Linkspam from N.Y. Times Wheels blog

[neonvincent]

Oakland Airport Builds E.V. Chargers and Awaits the E.V.’s

Wheelies: The Pipeline Edition

With Financing in Flux, Saab’s First E.V. Program Awaits Its Fate

Chrysler Exports ‘Imported From Detroit’ to New York

After viewing Chrysler’s two-minute Super Bowl XLV advertisement, during which the rapper Eminem emerged not from the all-new Chrysler 300, but from a 200 sedan, some Monday-morning quarterbacks felt that the brand missed an opportunity to showcase a superior product, one deserving of the spot’s emotional impact.

Well, it is now time for the 300’s “Imported From Detroit” turn. Following a spot in which Ndamukong Suh, the Detriot Lions defensive tackle, drives a 300 home to Portland, Or., to visit his mother, Chrysler’s new flagship, which was reviewed recently in the Automobiles section, faces the most feckless, image-conscious gridiron of them all: Manhattan.

From the Cloud, Google Pulls Down an Energy Saver

Amp Delivers Its First Electric Mercedes-Benz ML Conversion

As Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors, learned during filming of “Revenge of the Electric Car,” developing an E.V. from the ground up is a prohibitively expensive exercise. Amp Electric Vehicles, an Ohio company that removes the guts of internal-combustion passenger cars and replaces them with electric powertrains, says it has a more viable way to get E.V.’s on the road, even if those roads are almost an ocean away.

On Wednesday morning at its showroom and production complex in Cincinnati, Amp executives handed over the keys of an electric Mercedes-Benz ML 350 to the company’s newest and biggest client, Gisli Gislason, the chairman and chief executive of Northern Lights Energy, a utility in Iceland. The luxury S.U.V. is the first vehicle to be produced in a five-year contract between the two companies, during which Amp expects to ship 1,000 E.V.’s to the island nation.

Robert Stempel, a Voice for Alternative-Energy Sources, Dies at 77

Robert C. Stempel, the former General Motors chairman and chief executive who died on Saturday at 77, spent a turbulent two years atop the country’s largest automaker, during which he cut jobs and closed plants to minimize company losses. However, for every automaker that deepens its experimentation in alternative-energy sources, Mr. Stempel’s legacy as an auto-industry seer is bolstered.

Mr. Stempel was an early advocate of alternative energy within G.M. and championed the EV1 electric-vehicle program. The G.M. board, however, lost confidence in his leadership before the EV1 was ready for production, and Mr. Stempel, who was also experiencing health problems, resigned in October 1992.

But while sourcing batteries for the proposed EV1, Mr. Stempel befriended Stanford Ovshinsky, the noted scientist credited with the invention of nickel-metal hydride batteries, thin-film solar panels and a long list of other technologies.

I plan on using all of these for either Crazy Eddie's Motie News or Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday on Daily Kos later today. Right now, I'm just taking advantage of the rich text formatter so that I don't have to actually open the blog posts and create the HTML by hand. I have better articles and posts on which to use my 20 article per month allotment.