TreeHugger has an excellent round up of electric cars today, including a number of concept and university projects that are not often included in EV articles. The beautiful Tesla roadster is, of course, number one on this list too!

Sure, the Tesla roadster is not for everybody, but it is a car that appeals to the early adopter community, and makes headlines outside of its niche. Both of those things are very important for a nascent technology like EVs.

Also, be sure to check out the comments for some other electric vehicles that they don’t have in their 17.

Just ahead of the London Motor Show, Lotus has announced a special edition of its Elise sports car, the Eco Elise. This eco-friendly version of an already pretty efficient little sports car, improves the Elise’s footprint throughout its life, from production to eventual retirement without sacrificing performance.

How have they done this? A large part of the changes are in the choice of materials used to make the car. While the structural and drivetrain components remain mostly the same, sustainable materials like hemp, eco wool and sisal have been used for body panels and trim and a new water based paint has been used for the exterior finish.

On the more technical side, a new gear change light has been added, letting the driver know the optimum time to change gear, and flexible solar panels have been integrated into the car’s hemp hard top roof panel. The solar panels contribute power to the car’s electrical system, saving energy that would have come from the engine. No numbers have been provided for the amount of power generated, and given the size of the Elise’s roof panel, and the information about Toyota’s plans for solar panels in their next generation Prius, I imagine it is not much power.

[Via AutoBlog.]

San Francisco will be testing a system that uses 4″ square plastic sensors embedded in the street to report the location of empty spaces to drivers, either via signs in the streets or direct to their mobile phones. Cars circling around looking for spaces (which, as anybody who has tried to park in SF knows, is common) contributes significantly to the carbon dioxide emissions, reduces the local air quality and frustrates drivers.

This new system should help reduce the time circling looking for a space when there are some nearby, but is it really the best solution? And how many cars will be homing in on that recently freed up space as soon as the system reports it?

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It seems to be electric car day here at Vertography! Over at Wired’s blogs, Chuck Squatriglia reports that BMW is having 500 Mini cars made at the factory in England without any engine, transmission or fuel systems. The cars are being shipped to Germany where they are fitted out with electric transmissions and batteries, and then they’ll be off to California. Ten of the cars will be used by BMW as show cars, the other 490 will be leased to “select” customers.

Sounds like the primary reason for these cars being made is to help meet California’s zero-emissions vehicle mandate, but the official line is that it will help BMW understand more about electric vehicles. Shame it is just 500, but let’s hope they are just the first 500 of many.

Many people have heard of the Tesla electric roadster, but there’s another fast electric car around the San Francisco bay area too: the Wrightspeed X1.

Unlike the Tesla, the X1 is still a one-of-a-kind proof of concept vehicle that is not available for purchase. Whereas the Tesla gets its chassis design, and some other components, from Lotus, the X1 gets its chassis from another British car company: Ariel. Based on the Ariel Atom design, the look of the X1 is a little different too, bearing more of a resemblance to track racing cars or some of the classic British kit car designs like the Caterham 7.

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The internet is buzzing this morning with a report from the Nikkei business daily newspaper in Japan that Toyota plans to add solar panels to the next generation Prius, in addition to its plug-in capability.

Most of the comments seem to be skeptical of the amount of value adding the panels can bring, but Canadian engineer Steve Lapp can provide actual data since he modified his 2001 Prius back in 2005 to include solar panels on the roof. His initial three panel system generated around 270W, but he was hoping to boost that to 360W with the addition of a fourth panel.

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There have been a number of eco-friendly transportation announcements over the past few days, so here’s a quick round up of the ones that caught our attention:

• A cardboard bicycle from a student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Created initially in an attempt to reduce theft, the low cost cardboard bicycle which is made almost entirely from recyclable and recycled materials and uses interchangeable mechanical parts.
• Inhabitat reports that Mercedes Benz intends to convert their entire line up of luxury cars to alternative fuels by 2015. That might sound like a long time in the future, but it is only 7 years away!
• SolarLab will be launching a solar powered rickshaw in London next year as a pilot program. If it performs well there, it will be released into other cities around the world too. The solar hybrids are human/electric hybrids combining pedal power and solar electric power from an array of photo-voltaic panels on the roof of the rickshaw. [Via InHabitat.]
• In Austin, Texas, Doug Pelmear claims he has modified a 1987 Ford Mustang engine, perfecting ideas his grandfather had 60 years ago, and his car now achieves 110 mpg. The car produces 400 bhp, and is claimed to go from zero to 60mph in just 3 seconds.

As oil prices continue to rise, consumers will become more and more interested in lower cost alternatives. Luckily for the planet, many of the solutions for reducing our dependency on oil are also good for the environment - a win, win situation.

Out in San Francisco last night I came across one of Google’s plugin hybrids parked in the garage under the building they have office space in. There were three spaces in the corner of the garage nearest to the door to the Google space marked as reserved for Google Fleet vehicles, and all three spaces had retractable extension cords mounted on the wall in front of them.

Only one Toyota Prius was there, and despite being painted in RechargeIT.org colours and saying that it was a plugin hybrid, it was not actually plugged in. Furthermore, we couldn’t actually see any obvious place to plug it in (normally, the after market conversions have a small connector on the rear bumper).

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