Tesla started its mission out of Silicon Valley two years ago, getting funding from a slew of the tech industry's big players. The result is the $98,000 roadster (BusinessWeek, 7/30/07) that goes 220 miles on a charge and can reach 60 mph in a tire-screeching 3.9 seconds.

Sales are small right now. But Tesla has firm orders for the company's first 600-to be built this year. Another 400 buyers have put down $5,000 deposits for the first 400 cars the company will build next year, says Daryl Siry, the company's vice-president of marketing.

By 2010, Tesla plans to build a less expensive four-door that comes as either a pure electric car or a plug-in hybrid, which would get better range than a conventional gasoline-electric hybrid because it relies more on its electric motors to drive the car. Tesla is in the process of raising another $250 million for a factory for the next car, which Siry says should come out around 2010. Says Siry, "We invested in desirable, eco-friendly cars."

To shine the light on solutions to climate change and lend their star power to the problem of global warming, some of the world’s biggest celebrities are choosing to arrive at the Academy Awards in ‘green cars’. Instead of stretch limos or SUV’s, they’ll be arriving in eco-friendly hybrids, electric sports cars and other green vehicles. Celebrities and notable individuals participating this year include: Leonardo DiCaprio, Penelope Cruz, Forest Whittaker, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling, Gwyneth Paltrow, Al and Tipper Gore, Melissa Etheridge, Davis Guggenheim and Elisabeth Shue, Larry and Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, Lesley Chilcott.

"Global warming is threatening us all" said Oscar nominee and Global Green supporter Penelope Cruz. "Fortunately, there are many simple things we can all do such as driving greener cars or changing to compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can dramatically save energy and reduce global warming pollution."

This year, Global Green is highlighting the increased choice in eco-friendly cars as examples of the directions automakers can head. A plug-in Prius that gets 100 mpg, the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car, and Compressed Natural Gas vehicles are included in the green fleet. The Red Carpet/Green Cars Oscar campaign kicked-off Wednesday night with a pre-Oscar Party at the Avalon Hollywood to raise funds and awareness for Global Green’s smart global warming solutions: clean cars and green buildings.

The GM vision for the futuristic Hummer concept includes an algae-filled body shell, designed to shed oxygen, that also opens up like leaves on a stem to catch sunlight when parked.

The concept sketch, which was produced by GM's West Coast Advanced Design Studio, shows the Hummer riding on an aluminum shell and powered by a hydrogen tank and fuel cells.

"This design team said, 'We've done hybrids. We're doing fuel cells. What's the next step that actually improves the environment?'" said Frank Saucedo, director of GM's California design lab.

Saucedo said the GM team had deliberately chosen the polarizing Hummer brand for its imagined environmental remake.

Jay said, "We live in an era where liking cars and liking the environment don’t really seem to fit- especially high performance cars." He not only wanted to disprove that, but wanted to inspire America's youth to explore the possibilities and follow their dreams- this car for Leno started as a pipe dream, "and went from zero to here in seven months." Although the Eco Jet was not designed to be a production car - and we may never see it for sale - after a few good conversations with folks at GM, we're confident they understand innovations like these are crucial.

With all that said, we don't want you to think we are gloating for GM-they have a long way to go. Seeing this unveiling and speaking to the GM executives and designers makes us wish that this transition towards eco-friendly performance vehicles could happen on a mass-market level sooner than late (before the ice caps melt).

Our His & Hers Twike commuter vehicle is completely gasoline-, emission-, and guilt-free. This cozy two-seater has a brilliantly engineered zero-emission electric power system that can be supplemented with human pedal power, as desired. Like your significant other, it's a first: the first electric-human power hybrid. Swiss and German engineers have designed it with lightweight aluminum alloys and reinforced floors, and it weighs less than 600 lbs. You will have to find another excuse for running out of gas, however; its state-of-the-art, six-kilowatt hour nickel-alloy batteries can be fully charged from a regular household outlet. Powered by a three-kilowatt electric motor, it can achieve speeds of up to 55 mph with a range of up to 90 miles per charge. When you feel like pedaling, and thereby extending its range for those romantic drives with the convertible top down, the choice is yours. The clever regenerative antilock brake system captures energy from deceleration and channels it back into the storage system to extend the range as well. The Twike has far fewer parts than any messy internal combustion engine; if only all relationships could be this low maintenance.

