Government and private automobile and trucking fleets invest enormous sums in equipment like tire sensors and aerodynamics for improved mileage and safety but  “there’s very little investment in driver behavior,� according to Eric Weiss, VP of Worldwide Marketing at GreenRoad Technologies. GreenRoad is primarily about auto and driver safety but the same systems that discourage aggressive driving also help their customers harvest the low hanging fruit of improved auto and truck fuel usage. Innovative software and electronics target driver behavior and, according to their empirical data, can lower fuel usage by 11 percent.  According to fueleconomy.gov, aggressive driving can lower gas mileage by 33 percent at highway speeds. Unsafe drivers also waste fuel and increase carbon emissions as vehicles burn 10 percent to 15 percent more fuel when driven aggressively. GreenRoad has won a number of customers in the U.S. and in the U.K. where occupational driving is the number three most dangerous job behind coal mining and deep sea fishing. GreenRoad’s business model is software as service -- the company leases its systems out to fleet owners and consumers for “a few tens of bucks per month per vehicle.�  Its underdash system combines a GPS unit, an accelerometer, a cellular modem, and its “secret sauce,� the software that interprets the accelerometer data and avoids false positives and false negatives. The sensor system detects overly spirited acceleration and cornering as well as emphatic braking and speeding. The driver is provided with real time feedback in the form of a red, yellow or green light. If a driver violates the GreenRoad rules -- their employers and family are alerted and they are not allowed to have any pudding after dinner.  Nope, strike that -- GreenRoad absolutely tries to avoid the Big Brother is Watching You model in favor of a more positive approach. This VC-funded start-up has 60 employees, just had a record revenue quarter, and is currently selectively hiring.  Their customers include T-Mobile, the U.K. Ministry of Defense, and Ryder Trucks. The firm has received about $20 million in VC funding from Virgin Green, Amadeus Capital, Balderton Capital and Benchmark Capital.

When I decided to leave Tesla last October, I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I had very little time to figure it out. I had committed to myself to make my exit as smooth as possible for the benefit of the company and there was a lot of work to be done, leaving no time for planning next steps. I did know a few things though: For starters, I was quitting a good job in perhaps the worst job market since I graduated college. But such is life. You can’t always pick the circumstances that you find yourself in, but you always have the choice of how to handle them and ultimately one’s character is defined by the decisions they make when confronted with tough choices. It is this philosophy that led to my leaving Tesla, but more interesting is how this philosophy led to what I am doing now. When I left my previous job as CMO at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company to join Tesla, I knew that the risk associated with such a move would be hedged by the fact that the experience alone would be extremely valuable, regardless of the outcome. I felt this way for two reasons: First, it was clear that cleantech was going to be the next important sector for innovation and industrial growth. I had missed out on the last “big thing� in Silicon Valley (for better or for worse) and felt that living in the Bay Area but working at a large financial services company was somehow incongruous. I felt the tug toward participating in what makes Silicon Valley extraordinary. Second, I believe that one’s growth, both personal and professional, is maximized when you pursue orthogonal vectors. There are incremental gains to be had by continuing to try to advance in the same direction. The gains are exponential when you strike out in an entirely new direction. Which brings me back to what I am doing now. I’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. Aside from starting a short-lived record label (don’t ask), I’ve never been an entrepreneur. While I have always done well working within someone else’s system, I have a strong predisposition to independence and originality. The idea of having a much more direct path between my effort and the outcome is very compelling. Once again, my timing is impeccable. As a first time entrepreneur, it isn’t the most opportune time to raise funds to start a new venture. This is why I concluded that I would need to try an innovative approach to starting this company. It was a tough choice to pursue this route rather than the comfort or safety of taking another job at an established company, but I believe it is the right choice. The announcement that went over the wire yesterday that I am joining Peppercom as their senior analyst in cleantech is a part of the story. I am going to do my best to help build Peppercom into a leading player in cleantech communications and at the same time will be launching my startup, with Peppercom’s support, while working out of their offices in downtown San Francisco. Peppercom is a great partner for several reasons. My startup is a software service aimed at journalists, media relations professionals and CEOs, so working closely with a leading communications firm will help me build a better company. My background in cleantech communications and branding will be a great addition to Peppercom’s already strong capabilities in that area. Also, Peppercom believes that the best way to provide value in the business of communications is to have a deep understanding of the clients’ business. I believe this is especially true in the cleantech business, and Peppercom definitely lives up to this promise. In fact, when I concocted the idea of developing my startup company out of a communications firm, the first and only firm I spoke to seriously was Peppercom. I think this certainly qualifies as an orthogonal vector, no? I’m looking forward to the next few years of growth. May they be as valuable as the last few have been! Daryl Siry is the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. He now consults on marketing and the automotive industry. You can read more here: http://darrylsiry.blogspot.com.

