Hasta La Gadget!

Schwinn’s Tailwind electric bike — which has been available for just a few months — has been sitting in our apartment since post CES, waiting for the New York weather to shape up enough for us to give it a fair spin. Well, it’s been beautiful recently, so the pedal-assist bike has been taken for several spins on our backyard BMX trail to see what kind of dust we could raise together. The bike is a retro, hulking, 58 pound package, with a Toshiba SCiB Quick Charge Plug n’ Drive (SCiB) battery saddled onto the back for about 30 miles of assistance. It’s an expensive (about $3,200) piece of eco-friendly transportation, to be sure. So the questions are thus: what do we think about Schwinn’s latest foray into commuter cycles? Just who is this bike for? Will we ever get used to carrying it up and down our apartment stairs? Join us on the road after the break.

Continue reading Schwinn Tailwind electric bike review

Filed under: Transportation

Schwinn Tailwind electric bike review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 May 2009 17:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a more reassuring timeline for that proposed standardized plug for electric vehicles. The SAE J1772 Task Force-developed charging system, based on an initial design by supplier Yazaki, is now at Underwriters Labs for certification. That’s scheduled to be done by the end of May and, if all things go according to plan, it can be adopted for use in the next few months. Speaking to Autoblog Green, General Motors’ Gery Kissel listed his company, Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Tesla among those participating or supporting the standard. He also said the we-swear-it’s-coming-this-year Chevy Volt should be equipped with the new plug, and Tesla’s reportedly pledged to adopt it for current plans and retrofit its older models. Things are starting to look up for the EV industry.

Filed under: Transportation

Standardized EV plug could be adopted within months, says GM originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone that follows the automobile sector with any semblance of regularity would know that quite a few concepts never make it beyond the drawing board. Thankfully, Subaru’s Stella is one of the lucky ones. Fuji Heavy Industries, parent company and maker of Subaru automobiles, has just announced its plans to begin testing prototypes of its Subaru plug-in Stella electric vehicle, which will be introduced in Japan this summer. Furthermore, the company has managed to boost power output from 40kW in the previous iteration to 47kW, and it also stripped away some unnecessary weight and fine-tuned the output management system. There’s no mention of a price or expected launch date in North America, but you’ll never stop us from hoping the answer to the latter is “soon.”

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Subaru yanks concept label, begins testing Stella plug-in EV originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Say what you will about General Motors (okay, so maybe you should say it under your breath), but there’s no denying the brilliance of this idea. On the company’s FastLane blog, one Gery Kissel explains that engineers and suits will be meeting up next week to discuss the standardization of common components that will hopefully be installed in forthcoming electric vehicles. Notably, the SAE J1772 Task Force will be responsible for designing a plug that links each plug-in vehicle to an “ecosystem,” ensuring that drivers can pull into any charging station from Key West to Neah Bay and see a socket that fits their ride. Specifically, the group is being charged with defining a “common electric vehicle conductive charging system architecture for all major automakers in North America,” but it remains to be seen if said standard can be hammered out before the Volt’s not-to-be-missed 2010 introduction.

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GM proposes standardized plug for electric vehicles originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There has been plenty of interest in all-electric vehicles, but comparatively little attention paid to the infrastructure required to charge them. (Charging them every night in the garage is one thing, but what about long trips or heavy errand days?) Now Romag, a specialty photovoltaic cell manufacturer, has unveiled the PowerPark, a parking station with built-in solar cells
that can charge an electric vehicle on the go.

The company installed the first unit at its UK-based headquarters, and plans to install an unspecified number of them around the UK as well, according to Wired. “Interest has been received from supermarket chains, schools, airports,
train stations, hospitals [and] commercial office buildings in the
U.K., Middle East and Far East,” Kevin Webster, the company’s technical
director, said in the article. “The U.S.
would be an excellent market for the canopy.”

Romag claims that each parking space could generate about kilowatt hours of electricity annually, according to the report. Interestingly, the spaces are each linked to the
electric grid so energy “can be generated for use in the associated
buildings when cars are not being charged,” Webster said in the article. “No
electricity is wasted.”