Once the 'standard design' is licensed, as all the fission reactor designs are near to finally occurring, the period allowed to sue and stop everything, expires. When a Plant begins construction now, unlike before, only the NRC itself, can interrupt construction and operation. But the NRC has spent twenty years forcing answers and re-designs to all its objections, and any others offered by others as well. So project costs and schedules are now in control, unlike before. You know, as do I, that the French are re-processing and then "Actinide Burning" half of the tiny amount consisting of 0.04% of the total waste, that is the only long-lived radioactive waste. The French are treating all the waste they can "crack" and transmute, in their fleet of slow-neutron electricity producing, power LWRs,while generating electricity out of it. If presented with a limited amount of capital to design a power plant system, would you invest those $Billions in a Fusion plant design that you could sell thousands of copies, or would you invest in a fast spectrum reactor that you might build only one or two? Especially, if you knew you could use one or two other Fusion plants for the same purpose as the specialty, fast breeder, but run much more safely, to burn up all the long lived radioactive waste generated from Fission? The economic answer is obvious to me. I laugh at the earnest thorium reactor proponents. They simply don't understand that any fission reactor will take twenty five years from the time a earnest design is initiated, before the completed design would be licensed to build. A naturally fail-safe Fusion reactor has no need for such exhaustive safety system designs. If not carefully nursed to happen, the Fusion reactor simply stops, while there is little quantities of radioactive materials present at all. You could design a complete Fusion reactor, even though more technically complex is half the time, or perhaps one quarter the time, needed for a Fission equivalent.

This enabling control microprocessor family advance, is the long awaited, inexpensive but powerful version, needed and sufficient to make possible, the HCCI or PCCI operation of ICEs, either of Otto or Diesel variety. Great News, indeed. Many of the modern ICEs designs have made all the other advances needed, including cylinder by cylinder control, dual VVT, VVL, throttle free operation, DI, and enough toxic sensors to provide proper feedback control. This will improve ICE efficiency by another 15-25%. Especially now that the Euros are deciding to join the campaign to cleanse the ICE. By 2016 they will actually have implemented toxic emission controls that approach USA standards of the early 1980s, FINALLY. The Europeans are about to join the fight, after years of interminable environ-talk and blather, but no action. Their Air will begin to clear. The recent tremendous fossil fuel discoveries sufficient for 1000 years or more of advanced civilization, has put paid to the Peakist Malthusian ideas. Especially since all future energy needs are only a decade or two from arriving with Fusion. The last experiment and first primitive prototype Fusion reactor, ITER, is drawing ever nearer to completion. Some teams are actually designing the next prototype or "DEMO" which will add real power to the grid. Simultaneously the environ-Mental idiocy of CAGW is finally penetrating even over there. Twenty-first Century quantitative Science has disproved it, but Reality over the past 17 years of history of no warming, have completely discredited the constant, but lucrative, cry that Doomsday will arrive tomorrow. You can only cry Wolf so many times to no effect, before adrenal fatigue sets in, and you are ignored. PS: You can reverently clutch your copies of "Faith of My Fathers", today's version of "Mein Kampf", but it will do you no good. The Incompetent's mis-Administration is unraveling, and will be swept out, next November in a tsunami-like tidal wave, no matter how much he yells Class Warfare, and Class Envy. I want my Party back.

Harvey, Don't just count the old steel companies like US Steel, or look at raw steel production from ore. You need to count the mini-Mills too, who remelt old steel scrap and make most of the US steel today.

ITER could be scrapped and it would make no difference, not that that is any longer possible, with its much more equitably spread financing. The know-nothing Democrats could not stop it, like the Clintonians did once before,while pretending to support it. In the long gestation time for building the ITER, every single one of the scientific problems it was meant to overcome, have been solved in smaller machines around the world. It has become a Proof of Concept and merely an upsizing experiment, bringing all the advances together in one Place, before going on to commercial Fusion prototypes. There are zero real thorium reactors designs in existence, other than paper studies. It would take LONGER to design and certify a safe thorium nuclear fission reactor, then a new fusion reactor. What's more, it would cost more. Much more. I support the now safe GenIII+ reactor designs finally nearing license approval. But only as a one generation of power plants, to ease the transition to Fusion. This would allow the over-aged Coal plants, grandfathered by the eco-nitwit Carterite Democrats, with no toxic emission controls, to be retired, thirty years after they were planned to be scrapped. Except for the "No Nukes!" Demagogues who threw out the baby with the bathwater, indiscrimanately eliminating all fission plants to stop the relative handful of building problems in progress, that we genuine nuclear critics were trying to rectify. Besides we need some Fusion plants, if for nothing else, than to "crack" and tranmute the even atomic weight transuranics, that represent the remaining fraction of 0.1% of the highly radioactive and the only remaining long-lived Actinide radioactive waste. The French are already routinely "Actinde Burning", transmuting their easier to crack, odd atomic weight transuranics cutting in half the long lived radioactive waste. All the other waste becomes safe in much shorter times like 100 years that we routinely handle, like our gold and precious metals repositories. That solves one of the so-called problems of fission power.