Are you one of those good citizens who owns an alternative fuel vehicle? Having trouble finding a place to fill up? Help’s now available on your Google Maps-enabled phone or PDA. The U.S. Department of Energy has launched the Alternative Fueling Station Locator, a tool that helps you find the five closest alternative fuel filling stations. This tool should help early clean car adopters, especially those who travel away from familiar territory. Maybe it’ll even get some people to buy cleaner cars. The numbers behind the information service tell the story of how far we have to go, though. The database contains 5,866 alternative fuel stations across the U.S. This compares to 167,000 gasoline stations. That’s about one alt fuel station for every 28 gas stations. At first blush this doesn’t seem so bad. But if you remove the fossil fuel sources included in the list -- compressed natural gas, liquid natural gas and propane -- you’re left with 2,141 stations. That works out to about one alt fuel station for every 78 gas stations. Now let’s say you’ve been reading about the downside of corn ethanol (for example the high levels of greenhouse gas and particulate emissions from the corn ethanol lifecycle) and you’d like to exclude E85 from the list, at least until there are better sources of ethanol. Now you’re down to 1,211 stations: 687 biodiesel, 466 electric and 58 hydrogen. That’s about one alt fuel station for every 138 gas stations. To be sure, driving on natural gas is better than burning gasoline, but what I’d really like is to see that 1 to 138 ratio rapidly decrease. Eric Smalley is editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

General Motors plans to work with San Francisco and other cities to roll out its much-touted Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid-electric car that is scheduled for market launch next year.

Now, the cities are not in the business of selling cars. But they can make it easier for a company to do business through their permitting and other policy-making power. Plus, large cities often own large fleets of cars, making them good potential customers.

For companies that want to popularize electric cars of all kinds, seeking a municipal or state blessing is a good approach. Seeking help from cities that already have committed to popularizing electric cars is an even smarter -- and obvious -- strategy.

Last November, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities announced their plans to work with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Better Place, which aims to set up a network of electric-car charging and batter-swapping stations.

Better Place executives have traveled the world seeking national and regional government support for its business plan, which in some cases involves working with the Nissan-Renault Alliance to bring electric cars to places where Better Place plans to deploy its networks.

Another Silicon Valley startup, Coulomb Technologies, has begun selling and installing electric-car charging devices in California. The company also is selling subscription services to use those charging stations.

GM said it also is working with utilities to make sure proper charging networks would be available to service its new electric cars.