OBVIO said that gas-ethanol engines would power the initial versions of its 828 and 012 microcar designs, planned for production in 2007. But the 828E and 012E equipped with advanced electric drive systems will not be far behind, says OBVIO ! President Ricardo Machado, who announced he would export the electric cars to North America.

"It is clear to me that electricity has a big future in the auto industry," said Machado. "OBVIO !'s business model of 100 percent outsourced supplier relationships allows for the speed and flexibility to incorporate a new drive system powered by electricity by our second model year."

Machado says there are several suppliers that are negotiating to provide electric drive systems for the 828E and 012E. Targeting a price of $49,000 and $59,000 respectively, the cars will have plenty of power, capable of reaching a top speed exceeding 120 mph for a range of up to 200-240 miles per charge.

With timing perhaps intended to blunt criticism of the move, Bill Ford announced the strategic shift in an e-mail to employees Wednesday, the same day he and the CEOs of General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group sent a letter to Congress promising to double their annual production of alternative-fuel vehicles to 2 million by 2010.

Critics decried the back-pedaling on hybrids as another broken promise by the automaker to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Bill Ford's hybrid pledge, made last September, was the centerpiece of a national advertising campaign touting the company as an environmental and innovation leader.

"What I didn't foresee at the time was how rapidly other technologies would evolve," Bill Ford wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Detroit News. "Now, I am convinced that the objective we had set earlier to build capacity for 250,000 hybrids at the end of the decade is too narrow to achieve our larger goals of substantially improving fuel economy and CO2 performance."

Unique, optimized aerodynamics gives the Aptera(C) a drag form factor that will be lower than any mass produced car in the world. "It looks like nothing you've ever seen because it performs like nothing you've ever seen," says Accelerated Composites founder and CEO, Steve Fambro. "What we've done is changed the way cars are thought of and designed. Rather than designing to a styling aesthetic, like the big auto makers do, we hew to an efficiency and safety aesthetic. When you do that, math and physics mostly dictate the shape of the car, and in this case, math and physics look awesome."

But aerodynamics is only half of the equation. The other half is weight. The Aptera(C) is made almost entirely of lightweight composites, making it one of the lightest cars on the road. Yet this savings does not come at the cost of safety. In fact, the construction of the car is based on the driver-protection "crash box" found in Formula One race cars. "Composites are enormously strong and lightweight," says Fambro. "That's why all the aircraft manufacturers are switching to them."

So why aren't the auto makers switching? "Cost," says Fambro. "They haven't figured out cost-effective manufacturing processes for composites. But we have."

The Aptera(C) utilizes proprietary composite construction that significantly lowers manufacturing cost when compared to most other composite construction methods, and even steel. The patent-pending "Panelized Automated Composite Construction," or PAC2(C), lends itself to parallel assembly and has a very low initial capitalization. Additionally, AC's patent-pending hybrid technology allows off the shelf engines and electric motors to be seamlessly integrated for a very low cost. Another reason the big automakers aren't jumping to composites is corporate inertia. "They have many billions of dollars invested in factories and infrastructure for making cars the old-fashioned way. They couldn't walk away from that if they wanted to. This is something that only a new company can do, and that's where we come in. We are going to disrupt the status quo."

The car, named "TeamGreen," is 3.1 metres (10 feet 2 inches) long and a mere 0.6 metres (2 feet) wide, weighing just 30 kilograms (four stone).

"It's a labour of love," said Green, a technician in the mechanical engineering department of Bath University, south-west England.

"I think the car is important because it is a reminder to us all that the way to achieve fuel-savings is to drive lighter cars -- it's the weight of this car that is the main reason for its fuel-efficiency," he said.

Green's car is powered by a single cylinder four-stroke engine with a capacity of just 35 cc.

It will be the only British entry in a global competition in France later this month to decide the world's most fuel-economic car.

"The new data from the latest AutoVIBES study provides insight into consumers’ future buying intentions," said Rick Wainschel, vice president of marketing research and brand communications for Kelley Blue Book. "Extreme shifts in segment consideration levels reveal just how profound the impact of recent increases in gas prices is on consumers and their vehicle purchase behaviors. This information will be an important bellwether of the long-term effect of this issue on new-vehicle shoppers."

