Business smarts 44: Easigrass

Easigrass - artificial grass company based in London, England.
Photo: Colin Marsh.

Nissan's new Leaf sells out in US, Japan: Ghosn

The first year of production of Nissan's new electric car Leaf has been sold out, the head of the Japanese automaker, Carlos Ghosn, said Tuesday.
"We have 13,000 orders in the US and 6,000 orders in Japan," Ghosn said at a news conference in Detroit, the US auto industry capital.
Ghosn said that all of the US orders had come from individuals and not from government entities, whereas some orders in Japan were for municipal fleets.
"I don't think we're going to have a problem marketing and selling these cars for the first two or three years," the Nissan president and chief executive said, adding that tax incentives had made the car very popular in California.
The Leaf -- an acronym for Leading, Environmentally Friendly, Affordable, Family -- is billed by Nissan as the world's first mass-produced electric vehicle with zero emissions.
The first deliveries are set in December in the United States and Japan.
The car, which has a top speed of more than 90 miles (140 kilometers) per hour and is powered by a lithium battery, will go on sale in Portugal and the Netherlands in December, and in Britain and Ireland in February 2011.
Read full story here.

Miles ahead

My sister in Seattle spotted her neighbour taking delivery of one of these:
Miles ZX40S
From their website: "At Miles Electric Vehicles, we believe in the power of positive change and are working to make a sustainable difference that will benefit the environment today and for generations to come.
Not only are our zero emissions all electric, low speed vehicles ideally suited for fleet and neighborhood driving, but they also set the category standard for safety, comfort, quality and value. For the average commuter, MILES is developing a highway speed model, the MILES XS500, which will meet most daily transportation needs while preventing CO2 emissions."

Go Ape II!

Colourful Ape spotted outside the Cafe Bistro Charisma in Mayen, Germany.

Isetta

This Brighton, Sussex built Isetta was spotted at the 32nd edition of the Sandwell Historic Vehicle Show in the West Midlands.

Business smarts 43: Sandwell College, West Midlands, England

Sandwell College

Business smarts 42: Ring Events, Nurburgring, Germany

29 fuel-efficient cars face first big test

Competition to construct a 100-mile-per-gallon car cuts to chase next week at a Michigan speedway

Joe Knycha - Special to the Star

The 100-mile-per-gallon, real-world car has long been the stuff of science fiction, cartoons and comic books – but no more. Its day in the sun is coming, and fast.
Cars that can travel 100 miles per gallon on gasoline (or the equivalent thereof using other fuels and power sources) are not only possible but are being built now.
On Monday, 29 teams from around the world — including as many as three from Canada — will gather at Michigan International Speedway near Jackson to compete for $10 million in cash prizes in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.
Their goal is not only to achieve 100 miles per U.S. gallon (120 mpg per Imperial gallon, or 2.35 litres per 100 km), but also to do so in safety, comfort and at credible, real-world speeds.

Read full article here.

Business smarts 41: EW Tours

EWTOURS.TRAVEL is the brainchild of its founders, Kiran Rajdev and Herbert Wolf. After having acquired extensive experience in the travel industry over more than two decades each in separate careers, we jointly envisioned a travel service that would specialize in fully customized travel experiences for our clients. Our dream became a reality with the launch of EWTOURS.TRAVEL in 2006. Since then our goal has been to make your travel dreams come true.

Business smarts 40: G Force Training

Onsite Personal Training with Toronto’s G Force Home Training Inc.

Throw away the last of your good excuses. G Force makes it easy to get into the best shape of your life with our spirited team of certified personal trainers who bring the gym to you. Armed with fitness equipment and motivation, our fitness professionals arrive at your home or office on your schedule.

Business smarts 38: Hot Wings Grill and Rib House

Hot Wings
563 Queen Street West,
Toronto, ON M5V 2B6

416-359-8860

Remos, Smart car kick off airshow

By Sarah Brown

The two pilots peered out of the side of the Remos GX, looking for their counterparts on the ground. They were scheduled to make a low pass over Lakeland Linder Regional Airport[Lakeland, Florida] in perfect synchronization with a Smart car racing down the runway—a grand finale for the Road and Runway Rally, and a kickoff for the Sun ’n Fun airshow—but the Smart car was nowhere to be found.
Pilot in command Alyssa Miller and her co-pilot Jason Paur continued toward the field for its pass over the grass to the right of the runway. They finally spotted the car on short final, and soon they were neck-and-neck with the Smart car, which had been there the whole time: The roughly 9-foot-by-5-foot vehicle had been nearly invisible from a distance, swallowed by the circle in the "9" of the 8,500-feet-by-150-foot runway. The Smart car kept pace with the Remos for a bit until the airplane climbed and went around for a landing.