Previously, I suggested that our country should implement a gas tax. Several other blogs picked this up and the commentary was fairly vitriolic. The gist of the nasty stuff was the notion that raising the gas tax was an attack on families struggling to survive in this recession. I respect this point of view, if not the unseemly way many express it. The point I was making, and continue to make, is that the current economic situation will make it increasingly difficult to maintain the momentum we have built to address the longer term issues we face as a society. The progress on this front has been very positive and it will take extraordinary leadership to sustain it given the short term economic challenges and the powerful forces of populism. We need to do something radically different to re-orient our hyper-consumerist society into one that is sustainable in the long run. We cannot continue the slash and burn type of development that the industrial revolution brought. A major piece of the puzzle is the shift of automotive transport from petroleum to electrical power. The technology is maturing and we are in the midst of a real shift to practical electric transportation. Nearly every large automobile manufacturer has announced plans for plug-in hybrids or pure electric cars. The shift is taking place. It is inevitable. The only questions that remain are how far and how fast. The answer lies in the relation of two things -- the cost of petroleum and the cost of batteries. For the sake of simplicity, lets say the price of a gallon of gas and the price of a kilowatt hour of energy storage. Today, the costs of automotive battery storage (expressed in $/kWh) have improved relative to just 10 years ago, but they are still too high to be economical for mainstream automobile buyers. With today's gas prices, no EV manufacturer can credibly say that purchasing an EV will save you money over the typical life of a car purchase. They may point out the savings in gas costs, but if you account for the initial cost of batteries, and potentially the required replacement costs of the battery, the numbers don't pencil. In the absence of any incentives, the market for EVs today would be for technology and/or environmental enthusiasts who are willing to pay a healthy premium for cool technology or for reduced CO2 emissions. The good news is that this is a healthy, attractive market. The bad news is that it is a niche market relative to the enormous automotive market (incidentally, a "niche" business in the automobile business can be a billion dollar business, but it won't move the dial from an environmental perspective at that scale.) For electric vehicles to become mainstream, either battery costs must come down significantly or gas prices must rise significantly. Over time, fossil fuels will become scarcer and therefore more expensive. It can also be assumed that over time, technological innovation will bring battery costs down. This is why I say the shift is inevitable. But if you want to accelerate this shift, you must either make gas artificially more expensive (via a tax) or make batteries artificially cheaper (via an incentive.) So while I have criticized the political courage of our leaders in not confronting the issue of increasing the gas tax, I must acknowledge the significant battery subsidies that were passed last fall and have just become effective January 1st 2009. If you aren't aware, the current tax credits on the books start with $2,500 for a car with a small, 4kWh battery (assume 10 miles usable electric range) and max out at $7,500 for a car with a 16kWh battery (assume 40 miles usable electric range in a PHEV configuration, or about 70 miles in an EV configuration) Those aren't small numbers. At $468 to $625/kWh in subsidy (depending on the size of the battery, up to 16kWh), you are looking at a tax credit that offsets more than half the total cost of the battery. But I would argue that it isn't enough. Specifically, the cap of 16kWh effectively maximizes the benefit for plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt (this is not a coincidence!) but the per kWh subsidy decreases as batteries get larger, as you might commonly see in pure EV applications. What this means is that under the current incentive scheme pure EV sedans, which are more efficient and emit less CO2, are price-disadvantaged to plug-in hybrid models and to their pure gasoline competitors. By maintaining the current formula but eliminating the cap of 16kWh, EV manufacturers would have a level playing field with plug-in hybrids and would approach cost-competitiveness with their gasoline competitors. With such a subsidy, an electric family sedan with substantial range could start to be cost competitive with it's gas-only competitors. Over time, the subsidies could be phased out as the natural forces drive energy costs up and battery costs down. Perhaps this approach could accomplish the same result for accelerating the electrification of the automobile without inspiring the public outrage that a gas tax seems to bring. Daryl Siry is the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. He now consults on marketing and the automotive industry. You can read more here: http://darrylsiry.blogspot.com.

OK, so how do we get several hundred million carbon-spewing vehicles off the road in time to significantly slow global warming? I don’t think there’s a single answer, but chances are the solution is going to require massive government intervention. Tax incentives don’t count as massive. Neither does the “Cash for Clunkers� bill introduced in the Senate last week. The Cash for Clunkers program, officially dubbed the Vehicle Scrappage Bill, would give a $2,500 to $4,500 credit to drivers who scrap a fuel-inefficient vehicle and replace it with a more fuel-efficient vehicle. The bill’s sponsors estimate it’ll help upgrade half a million to a million vehicles a year. Americans sold 42.5 million used cars in 2004, so we’re not talking about much of a dent in the used car population, though presumably it would cull many of the dirtier cars. The bill is a step in the right direction, but it’s helpful in the same way getting a smoker to cut out that last cigarette of the day is good for his health. In the end it only matters if it starts a process that gets us to kick the habit entirely. The ideal would be for the government to wave a magic wand and turn everyone’s car into an electric vehicle (and wave it again to produce all our electricity from renewables, but that’s another matter). So how do we get as close to that as possible in the real world? First, the government should bail out Detroit but mandate that the automakers’ product lines be entirely plug-in hybrid or electric within five years. As amazing as that would be, it wouldn’t be enough. A study (pdf) by a pair of MIT researchers shows that even if clean cars immediately captured 50 percent of new-car sales they’d replace only 3.5 percent of the installed base after a year and 18 percent after five years. So we also have to address existing cars, which leads us to… We also need to create a major industry around converting existing vehicles, from R&D to consumer incentives. And we should put the Vehicle Scrappage Bill on steroids by requiring that used internal combustion engine vehicles be converted or scrapped rather than resold, with incentives weighted toward conversion. (Building new cars, even clean ones, puts a burden on the environment, so rehabbing existing cars has an added green dimension.) This may strike many people as unrealistic fantasy (or perhaps socialist nightmare). After all, we’re still working out the battery technology; we’re facing limits to the raw materials for batteries; Detroit can’t keep up with the competition, let alone lead the way; converting combustion engine vehicles is expensive and many are simply too heavy; and even with sizable government assistance most consumers are going to be too strapped or too scared to do anything. But we have to recognize the magnitude of the crisis we face. Global warming has already set us up for very rough times, and our grandchildren will inhabit a different planet. Without unprecedented action it’ll be even worse. (For a particularly bleak outlook, check out this interview with James Lovelock.) While I doubt we’ll do what’s necessary, it’s not impossible. In fact, we’ve done it before. Depression-scarred Americans willingly accepted rationing, bought war bonds and contributed to scrap metal drives during World War II. At the same time, industry rapidly retooled and geared up to crank out mind-boggling numbers of ships, airplanes and tanks. The difference is that the threat then was in the tangible form of hostile armies sweeping the globe. If only we saw our cars’ tailpipes the same way. Eric Smalley is editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

