Drew Dowdell

That inefficiency is present in any vehicle on a platform that offers engines with variable number of cylinders. That same inefficiency is there in an Accord or Passat.... it is simply the nature of offering Inline engines and V engines in the same platform. edit: Even true for BMWs... a Turbo-4 is shorter than an I-6... thus there is "wasted space" under the hood of every 4-cylinder BMW. You can't just transfer that space to the rear seat passengers... the hardpoints for the engine and transmission and everything else are still there.

You mean like wood? By your reasoning, we would be using wood for electricity generation. While coal as fuel may be cheap, the costs to burn it cleanly are high... as the standards for coal plant emissions increase, the cost effectiveness of burning the cheap fuel will decrease. Additionally, the energy from natural gas can be extracted more completely. A gas turbine with a regenerator and heat capture is like two power plants in one. The exhaust gases from such a setup are released at temperatures similar to a hot Texas day. Coal simply cannot do that. Coal plants are closing. Natural Gas plants are being built. Follow the trend line. I said I work for an Energy company... but I don't work for a company that does generation (we have some wind farms in Texas for token "green" cred, and a few gas generation plants in Canada, but that's it)... we don't have a dog in this fight aside from wanting to being able to buy energy cheaply at wholesale and sell it higher at retail.

Don't see these out and about too often.... any of our old-timer bus fans able to identify?

Lambda was designed from the start to be so much more than what it is today. I was supposed to spawn mini-vans, and a sedan version of it was supposed to replace the DTS and Lucerne. There is hidden flexibility in this chassis that we simply haven't seen yet.... don't expect it to be an Acadia Denali with the badges scraped off.

We took a loss on the sales of the shares, but the gain of kept employment (and paid taxes by those employees) by the domestic auto industry is far greater than the stock sale loss.

As much as I appreciate your links from Cleancoalusa.org, coal is not our future. It will remain in our infrastructure, but it will be diminishing over time. But who are you going to believe... the coal industry lobby website or the guy that works for one of the larger energy companies in the country?

GM + a little help from Isuzu

There's no reason they can't sell them... they just can't be the sole contract winner

While I think putting so many of our eggs in just the natural gas basket is asking for trouble (Just ask the UK), for the moment, natural gas prices are so cheap, we have too much. Companies are drilling wells and then capping them because they have no place to store the gas, so they might as well just store it where it is until it is time to bring that supply to market.

The government isn't mandating it. It is encouraging an environment for the EV car infrastructure to grow.

Look again then.... The 150th Coal fired generation plant shut down since 2010 just shut down last month.

Ford's design is very annoying, that's true, but in their cars that use Sync for HVAC primary control, it can end up being a reliability thing too. I've had Sync crash on me more than once.

I'm a traditionalist, so this isn't for me really. However, there are certain cars in the generations that I'm interested in that came with white painted rims or colored hubcap inserts.... I could see a use there. The only thing I would use this for on a modern car would be that "Winter Mode" set, in black, for our CR-V or Encore.

Well there goes GM's access to the VM light duty diesel I suppose.... Still, $47million seems really cheap for an engine manufacturer.

This very well preserved El Camino was seen out shopping at the mall over the weekend.

Looking forward to seeing it in person.

Coal fired plants are at an end. Any new ones currently being built are likely to be the last ones. In fossil fuel generation, natural gas is where it's at for efficiency, broadness of scale, cheapness of fuel and cheapness of construction, cleanliness, and demand responsiveness. The coal argument is invalid.

EV's for the middle class people are coming.

I love the Evoque but I cannot deny the presence this car has...

Not new

You can fill up a CNG vehicle with CNG in even fewer locations than EVs at the moment.

This may come as a shock to you, but the early adopters of the first Apple iPod and first Apple iPhone ($499 for the 10gb model in 2001 and $499 for the 4gb model in 2007 respectively) were relatively wealthy people. As the technology improved the price came down, and more people were able to afford it. Today, the cheapest iPod that isn't a shuffle has a full color screen and 16gb of memory costing only $149 each. Tesla is, at best, in the circa 2003 iPod time frame when they are still a curiosity that rich people buy, but that price WILL come down. The next generation models are already supposed to be cheaper than the current one.

260 miles isn't "any real distance"? Why do we keep having this conversation over and over? The Tesla Model-S has a longer range than my (currently out of service) Honda CR-V. As EV technology continues to improve, range will either increase or cost for that range will decrease, or a combination of both. Your Tin-Foil-Hat brigade comment that this is a way for the government to control the movement of the population is beyond dumb, and quite frankly, beneath you. The government is doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you said by encouraging MORE CHOICE in the mode of transit.

Happy belated!

Edit: Added poll