A whole bunch of low value funding that after Admin costs, will be sufficient to only result in paper studies duplicating previous research. Ideally the politicians would like to give 10 million voters one dollar each, rather than one researcher 10 million dollars, enough to do real R&D.

All this does is prove once again that the eco-nitwits never learn a damn thing. It also reminds you what the first thing any Consultant quickly learns, which is the "proper answer" sought by his paying client; and makes sure his Report/Study will say exactly that. Talk to me when a FCEV can be sold for less than a few hundred thousand dollars per vehicle. FCEVs are subsidized excesses like the EV-1, of 25 years ago, technological "Tour de Forcees", with no prospect of econm0omuic viability. They are created to satisfy the CARBite idiots and their Gold quotas mandating FCEVs, on the automobile industry. But the auto companies, foreign and domestic, are gathering the gumption to face down the CARBites, now knowing that the California auto market will NEVER be denied to them, by those Eco-nitwits. If the VOLT is criticized for being too expensive, when it is $5000 more than a conventional ICE auto, and its fuels are as widely available as electricity and gasoline are, what pray tell are these FCEV LOONs smoking? With the US down to only two counties across the Country not meeting the endemic targets for Clean Air, after forty years of hard effort, the days of these eco-nitwits are just about over.

EP, Your understanding of energy sources is out-of-date. Oil supplies, recoverable with today's technology, is about 2 trillion barrels in America, 2 trillion in Canada, and 2 trillion in South America. I won't speak for Eurasia at all. By comparison all of the mid-East has about 1.2 trillion barrels of recoverable liquids. So supplies have expanded at least six fold if not more . If supplies lasted 50-100 years under old reckoning, it is now 600-1000 years today. Plus liquid fuel energy use in the advanced societies is declining everywhere, as IEA reports, as the hard effort to improve efficiency is bearing fruit. No one has declined from 21 million barrels /day to 18 million barrels/day over the past decade, but all developed countries are using less every year. This offsets in large part the increased demand from the new tigers of China and India. But Fusion is no longer "...50 years away and always will be". ITER is half constructed in Cadarache France. It is like the early prototype fission power reactors in the late fifties. In a lot less than a score of years, commercial reactors were being constructed everywhere. The next fusion reactor after ITER will add power to the grid; and had there been satisfaction with the very low service factor of so-called renewables, ITER itself, could produce power more frequently, and more power, than any renewable Solar or Wind installation. But unlike fission, that demands the very best safety technology to control a potential runaway, Fusion is fail safe, and that makes all the difference. If something goes wrong it just stops. That will make its spread much faster.

A doubling from next to nothing will still result in next to nothing. That is what you get when know-nothing eco-fools presume to do any scientific engineering. Geothermal is limited by satisfactory sites, and sufficient thermal reservoirs. But it is really hindered by the hot and very corrosive thermal fluids that destroy the Plants in a short time.

It is hilarious to see the eco-nitwits braying at a EPA worker saying the ICE will exist for the foreseeable future. If the Volt is too expensive, you can take your half million dollar fuel cells, and firmly plant them in your imaginations because that is where they will stay. Nobody can afford them. The qualitative scientific hypothesis of CAGW has been pretty much been proved false by the quantitative science of the 21st century. Further it has been confirmed by real life. The eco-loon Jimmy Hansen wanted us to go back to the caves in 1988. He and loony friends predicted the world would still warm much more than it has, even so. He was a loon then, and remains one, but his prophecies are tarnished today. the North and South American continents produce no NET CO2. So their is no need to address the so-called problem in America at all. we have sacrificed an created more than enough bio-sequestration sites already, even if we commonly call them National Parks. There has been no warming for going on 16 years after a 19 year period of minutely escalating temperatures. Meanwhile the increase atmospheric content of a trace gas CO2, is greening the Planet as reported by the NASA satellites. That is wholly benign, and Mankind is repairing the Planet for the true eco-catastrophe that the Planet's Flora did, by consuming the atmospheric CO2 to starvation and stunting levels for them. Efficiency is biting too. The search for substitutes has succeeded. It took some forty years, but the answers are becoming available. US Oil demand is down to 18 million barrels per day from over 21. That is a decrease of 3 parts in 18, or 16%, and the decline is accelerating. Meanwhile US domestic Oil production is up, due to new technology, and approaching the high point reached in the mid 1970s. We have also created a synthetic fuel industry producing 15% of our demand. Dis you ever expect a non-signee the USA would be the only country to achieve the Kyoto treaty targets? But the US emissions are down to mid-1990s levels already, just a little way to its targeted 1990 level. Together our imported Oil demand is therefor way, way down. Energy independence is now actually feasible. Our Oil finds are pushing the time before we exhaust supplies to a thousand years or more. So much for the Peakist idiots. The ITER Fusion reactor in France is half built in its 10 year construction cycle. It does not have any electric generators in its construction plan. But if it did it would be more reliably produce power than any Solar or Wind installation; and it would also produce more electricity then any so called renewable plant, in the world. The next Fusion reactor after the ITER experiment, WILL add power to the grid, and solve in perpetuity the need for energy. The wait for clean and inexhaustible Fusion is drawing to a close, finally. But of course the eco-nitwits don't know, or want to know that.