These preliminary April 2006 AutoVIBES data also show an increase in awareness of alternative fuel vehicles. Sixty-six percent of consumers are aware of E85 (a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline), and 59 percent are aware of flex-fuel vehicles (those that can run on either regular gasoline or E85). The April awareness levels for both E85 and flex-fuel vehicles jumped a significant number of points over the previous month (E85 and flex-fuel awareness levels were at 60 percent and 55 percent in March 2006, respectively).

"With gas prices on the rise and continuing to climb, consumers are more aware of and interested in highly fuel-efficient cars now than they have been in the last 25 years," said Jack R. Nerad, executive editorial director and executive market analyst for Kelley Blue Book and kbb.com. "We expect to see increased consumer interest for some of the recently-introduced fuel-efficient sub-compact vehicles such as the Toyota Yaris, Nissan Versa and Honda Fit, in addition to hybrid, flex-fuel and compact models."

Consideration for compact sedans is at an all-time high at 19 percent, up four points from the previous month.

Hybrid vehicle consideration also reached an all-time high in April at 14 percent, which is more than double the percentage of consumers that were considering hybrids last month. (Six percent considered hybrids in March 2006).

In contrast, consideration for mid-size SUVs is at an all-time low at 19 percent, and full-size pickup consideration also is down considerably at 11 percent, a 5 point drop from the previous month.

A fledging Las Vegas-based company called Hybrid Technologies thinks it has the solution. Hybrid will launch a car it calls LiX-75 at the New York Auto Show on Apr.14. The sleek, $125,000 sports car runs off of electric batteries, boosted by solar panels on the trunk. It recharges in four to six hours from a regular three-prong electric socket. And the company claims it will go from zero to 60 miles per hour in three seconds and hit a top speed of 200 miles per hour.

"It's the environmentalist mid-life crisis vehicle," says Richard Griffiths, head of business development at Hybrid. "It's a sports car that performs like a Porsche Boxster, looks like a Ferrari, and has zero emissions"

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The LiX will utilize lithium ion batteries, big versions of the kind that power laptop computers. Because they can store more energy and degrade less quickly when not in use than the nickel metal hydride batteries used in hybrid cars today, they're rapidly becoming the technology of choice for electric-car developers.

"Lithium chemistry is widely acknowledged to be the next generation of battery power," says Lindsay Brooke, senior editor of the Society of Automotive Engineer's magazine.

If ethanol becomes a considerable part of our energy mix, we may be replacing the Middle East dependency with a fix for Brazilian fuel.

Brazil exports of ethanol grew by 20.7 percent to more than 145 million liters in February over last year, according to the Energy Management Institute. The United States, which is in need of an MTBE replacement, was the primary client, purchasing 79 million liters, up nearly 500 percent over the previous year.

The average wholesale price of ethanol stands at $2.43, which in some areas is up over 80 percent from this time last year. We will have to substantially increase domestic production if that price is to fall back to previous levels.

While Mr. Bush set 2025 as the target date for replacing three-fourths of the oil imported from the Middle East with American ethanol, Brazil already satisfies nearly half of its domestic passenger vehicle fuel demand with ethanol.

After decades of government intervention and subsidies, the industry here is a thriving free market business, complete with ethanol pumps at every filling station in Latin America's largest country. Millions of cars run on either ethanol, gas or any combination of the two. And there's plenty more land available for sugar cane cultivation as the planet's biggest sugar producer gears up to become its undisputed long-term ethanol supplier.

Inspired by its unique aviation heritage, Saab produced one of the sensations at this year’s Geneva Show with the Aero X concept - a two-seater sports coupe that breaks with automotive design convention both outside and inside to make a unique statement in performance car design. First, there are no doors…or windscreen pillars. That's because the Saab Aero X adopts a cockpit canopy, just as you would see on a Saab jet aircraft. It offers the Aero X pilot full 180 degree vision, and also facilitates entry and exit from its low-slung cabin. Thrust for the all-wheel drive Saab Aero X also comes from a powerplant with a difference. The 400 bhp, twin-turbo, BioPower V6 engine is fuelled entirely by bioethanol, a sustainable energy source that is kinder to the environment by cutting fossil CO2 emissions. The 'green power' of this advanced engine gives new meaning to the phrase 'performance with responsibility'.