After four days of flying and driving adventures, the four contestants in the Road and Runway Rally arrived at Sun ’n Fun in style. Along the way, they met circus performers and pilots-to-be, tested their driving skills at the Grave Digger’s lair, and compared the size of the Smart car to everything from the Mercury capsule to a monster truck tire. Each team got two days in the Smart car and two in the Remos—which, by the way, weighs less than the tiny Smart car. The winners? The jury’s still out. But one thing’s for certain: Both teams had a whole lot of fun

Read full story here.

Renault-Nissan and Daimler to cooperate on new cars

Franco-Japanese Nissan and German giants Daimler form partnership to develop new cars and share engines.
By Andrew English - Telegraph.co.uk

A common replacement for the Renault Twingo, the Smart Fourtwo and a new four-seat Smart model will be the first results of a cooperation and share-swap deal signed by the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Daimler this week.
They will swap a symbolic 3.1 per cent stakeholding in each other to seal the deal, which will see the joint development of small cars as well as diesel and petrol engines.
At the top end of the model ranges Daimler will give Nissan's Infiniti prestige brand access to its four- and six-cylinder petrol and diesel engines, but both companies stressed that the deal will not dilute the image of their brands. Infiniti's efforts to launch itself in Europe have been hindered by its lack of turbodiesels.
"Each brand has its own identity and its own kind of products and its own cost and price level," said Carlos Ghosn, Renault-Nissan chief executive. "We need to keep each brand very different from the others."
Read full story here.

What is this car?

The picture on the left accompanied a story "Behind the wheel of the plucky Think City electric car" on the CTV website. The article describe the Think City electric car as a two-seater. Why then four doors?
The photo on the right is a Think City car from the Norwegian manufacturer's official website. Sure don't look like the same car to me. Question is, what is the car on the left?

Tuk-tuk driver takes web road to success

AMRIT DHILLON-SPECIAL TO THE STAR

CHENNAI, INDIA—Many proud auto rickshaw drivers cover the back seat with fancy fabrics such as faux leopard fur, hang tassels and fringes on the side or decorate them with deities or pictures of their favourite Bollywood actresses.
Samson (he goes by only one name) in Chennai has no time for such low-tech practices; he is probably the only driver in India with a website dedicated to his trusty steed and service.
Auto wallahs lead hopeless lives. Every day, they struggle with chaos, honking, aggression and pollution. Their income is meagre. Home is one room in a slum. Between rides, they smoke or snooze. Some cannot even name their prime minister, much less understand the Internet.
Though a school dropout, Samson, 38, turned out to be different. The auto rickshaw stand he operated from was located in front of the Taj Coromandel hotel in Chennai, patronized by foreigners. Some years ago, a regular customer, a Japanese woman, asked him to take her, as usual, to an Internet café.
Read full article here.

Business smarts 39: Classic Towing and Storage

First U.S. site for Smart car2go concept is Austin, Texas

By MICHAEL TAYLOR
It might be the oil-rich state, but Texas will be the first U.S. home for Daimler’s innovative, environmentally aware car2go pay-as-you-go city-transport concept.
The concept has just moved from the pilot phase to a full-time business for the 120,000 residents of Ulm, Germany, and Daimler has announced that 200 car2go Smart Fortwos will flood downtown Austin this fall.
This isn’t the first car-sharing scheme in the United States, but it might be one of the simplest, and it’s backed by the auto industry’s oldest name. Daimler’s idea for car2go is to make driving through traffic-clogged cities as cheap as talking on a mobile phone.
Loosely based on Paris’s noted Velib city bicycle system, Ulm dwellers or visitors can drive away in any car2go vehicle for 19 cents a minute by showing the car a chip attached to their licenses.
“The idea is that when you want a car, you just take it, and when you’ve finished with the car, you just leave it,” car2go project manager Robert Henrich, said. He said it’s a free-flowing system and you never have to return the car to where you picked it up. “So if you want to cross the city, you just take a car, cross the city and then leave it.”
The Austin trial will start with 200 Fortwo Micro Hybrid Drives for city employees and, to make the system more environmentally friendly, they will use an automatic start-stop function to kill the engine when the cars are stationary.
Daimler hopes that the Austin version will develop like the Ulm project, which began with 50 cars for 500 employees in October 2008, spread to 100 cars for 1,000 users this February and now has 200 cars available for any resident to use any time.
With 750,000 people, Austin is much larger than Ulm, but Austin is known for its open-mindedness, its high cycling rates and its public transportation systems.
“We very much look forward to becoming the first international partner of car2go,” Austin Mayor Will Wynn said.
“Our city is known for its strong sense of environmental responsibility. The project has our full support,” he said.
Jérome Guillen, director of the Business Innovation department at Daimler that developed the car2go concept, said, “We deliberately chose a large American city. In the U.S.A., the car-sharing market has the highest growth rates in the world.
“Membership is free. We’ve taken a lesson from the mobile phone industry and you pay by the minute, which covers all the fuel and insurance costs as well,” he said.
Daimler eventually hopes to have cars within a three-minute walk of every city driver, with a fleet of cleaners keeping them pristine around city streets.
The automaker hinted that the system may upgrade from the fuel-sipping CDI Smart to a fully electric Smart that is being tested in London.
Source: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20090326/carnews/903269997

