State slashes clean-air car goal

7,500 emission-free autos are mandated by 2014
By Michael Gardner
UNION-TRIBUNE U-T SACRAMENTO BUREAU

March 28, 2008

SACRAMENTO – Air quality regulators dramatically reduced the goal for emission-free vehicles in California yesterday, but for the first time they required automakers to sell a new generation of plug-in hybrid cars.


The unanimous decision by the California Air Resources Board will reduce by 70 percent the number of electric and hydrogen vehicles that manufacturers will be required to sell by 2014.
The new rule also obligates auto companies to manufacture 60,000 plug-in hybrids by 2014. The cars would make short trips on batteries that could be recharged with everyday extension cords and switch to gas for longer drives.

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Brazil tops five million hybrid cars: auto industry

SAO PAULO (AFP) — More than five million vehicles and almost nine in ten new vehicles in Brazil now run on both gasoline and ethanol derived from sugar cane, the car manufacturing association Anfavea said Monday.

Anfavea president Jackson Schneider told reporters in Sao Paulo that Brazil -- a pioneer in biofuels -- has made more than five million so-called "flexi-fuel" vehicles since the first came off the production line in 2003.

Some 4.97 million vehicles were sold nationally by the end of February and "the five million vehicle mark has already been passed", he said.

Last month, 168,744 new hybrid vehicles were registered -- 88.3 percent of the total -- compared to a total of 2,003,090 last year.

Schneider predicted that such vehicles would make up 52 percent of the market by 2013, up from 12 percent in 2007.

The biofuel industry is rapidly expanding as governments and companies try to wean themselves off oil, and Brazil is a world leader, last year producing 22 billion liters of ethanol biofuel derived from sugar cane.
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