I think they ought to spend some of the money to double-track additional BN trackage between St Paul and Seattle. The Empire Builder has been held up nearly every day by huge crude oil trains and the EB is one of the few Long Distance trains that comes close to being profitable. Amtrak as a whole is a bargain. Just 1.5Bn of federal support per year and they deliver an entire passenger transportation mode. Now that the new electric locomotives are arriving some of the east coast lines will lose less, or possibly even make a profit. Amtrak has seen ridership increases with record setting numbers in 11 of the last 12 years.

Nice article, but I couldn't find the important number (the city mpg), anywhere in it. Did I miss something? I am tired of articles boasting about highway mpg since most of us do a lot more city miles than highway miles and it is relatively easy to boost hwy mpg by going a bit taller on the top gear.

Switchgrass is a possible crop in areas that have too little rain to even consider corn production. My family is from Montana and the average precipitation there is between 10" and 12". I would love to see switchgrass growing there alongside wheat fields and pasture land. It would also be really interesting to see the secondary impact of the change in crops, in that it would probably increase the amount of deer and wild fowl in the area as well as giving farmers another tool to use in order to keep the land healthy, productive and profitable.

One thing is for certain, if the Fresnel really does concentrate the light 8x, you won't see any vehicles ICE'ing your parking spot more than once. Can you imagine how hot it would cook a car that didn't have a PV array on its roof? On second thought, just how hot would the C-Max get, even if it does have a panel on its roof?

Henrik, I have to agree that Tesla Motors is still fairly fragile unless Musk decides to use his own money to cover short-lays as they ramp up production. But if they do get the Gen 3 out within 3-4 years at the price point Musk just spoke of, "$35,000 without a subsidy" all bets are off. Especially if the X is fairly successful and it actually comes out next year. Interesting days.

I can not believe that GM is going to sell the Cadillac ELR with a 3.3 kW charging rate. That is beyond absurd. Obviously, most of the ELR owners are going to charge at home most of the time. But they will be looking to top off the battery mid-day from time to time, and hooking up to an L2 charger and then be limited to 3.3 kW charging speeds will be a huge downer for ELR owners. I know how frustrating it is to grab a bite and spend an hour at a cafe while my car is charging, only to come back to my Volt and see that I gained just 9 more miles of AER in an hour of charging. 6.6 kW is the bare minimum a car builder should consider. The new RAV4-EV has 10 kW charging and that is pretty decent. You don't need Tesla type fast charging, but there is a minimum level that is acceptable to most buyers, and I think 6.6 kW is the bare minimum.

Nice price point. Impressive 0-60 times, too bad there are next to no DC fast chargers out there. Not sure how active the pack management system is, but it has to be better than the Leaf has. Too bad it is a compliance car for just the ZEV states. Hopefully, if it is selling/leasing well, GM will enlarge the area that they are selling it in.

One of the ugly aspects of carbon black is the ubiquitous nature of the its sources. I was hiking in Nepal in a completely agricultural area and the only time you saw a bit of clear sky was at dawn, within half an hour of dawn the sky was full of wood smoke. And this to the point of you wondering where in the denuded world these people were finding wood to burn. The government was encouraging them to use natural gas/propane stoves but wood gathered by a kid is free, so you can imagine how the new stoves went over. Then there are peat fires and subterranean coal fires to account for, and manufacturing processes, energy production and transportation... Talk about a plethora of targets for reductions, though. But don't even think you can touch my pellet stove or bother my rotisserie chicken place!

It would be easier to take this paper seriously if the editors of the Journal of Geophysical Research knew the difference between complementary and complimentary. Editors? Really? And I don't doubt that carbon black is a larger factor than previously thought, just that somebody ought to at least look at JGR-A's comments before they submit them. Next thing you know they will be mixing up loose and lose.

Kelly, I have been saying something similar, i.e. I thought that the economies of scale would kick in and the price of a Volt would drop after they built 1,000 a month or more. And I am still waiting for the MSRP to drop more than $1,000. Admittedly, some Chevy dealers are now offering Volts at $3,000 below MSRP so the real world price has dropped by nearly 10% in 25 months of production. $36.2k with incentives means a net price of $28.7k after the credit, which isn't bad. But only a few of the top dealerships are giving those deals. And GM refuses to build enough Volts to satisfy demand. Cars.com had just 3650 Volts in the entire US 2 weeks ago, despite the fact that there are 3079 Chevy dealers and they were selling nearly 3,000 Volts a month in 3 of the last 4 months. That is absurd. 5 weeks of inventory including the demo cars?

Interesting. SJC, the Overview page you cite has an MSRP of $32,950, but if you hit the Pricing tab, it shows an MSRP of $33,745, which is the same as the KBB page I linked to, but both those $33,745 MSRP's actually include the Destination fee. So my link to Kelley Blue Book is pointing to incorrect info. Sorry for incorrect information. I checked with ford.com and they now have the MSRP for the C-Max Energi, which they didn't have last week and it is $32,950. I am not sure why KBB included the destination fee in their MSRP for the Energi, but on at least one page, so did Yahoo.com.

I didn't see the actual MSRP in the article, so either I am skimming or the writer left out some fairly important info. Yes, the net is around $30k, but it only qualifies for a $3750 credit and the MSRP is $33,745. So though all the plug-ins seem to be clustering around a net price of $30k (though the Leaf may be dropping below that number) the Energi does give you good bang for your buck. Though I hope the Energi comes closer to meeting its EPA CS mpg figures than the C-Max Hybrid does to its stated hwy mpg. http://www.kbb.com/ford/c-max-energi/2013-ford-c-max-energi/sel/?vehicleid=378934&intent=buy-new#survey

Heat and AC stay on, but in Eco mode. Your glass is half full.

