Carlos Ghosn is either a brilliant visionary or crazy as a loon.

The CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance is easily the auto industry’s biggest advocate of electric vehicles, possessed of an enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism. Others may speak with louder voices, but no one is placing a bigger bet on cars with cords.

Ghosn is going all in with an investment of 4 billion Euros ($5.6 billion) in electric vehicles. That will give Renault-Nissan the capacity to build 500,000 electric vehicles and batteries at 11 factories in eight countries by 2013.

Electric cars might make up 5 percent or less of the U.S. auto market by 2020, a consulting group said on Tuesday, cutting its prior estimate at a time when automakers are racing to develop such vehicles.

 Improvements in internal combustion engines and a more modest forecast for oil prices prompted Boston Consulting Group to tweak its estimates from three years ago in its upcoming report titled "Powering Autos to 2020."

One night, back in February, I was riding a Capital Bikeshare bike home (I was doing the Winter Weather Warrior contest, remember?)

Monstrosities like fracking can only happen in societies where government is conceived as not playing the role of the steward of the common good and the common land. Government should exist to promote the general welfare, to protect the weak from the depredations of the strong, to prevent accumulations of power that could undermine the state's supremacy, and to be the steward of our commonwealth, including stuff like, you know, the tectonic plates. This should be beyond argument by now. That it is not tells us that the republic is in crisis.

In the wake of adultery-related scandals, Republicans fiercely defended Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. Mark Ensign and Sen. David Vitter in spite of their indiscretions. They urged constituents to pray for these offenders and their families but strongly objected to any notion they resign.

Various national Republicans pointed out that these politicians made unfortunate lapses in judgment but were still good public servants who deserved to continued to represent their constituents.

One February morning, the President of the United States called Thomas H. MacDonald, the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, into the White House to broach an idea: It seemed to him, the president said, that the U.S. might benefit from a system of high-speed superhighways crisscrossing the country. With that, he handed MacDonald a map on which he’d drawn six blue lines—three crossing the 48 states from coast to coast, and three running North-South from the Canadian border to Mexico or the Gulf.

This takes me to my point – what is objective sports journalism? I’ve been on both sides of the table: working for a magazine and now doing my own thing, and I can sympathize with both. A magazine/web site writer, whose career depends on access, can easily get flicked if they offend a rider. For example: you won’t get the Lance Armstrong interview, that is guaranteed to sell a crap load of issues/ hits on the web site, if you’re not on Team Armstrong. At the same time you’re no longer reporting “news” but just pushing out general information or that rider’s own agenda.
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Cycling while sexy could be hazardous to city motorists - just ask Jasmijn Rijcken.

The leggy Dutch tourist said she was pulled over by an NYPD cop for flashing too much skin while on two wheels.

"He said it's very disturbing, and it's distracting the cars and it's dangerous," Rijcken told the Daily News. "I thought he was joking around but he got angry and asked me for ID."

The Ford Motor Company has canceled plans to re-enter the minivan market in the United States. Instead, Ford said on Thursday that it would introduce a smaller, five-passenger hatchback version of the minivan that it was going to build and offer it only as either a hybrid or plug-in hybrid. [Prius v chaser?]

The car, called the C-Max, would be Ford’s first hybrid-only model in North America, in the same way that the Toyota Prius is offered only as a hybrid.

Toyota Motor said Friday that it expected its annual net profit to fall by almost a third from a year earlier, hurt by production disruptions in the aftermath of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March.
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But Toyota’s forecast also projected a robust recovery in the coming months as the automaker makes headway in mending its supply chain. Though Toyota’s 17 plants in Japan escaped the disaster relatively unscathed, factory lines have been working well below capacity, as vital suppliers in the country’s worst-hit areas race to restart operations.

In the early summer of 1995, Jay Hair quietly resigned as head of the National Wildlife Federation. This Napoleonic figure had transformed a once scruffy, apolitical collection of local hunting and gun clubs into the cautious colossus of the environmental movement with more than four million members and an annual budget of nearly $100 million. By the time Hair left, the Federation enjoyed more political clout in Washington than the rest of the environmental groups combined.

In a major speech earlier this week to an American Bankers Association conference, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out his view of what went wrong in the financial sector prior to 2008, how the crisis was handled 2008-10, and what is now needed with regard to implementation of reforms.  As chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the only senior member of President Obama’s original economic team remaining in place, Mr. Geithner’s influence with regard to the banking system is second to none.

The world is beginning to look a lot like the August of 1914 or perhaps the summer of 1939 all over again. This time instead of the great powers of central Europe dragging the rest of us into a European affair, it seems that nearly every corner of the earth is facing some sort of imminent disaster that could combine into a very unpleasant situation.