Prius designer: It is time to end our oil addiction  

Bloomberg has an interesting (and long) article quoting the designer of the Prius saying that Toyota must lead the car industry in ridding itself of oil addiction.

Bill Reinert, who helped design Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius hybrid, hovers in a helicopter 1,000 feet over Fort McMurray, Alberta. On this clear November morning, he's craning for a look at one of the world's largest petroleum reserves where there's not an oil well in sight.

Instead, in a 2-mile-wide pit below, trucks head to refineries with loads of sand weighing more than Boeing 747s. Yellow flames shoot skyward as 900-degree-Fahrenheit (482- degree-Celsius) heat liquefies any embedded petroleum. Floating scarecrows and propane-powered cannons do their best to chase migrating birds from lethal wastewater ponds.

Eventually, nuclear reactors may surround the crater 270 miles (435 kilometers) northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, delivering the power required to wring oil from sand.

``This is what the end of the age of oil means,'' says Reinert, 60, who plans the vehicles Toyota will make in a quarter century as national manager for advanced technology at the U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California. ``The car-based culture, the business-as-usual of building cars and trucks, is going to change dramatically.''

Since Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913, the world's automakers have relied on a single source of power --the gasoline-dependent internal combustion engine.

Today, the twin threats of $100-a-barrel oil and global warming are convulsing an industry addicted to cheap, abundant petroleum. Auto companies, already hurt in 2007 by the lowest U.S. demand in a decade, are struggling to perfect cars that run on ethanol, diesel, natural gas, hydrogen and household electricity.

They're under the gun from California and more than a dozen other states to cut carbon exhaust by 2020 with vehicles that must get 44 miles per gallon (19 kilometers per liter) of gasoline, about double today's average. On Dec. 19, President George W. Bush signed a law that mandates fuel-efficiency of 35 mpg nationwide by that year.

Reinert says automakers are endangering themselves by basing sales and profits on the big, fast cars that many U.S. customers say they want in 2008.

In five years, as oil shortages and global warming intensify, car companies may be out of step with drivers' demands for fuel-efficient vehicles. Even worse, degrading stretches of the planet like Fort McMurray will only delay -- not prevent -- the time when the world must function in a post- peak-petroleum economy. ...

It's been a crazy few months at Tesla Motors, what with all those heads rolling and transmissions failing, but the company says it absolutely, positively will begin building the all-electric Roadster on March 17.

Tesla still hasn't gotten the transmission sorted out, so the first run will use an "interim" unit that, although robust enough to do the job, cuts the car's zero-to-60 time from 4.0 seconds to 5.7. That's a 42 percent drop - nothing to sneeze at when you're forking over $98,000 for a high-performance sports car.

Just how many cars will feature the temporary fix remains to be seen, but Tesla says its engineers have finally solved the transmission problem and later models will deliver on the 4-second promise. Tesla calls it DriveTrain 1.5.

So what's that mean for people who get cars with the Band-Aid?

Tesla is promising to retrofit earlier cars at no cost once it's sure DriveTrain 1.5 works. Those who get a Roadster early will find themselves getting a substantial boost in performance some time down the line.

Sn150254_2 The first two transmissions Tesla tried proved unreliable, and apparently the tranny in the car Motor Trend praised in its road test is only good for a few thousand miles. Tesla has decided to abandon the complex two-speed gearbox originally slated for the car. Instead, it has developed a one-speed transmission and improved power electronics module that sends more current to the motor, allowing it to produce more peak power. The company says the new design is lighter, more efficient and offers improved thermal performance and quarter-mile acceleration.

It's not an easy fix. The motor must be modified to improve its cooling capacity, and AutoblogGreen reports that Tesla is ditching the air-cooled motor in favor of a liquid-cooled one. Road testing of DriveTrain 1.5 could begin as early as next week.

Coincidentally, that's when the first production Tesla Roadster, dubbed P1, will be delivered to Elon Musk, the company's chairman. The company has cleared all the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation hurdles and says it will start building cars in England on March 17. Production will start slowly and ramp up through the summer once DriveTrain 1.5 is ready to go.