2010 New York Preview: Are GM’s EN-V concepts the future or folly?

Toronto Star - John LeBlanc
As a follow up to last year’s two-seat Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility concept developed with Segway, Government Motors brought to last year’s New York auto show, the U.S. automaker has released details of a trio of new Electric Networked-Vehicles (EN-V) concepts for this year’s Big Apple show media days, scheduled for next week.
This time around, GM teamed with its Chinese manufacturing partner, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. Group (SAIC), for its trio of show cars.
GM says “they represent three different characteristics that emphasize the enjoyable nature of future transportation: Jiao (Pride), Miao (Magic) and Xiao (Laugh).”
In addition to being shown in New York next week, the concepts will be showcased from May 1 through October 31 at the SAIC-GM Pavilion at World Expo 2010 Shanghai.
The EN-V concepts, two-seat electric vehicles—that weigh less than 500 kg and about 1.5 metres in length—were designed to “alleviate concerns surrounding traffic congestion, parking availability, air quality and affordability for tomorrow's cities.”
GM’s press release ominously predicts that “by 2030, urban areas will be home to more than 60 percent of the world's 8 billion people.”
GM’s Blade Runner-like projections aside, do you think the automaker, using our tax dollars, should be playing around with cars that won’t see the light of day for 20 years, if ever?
Or should GM stick to trying to make more competitive Chevys and Cadillacs?

smart drive kit for the iPhone: More safety and lifestyle

smart is the first car brand to develop its own drive app for the iPhone. Together with the vehicle-specific smart cradle for the iPhone the popular phone becomes a multimedia trip computer that is optimised for the smart fortwo in terms of function and design.
The smart drive app for the iPhone has all the important features needed whilst driving: phone calls via hands-free system, your own extensive music collection, internet radio and a clever navigation system with a special smart touch. There are also smart extras – for example the Car Finder that will guide you back to wherever you parked your car. The new smart drive app for the iPhone boasts an outstanding design and is simple to operate thanks to extra large buttons. The new app makes urban mobility even easier and more fun - the declared ob-jective of smart's philosophy.

Read more here.

European car firms’ drive for alliance falters

DAIMLER and Renault have been unable to resolve differences over valuations as the car makers explore a share swap that would bring Daimler into the Renault-Nissan alliance, two reliable sources said yesterday.
Daimler and Renault, which said in December they were in talks about jointly developing small cars, had also been discussing a share swap, the sources said.
Daimler is seeking a partner to improve profitability of its Mercedes A-Class and Smart cars by sharing development of vehicles and engines. The discussions were “more extensive and more advanced than realised”, Sanford C Bernstein analyst Max Warburton wrote in a report on Monday, citing “industry contacts”. An equity tie-up would bring “financial and strategic security” to Renault, the London-based analyst wrote.
“I struggle to see the will on both sides” for Daimler and Renault to swap stakes, said Philippe Houchois, an analyst at UBS in London who has “buy” ratings on Renault and Daimler shares. “There isn’t much scope for the companies to co-operate beyond small cars.”
Florian Martens, a Daimler spokesman, declined to comment on any share-swap negotiations with Renault. Daimler, based in Stuttgart in Germany, is discussing joint production of small cars with car makers including Renault, he said, repeating comments by Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche. Simon Sproule, a spokesman for Renault-Nissan, said he had “nothing to add” to remarks by CEO Carlos Ghosn, who said on March 3 that there was no “particular prospect” of an equity tie-up for the alliance.
Renault, which is based in Boulogne-Billancourt, rose as much as 67c, or 2%, to à 34,24 and traded at à 34,22 before midday in Paris, valuing the company at à 9,7bn. Daimler gained 37c, or 1,1%, to à 33,70 in Frankfurt, giving it a market valuation of à 35,8bn.
Daimler aims to boost sales of small cars to lower carbon-dioxide emissions to meet tighter regulations. The company is also looking to double its offering of compact Mercedes-Benz models to four to attract younger drivers.
Mercedes drivers are 55,6 years old on average in German-speaking Europe, compared with 45,6 years for BMW and 47 for Audi, according to research firm Sinus Sociovision, of Heidelberg in Germany.
Daimler is building a new factory in Hungary as part of a à 1,4bn investment in compact models, which will introduced next year.
Source: Business Day