Chad, FWIW, my colleague has an MKZ Hybrid and he gets 38 combined February through December and got around 36 mpg in January when we had "winter". So I don't know what your mpg would be but it would probably be better than Consumer Reports article that slammed it. It is a pretty nice car, the Fusion hybrid looks sharp inside and out but not as sharp as the MKZ.

83 mpg JA08 is going to be what in the newer US cycle? 65 mpg? Or more? The Prius gets 63 on the JA08 so if the Aqua got 83, it sounds like 65 mpg might be doable for the Aqua on the new EPA test cycle. I had thought that it was going to come in just under 60 mpg based on earlier comments but this is pretty impressive.

I missed the point by such a huge margin that I am rather embarrassed to return to the scene of my crime. I obviously thought that the 5C was a temperature. I still wish there was a record of what the price per kWh was every month, if the past few years were documented in a site like this it would give us a better idea of what we could expect in the future.

85% at 5C? Isn't that setting the bar kind of low? It is below 0C nearly every morning for 3 months of the year so what kind of loss are we looking for during our morning commutes? I do like the fact that they spoke about both the cathode and anode instead of boasting about gains in one and not the other. I wish GCC would have a monthly article on what the state of the art in wholesale and retail pricing, weight per kWh and expected life cycles for batteries that are currently being sold. It is useful to see what the universities claim to expect in 2 or 3 years, but it would be even more enlightening to see what the facts on the ground are, and how they have changed over the past few years.

Fuel efficiency gains might be useful, but if the US had had a way to produce clean, tasty drinking water in Iraq hundreds of American lives would have been saved. Nearly half of those truck convoys that were regularly attacked were carrying water. Also in an environment like Iraq, a solar array linked to a battery park would have given BEV's a reliable energy source that again did not have to be shipped in by at risk truckers and escort teams. But I think that the key word in this study is that there was no DIRECT military benefit. The indirect military benefits would be noticeable, and the military could possibly build technology that could be applied in a less expensive way in the civilian world.

56 mpg (US) in Europe, and what, 38 mpg for the models delivered here in the US? But we do get cupholders large enough for a 128 oz. big gulp.

I have been watching the ethanol debate for some time and the encouraging aspects of increasing efficiency and decreasing use of corn have been grindingly slow. The government puff pieces do show some improvements, like the article below: http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/pdfs/factfict.pdf And Pimental and Patzek have been pretty soundly debunked, as below: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/PimentelComments4_5_05.pdf But it seems like the ethanol production efficiency is not improving much at all. Is that graph accurate? Has the yield on each gallon of gasoline invested in making ethanol still in the area it was around 1990? Rats, I don't think those links are live, but they do have some interesting info if you care to cut and paste.

Intriguing! The map above is pretty useless, but the only good map I can find is on a Gungho sort of Israeli website, but he does have the only decent map of the earlier Tamar find, and Rachel, the larger find is 47 km SW of Tamar, even further into Israeli waters. But the field itself is probably spread out over mainly Israeli but also Lebanese and Cypriot areas. I don't think it will extend past the Mari-B into the waters off of Gaza, but this really gives Israel an increasingly strong whiphand over the Arabs. No wonder the Lebanese are screaming, first they have Israel to the south, making the desert bloom while the Lebanese are barely able to hold the Syrians at bay, let alone rebuild the healthy Lebanon of the past. Now Israel has an economy that is growing like gangbusters already, and you add in a find that rivals the North Sea. I think Iran will have to try to nuke Israel within 3 or 4 years or Israel will be so far ahead of the region that it will be impossible for the Arabs or Iran to keep up. http://hashmonean.com/2010/06/16/future-war-israels-massive-natural-gas-reserve-discoveries-draw-enemy-eyes/

I see it is only rated an 8.0, but it is an 8 out of 11, mind you. And 11 is louder.

The other aspect of buses energy use is that it is intermittent. A bus travels for 1 to 2 hours at relatively low average speed, around 20 mph, which means total energy needed is relatively low. Then it parks at its destination for 10-20 minutes, changes the driver and then starts another trip on its route. Wouldn't that 10-20 minute wait give the bus to substantially recharge its battery, i.e. the battery would drain from its 100 mile range to 60 miles in a 2 hour circuit, then it would recharge to 80 miles, next circuit would draw it down to 40 miles, you recharge it longer over lunch to get it back to its full range, repeat as needed... Just because a bus has just a 100 mile range it doesn't necessarily follow that the bus can only do 2 or 3 routes in a regular day, even if you mandate a 40 mile minimum reserve.

Tim, what I know about ranching would make a rather short paper, I used to help out on my Grandfathers ranch and I do help on my Mom's ranch, but she didn't get her ranch until after I left Montana. But the way it seems to work for most ranchers in Montana is, calve in late March to early May, sell the calves in matched, sale-able lots (red angus in one bunch, black angus in another) in the fall & early winter. Usually keeping the runt or any calf that doesn't look the same as the rest or would affect the price you get at auction. Then you butcher the runt & the oddball in the fall of the next year when they are about 18-20 months, and eat it yourself of sell off a side or two.

Impressive. All this tech and it gets 18 mpg in the city, 29 on the hwy. My CUV does better than that in the city. CXL $26,249 2.4L I4 182 HP 19 / 30 mpg CXL Turbo $28,745 2.0L I4 220 HP 18 / 29 mpg