Steel produced in Japan may be made as you suggest, but that is NOT TRUE in America. Better than 90% of US steel is manufactured from recycled scrap steel in enlarged, high quality, tool-steel electric arc furnaces. For an enviro, this is a perfect example of true sustainability, as well as true economic progress. Unlike the phony enviro nonsense of Solyndra, EverGreen, Nrel, and a long list of politically connected payoffs to cronies, that had zero probability of lasting beyond the last subsidy. Making steel in this manner, in so-called mini-Mills, as America now does, uses much less energy remelting 90% steel scrap as "ore", instead of from 2-3% iron ore. American Steel is now the most profitable and envy of the world, with which third world countries can't compete, since they don't have two centuries of scrap steel to draw upon as "ore".

The dystopians are out to modify the modern human way of Life in America, once more. It won't work, it never does. Progress that improves things is readily accepted. Rationing and reduction in life-styles are always posited, by those it won't effect at all as "..being good for you". What utter Bilge. But the idiots never, ever learn!

Chrysler has been designing a DI and MultiAir version of its World engine under the code name "Thunder Shark", that is all-alloy and only 5 years old. But significantly they have not been doing that for its 1.8 liter versions, only the 2.0 and 2.4 liter versions. Is this the reason? A new 1.8 liter all-alloy engine was in the works from Fiat to replace their "B Family" ? Or is this merely the modernized 1.8 liter World engine as modified by Fiat Power Train? You can speculate that it is a completely new engine in a slightly smaller basic design. That would lend itself to a reduction in displacement to 1.2 -1.4 liters as well, and eventually replace the FIRE Multiair.

The bureaucrats still have not managed to coerce or threaten the mighty Oak and Redwood to submit their annual CO2 sequestration figures. Here in North America our Flora in forests, ranchlands, and farms are expanding rapidly thanks to the to removing the starvation levels of CO2 that Flora had depleted from the atmsophere. Since we don't have any idea how much we bio-sequester, any attempted accounting is ridiculous. Now suggested to be revised upward by 17 times more than Man emits, according to a recently peer-reviewed published in Nature, except that it is more than we emit in North America, all such accounting is P-H-O-N-Y! America is a NET carbon sink as measured by peer-reviewed and published measurements published by Scientists from princeton University. This is typical scare tactics by the eco-loons and their cynical, corrupt, eco-organizations like WWF, UCS, Green Slime etc,seeking more funding and Solyndra type ripoffs.

As typical, the know-nothings can't get two organizations straight. The Energy Information Agency, EIA, is a domestic governmental agency and part of the DOE. The International Energy Agency, IEA, is an international organization and a part of the UN agencies, I beleive. Also as typical, the eco know-littles don't know that USA domestic production has begun to rise from a low of about 5 million bbls/day and is with in spitting distance of 8+ million barrels per day, the Peak of the 1976. Furthermore, we have grown synthetic fuel manufacture to an additional nearly 3 million bbls/day. On top of that, despite our population rising to over 300 million, our oil demand is down from a peak of 21 million bbls/day in 2000, in a steady decline over the past decade to about 18 million bbls/day, a decline of 14%. The result is that US imported oil demand is way down to about 7 million bbls/day. In addition, the only major country to even approach the Kyoto targets is the USA, even though we never agreed to it. Our documented emissions are at mid 1990s levels approaching the target level of 1990. Of course this is still all bovine scatology, because the bureaucrats still haven't managed to get any of the mighty Oaks and Redwooods to fill out their required paper work documenting how much CO2 they sequestered in their trunks, roots and leaves. Since they never document natural sequestration, our enlarging forests, sequester more and more with the result the USA emits not a single gram of CO2 on net, and actually absorbs a lot from Eurasia to boot. Just as the peer reviewed and publsihed paers from the Princeton University teasm have tested and proved. So much for the California loons and their AB32. The Peakist fools still spout Apocalyptic cant, even though the Peakist nonsense was concerned with sweet oil refining capacity, originally.

The only thing that is news here is that Japan's very very, very optimistic mileage ratings have been down graded to merely very very optimistic. It lamost approaches the Eureopena NEDC that is 15% more optimistic than our legal measure the CAFE, which in turn is 30% more optimistic than the arbitrary and ill defined EPA window stickers.

Once again. Technological progress is slow but incremental.