The Enertia isn’t your regular, wimpy electric moped. It’s an honest-to-goodness motorcycle. Mind you, it’s no crotch rocket. It’s much better looking and waaayyyy cooler. Unfortunately, at $12,000 it’s  just as expensive as those over-powered boy toys. 

What does 12 grand buy?  Glad you asked. Though you’ll only go as fast as 50 mph, you won’t even notice because you’ll be busy gloating about the incredible 326 mpg and knowing you won’t need AAA if something happens.  This baby, and all future Best Buy-purchased PEVs, is going to be repaired and maintained by the Geek Squad.  Though, to be fair, there are two pretty important disclaimers I need to add at this point:

1. While the mpg is 326, actual range on a charge is 45 miles.
2. The Geek Squad is only going to do Level 1 repairs. Not clear what happens if you have a Level 2 or 3 issue. (At least you’ll look good standing next to your Enertia on the side of the road….)

I still haven’t seen the Enertia. They were supposed to appear in 5 Best Buys this month. Does anyone out there know which lucky 5 stores are offering my future boppin’-around-town wheels?

So, it turns out that having a Ford vehicle (Escape hybrid) entitles us to receive the Ford Magazine. As you might expect, the “magazine” is basically a blatant extended advertisement. However, surprisingly, it did have interesting news on their cars (the new Flex, a new plug-in Escape), some fun facts on eco-driving, as well info on a new site they’ve developed called Driving Skills for Life. Wonder if they got the idea for combining self-promotion with useful information from Costco Connection? Costco’s got the whole self-promotion-disguised-as-interesting-articles thing down to a science.

Anyway, let’s start with the eco-driving facts. They really did a good job of pulling together some interesting stats:

• Older, poorly maintained vehicles make up only 10% of the vehicles in the US but account for 90% of all emissions!
• At speeds exceeding 40 mph, the drag caused by open windows consumes more fuel than using the vehicle’s air conditioning.
• Approximately 50% of the energy required to operate at highway speeds is devoted to overcoming wind resistance. (So why don’t Ferraris get better gas mileage??)
• Idling for more than 30 seconds uses more fuel than restarting the engine.
• In city driving, acceleration accounts for nearly 50% of a vehicle’s energy consumption.
• When compared to Eco-driving behaviors, depending upon the vehicle being driven, aggressive drivers can produce as much as:
• 7% more CO2 emissions
• 26% more NOx emissions
• 8 times more CO emissions
• Gas mileage drops by about 1% for every pound of tire pressure below the recommended level. Keep your tires properly inflated!
• Driving a vehicle at 65 mph consumes roughly 15% more fuel than driving at 55mph.
• Today’s engines don’t require lengthy warm-up before driving, even in cold weather.
• A properly tuned vehicle may consume about 20% less fuel and produce fewer emissions.

As for new things to expect with Ford’s cars:

• The plug-in Escape sounds promising. For 7 hours of charging time you get to travel 30-40 miles on electric power. The charge time may sound a bit excessive but the very cool part is that if you need to go further than your alloted 30-40 miles, the gas engine will kick in and the vehicle switches to standard Ford Escape Hybrid mode.
• For the new Ford Flex (pictures above), Ford is finally unveiling a car that appears to be designed some time within the past 20 years. I especially like the humongous amount of cargo space that can be available as well as the giant sunroof for the back-seat dwellers. Really, the biggest issue I see with the Flex is the fact that it is essentially a car/wagon that gets SUV-like mileage. Obviously designed pre-$120+ per gallon oil, the Flex gets a measly 17 mpg in the city and 24 mpg on the highway. Too bad Ford didn’t have the foresight to make the Flex their second hybrid. THAT would have been something to blog about!

And lastly, with regard to Ford’s hyped new site called Driving Skills for Life, I did a 25 minute tour of the eco area under the Students section. It was torture. Don’t waste your time. Anything you can learn during that waste of internet electrons is available in their handy-dandy list that is provided at the beginning of this post. To be fair, the Student section does seem to provide some good tips for beginner drivers. So don’t be afraid – go ahead and explore the site, just avoid the eco section.

Right on cue, after my $4.10 per gallon experience this morning, I saw an article in MSN Autos for Volvo’s latest concept plug-in hybrid based on its C30 model. As with all things still in concept, this little gem has been given the somewhat cool name of ReCharge. Though, knowing Volvo, the actual production name will be something entirely more bland like R30.

Some interesting highlights for the ReCharge include:

• No central motor! Rather, each wheel is driven by its own electric motor.
• The flex-fuel engine that it does have is used to charge the battery, not provide power directly to the wheels.
• Volvo estimates that the ReCharge will emit up to 66% less CO2 than today’s best hybrids.
• There are a bunch of other interesting technical points brought up in Jacob Gordon’s MSN article – why wheel engines are safer, battery technology used, plus the efficiency, speed and distance specs. I don’t need to confuse things with my interpretation, so please click HERE to access the original article.

Having said all that – I have just 2 requests for the engineers at Volvo:

1. Please bring the ReCharge to production sooner than the 10 years currently projected.
2. Please do a station wagon version. I am, after all, still an American that needs my SPACE!