If Dr. Lyle Dennis’ website is to be believed, over 35,000 people have already expressed an interest in GM’s hybrid Volt, not due to launch until November 2010. While the Volt is perhaps not as striking as the Tesla roadster, nor as fast, it is much more likely to be affordable.

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Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech has commented on an article in Sunday’s NY Times looking at the differences in two plans for getting off the addiction to oil. We think we have a better plan than either of them, inspired in part by both of them. Let’s look at the two plans first…

First up is Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, which is trying to solve the problem by means of pure electric cars with exchangeable battery packs for range extension. Basically, for typical daily driving you run off the battery which you recharge at night. When you need to drive further, you can pull into a battery changing station and they’ll swap out your flat battery for a newly charged pack. Even better, the car is free (in the same way that your cell phone is free, when you sign a two year contract). Just pay a monthly contract that is similar to the monthly fuel bill you’re paying and they’ll lend you the car for free.

The Pickens Plan on the other hand is promoting the use of natural gas for vehicle power, and wind power for electricity. Natural gas solves the range problem in pretty much the same way as gasoline does today - you pull into a gas station and simply refill. CNG is already in use for vehicles in the US, so this is a well known technology; many taxis servicing the airport here in San Francisco are already CNG fueled, as are some of the buses and even some garbage trucks.

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Another California automotive startup, Fisker Automotive has plans for a luxury performance plugin hybrid (PHEV). The very slick looking 4 door car is powered by their Q Drive plugin hybrid system. The car will do 50 miles on pure electric power, so for many people their commute can be totally electric.

If you do need more than 50 miles range, there is a small gasoline engine in the car that will turn a generator to recharge the battery and run the electric motor.

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Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s president, said, “We are currently working on the development of a Ferrari that will use alternative energy sources and which will be based on what we are doing at the moment in Formula One.”

The technology he’s referring to is Ferrari’s Kinetic Energy Recycling System (KERS), which is part of the requirements for the 2009 Formula One season. This move to make racing more efficient is partly driven by EU regulations forcing car manufacturers to reduce their fleet-average emissions to less than 130 grams per kilometer by 2012.

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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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