China is set ‘to block’ Hummer takeover.
Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery emerged as the surprise buyer for the brand earlier this year.
But China National Radio said Hummer is at odds with the country’s planning agency’s attempts to decrease pollution from Chinese manufacturers.
Standards in China for clean air and efficiency that exceed those in the US? That normally would be good news, but thanks to product management at GM it’s now bad news for America.
Surprise. How many people expected the first company to re-introduce a light diesel pickup in America would be Indian? Mahindra and Mahindra has scheduled the arrival for the end of 2009:
From the onset, the company will offer a diesel-powered pickup truck in two- or four-door versions. This will be a completely federalized and revised (for the U.S. market) version of the truck sold which is known as the PikUp in India. The U.S. naming for that vehicle has yet to be announced nor has pricing information except to say it will be competitive to others in the small pickup class.
The Mahindra site is already taking sign-ups for a test drive. They should also take suggestions for the name.
Hope they include a 4×4 or an AWD version. Maybe they can name it something like Cobra, which comes to mind when thinking of snake charmers in India. A bit of irony could come from a name like Taloa, which is the Choctaw Indian word for sing. Even more irony? They could name it after the Muskogean Indian word for Red — Humma or Homma…
How could American automakers have missed this opportunity? I guess that is a silly question, given the lessons illustrated in the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car”. These marketing blurbs are exactly what we should have seen five years ago from Detroit:
Forget everything you thought you knew about diesel engines.
Turbocharged Mahindra clean diesels provide a power-packed 30 miles per gallon creating benefits beyond any other vehicle in its class.
Mahindra’s common rail diesels are cleaner, quieter, greener and more efficient than ever. Our new generation of clean-burning diesels emit 97 percent fewer sulfur emissions than old-school diesels and virtually no sooty particulates. They produce 30 percent fewer greenhouse gases per mile than gasoline engines – while getting 20 to 40 percent better fuel mileage. And they do it all while maintaining the traditional diesel advantages of more torque and greater durability.
It’s a six speed. They could call it the sixer, or the 30.6. That would really pull in the NRA crowd. Maybe they should name it the bail-out, or the stimulus.
A story from last year’s TheRecord.com explains that plastic can now be degraded by natural microbes at an impressive rate. The solution? A high school student figured out he should isolate the most productive strains by testing them on plastic bags.
He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature.
First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.
After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.
Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.
That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.
Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.
The risk of plastic now has to be recalculated.
The BBC says 2020 is when the country will eliminate their carbon footprint.
There is a growing consensus that, unless the world takes drastic action to slash carbon pollution, warming will tip beyond man’s control, unleashing unprecedented global catastrophe.
This is why, on 15 March this year, the Maldives announced its plans to become the world’s first carbon-neutral country in ten years. Our oil-fired power stations will be replaced with solar, wind and biomass plants; our waste will be turned into clean electricity through pyrolysis technology; and a new generation of boats will slash marine transport pollution. By 2020, the use of fossil fuels will be virtually eliminated in the Maldivian archipelago.