Fast Company

In July, the U.S. Postal Service announced its plan to buy 1,900 fuel-efficient vehicles, including 900 hybrids and 1,000 alternative fuel vehicles. Impressive enough, but now USPS is investing its resources in building an all-electric delivery truck that could save the government millions in fuel costs.

When the power grid fails, the cheapest and most reliable backup is often solar power. So it's no surprise that solar is playing a starring role in Haiti earthquake relief efforts, from solar-powered audio bibles to solar-powered phones.

Think you'd be a good car designer? Trexa wants to give you a shot with an open-source platform.

Yesterday, Inhabitat broke news of Trexa, an open platform that would allow partners to create their own custom electric vehicles. And blogs went crazy: the first EV development platform! Open source hardware! Build your own car! Change it if you need to!

Let's take a step back. This might be a compelling solution--but it's a solution looking for a problem.

Solar energy got hot in the 1980s. The economic sting of the oil embargo was still fresh and the air was thick with tax credits, so Innovation Nation put on its thinking cap and began harvesting the resources that were literally falling from the sky: the 1,366 watts of solar energy that constantly rain down on every sunny square meter of earth. Smelling opportunity in those free-flowing photons, huge companies jumped into the sun business.

A new arts center shows how to make solar panels look good, without camouflaging them.

A new building by LIN Architects proves that a wealth of technical solutions for solar panels can be accomplished with sharp design.

Until now, the EV charging station sector has been dominated by high-profile start-ups like Coulomb Technologies and Better Place. Toyota, determined not be left out of what promises to be a booming business, has decided to build charging stations of its own. And in what appears to be an attempt to one-up its competitors, Toyota wants its stations to be solar-powered.

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Sliding into the driver's seat of Coda's electric sedan for the first time, I looked around for clues. Here's 100 years of automotive history, reinvented -- what's different? No gear-shift, just a knob that engages the car's two speeds, forward and reverse. A battery-life gauge. Not much else. Then I pull into midtown Manhattan traffic and hear the road noise, the thrum of passing air. They were always there, but now there's no engine roar to drown them out. The Coda's motor barely whimpers as it speeds into a new market for cars with no gas and no exhaust.

Abandon your doubts that an affordably priced EV will do well. Nissan's news yesterday confirms it: Almost 22,000 people in North America have contacted Nissan since it announced, in August, that the LEAF EV sedan--expected to hit showrooms in fall 2010--will cost approximately $20,000.

For further information: Fast Company

Yesterday we wrote about the conundrum between getting enough electric vehicles (EV) on the road and installing plug-in stations to support them. If EV batteries can last longer on a single charge, we wouldn't have to install such an extensive charging infrastructure. The Battery 500 Project, launched today by IBM in San Jose, CA, aims to boost the capacity of EV batteries from under 100 miles per charge to at least 500 miles. It's an initiative that could also cut down on headaches generated by the multiple hours-long charging time of EVs today.

Tesla Motors--they made that cute all-electric Roadster no one actually owns--wants you to know the money they received from the government is NOT the same money that bailed out Detroit, but rather a loan from the DOE to accelerate the production of fuel-efficient vehicles. So what are they doing with $350 million of your money? Well it’s actually pretty exciting; according to a blog post on Tesla’s Web site, an all-electric minivan, a crossover, and a utility fleet van will join the Model S family sedan on Tesla’s sales floor in the not-too-distant future.