I know the time for all of the "best of" lists and "predictions" is past but as an observer of the EV and alt-fuel industry, I think that it is going to be a very interesting year with some surprises. In many ways, I think 2009 will be the shakeout year. One obvious reason will be that the recession and difficult capital environment will continue to put pressure on established companies and startup companies. Another reason is all of the projects and plans that were previously in the development phase are due to start maturing, and it will be clear who the serious players are. So here are some of my predictions for the EV industry in 2009: 1) The first Tranche of ATVM loans will be heavily weighted toward legacy manufacturers and building domestic battery capacity: Perhaps the most important decisions that will impact the EV industry are being made now in the halls of the DOE. 70 applicants await decisions on whether their projects will receive direct, low interest loans from the government. While there is a bit of a "pigs at the trough" mentality going on, at the end of the day I think that the incoming administration will be looking at this program in the larger context of the economic stimulus and will therefore show a bias toward preserving established jobs and manufacturing capacity when it comes to vehicle programs. As for batteries, the lack of any domestic capacity is both a concern and a great opportunity to build a new industry. The big winners (but certainly not the only ones) will be GM, Ford and A123 in the first round of loans. 2) Recession and government involvement in funding advanced vehicle technology will accelerate the convergence of Silicon Valley and Detroit: For similar reasons outlined above, the DOE will attach conditions to loans that will either explicitly or implicitly encourage new companies to leverage old manufacturing capacity and job bases. Imagine, for example, that the DOE approves the application that Tesla has submitted for battery Model S assembly, but conditioned on them using an existing plant with excess capacity or a plant that is planned to be closed by one of the Big 3. The example is hypothetical, but you can bet the government is going to be very hands on in not just the "who" but the "how" these loans are implemented, and it will be done with an emphasis on protecting existing jobs and stopping the bleeding. The other force driving convergence will be the economy. Lack of capital will drive startups to get out of the manufacturing business and into the patents/components business, turning to the incumbents as their customers. 3) GM will announce a "pure EV" version of the Chevy Volt with 100+ miles range: This would be very easy for the company to do, since it basically would only require the use of a different battery chemistry and the depopulation of the ICE and genset. And it would be a popular move from the perspective of the EV community, but the hard business reason why GM will do this is because it will enable the company to more easily meet its commitments to the CARB ZEV mandate in 2011 and beyond. Add to this the announcement by Ford that its intends to produce a pure EV Ford Focus and you've got the cross town rivalry thing going as well. 4) Lotus will announce both a pure EV and range extended EV version of the Evora at the Geneva show, and will release at least one of the two: this is another no-brainer (and the rumor was reported by the FT). Lotus has enough experience with Tesla, Chrysler and who knows who else to have the confidence and desire to go it alone in what is one of the only growth segments for the automobile industry. The longer, more luxurious Evora will be a very compelling offering, although it will likely sacrifice the "+2" seating to accommodate the drivetrain. 5) All major players will seek equity tie-ups in battery makers to ensure supply: in the future world of EV production, guaranteed access to cell supply is absolutely vital. The current projections for demand for automotive lithium-ion batteries vastly outstrips current capacity. What is shaping up is the possibility of a battery squeeze play, with some being left wanting for supply. The situation was made worse by Panasonic's acquisition of Sanyo. Toyota has already made it clear they will develop batteries in-house (in addition to their JV with Panasonic). Daimler has already announced their tie up with Evonik. Nissan has a JV with NEC. GM will be looking to strengthen their ties to LG Chem (possibly through a US based JV) and Ford will be looking for a partner. With so few players in the cell manufacturing business, smaller players or those late to the game risk being squeezed out. Daryl Siry is the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. He now consults on marketing and the automotive industry. You can read more here: http://darrylsiry.blogspot.com.