In all, 25 VIPs are participating in the fourth annual "Red Carpet, Green Cars" event sponsored by Toyota Motor Corp. and the environmental organization Global Green USA. McDormand, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney are all expected to arrive at the Oscars in Toyota or Lexus hybrids, including the Toyota Prius, Lexus RX crossover and a hybrid version of the Toyota Camry, which goes on sale in May.

Event spokeswoman Kathy Kniss said the program began with just four participants in 2002, but interest in fuel-efficient vehicles has grown exponentially since then.

Other automakers are also getting into the act. Ford Motor Co. said Cathy Schulman, the producer of best-picture nominee "Crash," plans to arrive in a hybrid Mercury Mariner, while best-supporting-actor nominee Gyllenhaal's entourage is scheduled to show up in a Ford Excursion powered by clean-burning biodiesel.

General Motors Corp. also will be bringing VIPs to the ceremony, but its focus will be on luxury rather than fuel efficiency. GM spokeswoman Ryndee Carney said a fleet of 50 Cadillacs - mostly 2007 Escalade SUVs - will be used to pick up and drop off celebrities. Carney said the automaker also will run ads during the broadcast featuring GM's two other luxury brands, Hummer and Saab.

According to media reports this week, Ford hopes to have something to show by 2008 as part of the company's celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Model T. The desired end product reportedly will be a fully recyclable car based somewhat on the Model U concept from 2003. Its recyclability will stem from the fact that it will be completely easy to disassemble; all parts not reusable in automaking will be biologically based materials.

Ford is said to have put together a team of its most inspired personnel to pursue the green-car idea. Company sources have indicated that the project may include vehicle parts as well as the actual cars themselves in a pursuit of more lightweight, safe, strong, cheap, and environmentally sustainable vehicles.

What this means to you: Eat your heart out, Toyota. Ford is going for perhaps the ultimate statement in environmentally conscious automotive design.

Called Eliica, short for Electric Lithium-Ion battery Car, it boasts a neck-snapping 0-100kmh time of just four seconds and a 0-160kmh time of seven seconds, which means the Eliica accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo.

Professor Hiroshi Shimizu, of Japan's Keio University, believes his team can make the electric car popular. He feels that the movement towards stricter emissions laws will favour these zero emission vehicles.

"If we continue producing current levels of CO2, we will face a global-warming crisis well before 2040, a long time before fossil fuel reserves run out. We need to halve these emissions now," he says.

Earlier this year, at Italy's Nardo high-speed test track facility, the Eliica recorded a top speed of 370kmh. Shimizu says the car would break 400kmh on a smoother surface.

No reason for the extra set of axles is given, though perhaps they’re needed when the vehicle is traveling at its top speed of 230 mph, which actually was reached one day last year at the Nardo in Italy. The Eliica takes 10 hours to charge and will travel 125 miles on a charge. It can accelerate to 62 mph in 4.1 seconds, after which we imaging you’d need to recharge it again. The team’s goal is beat the top speed of the Bugatti Veyron and produce 200 units of the Eliica for people like George Clooney and that ex-Baywatch babe who still drives an EV1.

"It's kind of hard to be arguing to conserve gasoline when you're driving around in a Ford Expedition that guzzles it down at a 6- to 8-mile per gallon clip," Bush said last month.

"You need to practice what you preach," Richardson said.

The three-seater car comes with a number of user-friendly technologies, including Nissan's Around View Monitor which reduces blind spots by displaying the outside surroundings on screens mounted on the inside of the car's A-pillars located on either side of the windshield. A dash-mounted infrared (IR) commander allows the driver to operate the navigation and stereo systems with simple finger movements without letting go of the steering wheel.

Pivo is powered by Nissan's compact, high-performance lithium-ion battery and its unique Super Motor, resulting in zero emissions.

So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them.

"They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what they can do about increasing fuel economy."

The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg.

These modes of transport are almost silent therefore reducing noise pollution as well as exhaust pollution. The price per kilometre is 6 times less than that of petrol or diesel. When you are standing at traffic lights these vehicles don’t consume any energy, so no need to argue about whether its more or less efficient to turn the engine off and on at traffic lights. And did I mention that they can be recharged by solar power? Oh yes, yes I did! To be honest these little get-abouts aren’t really designed for the open road, but they do make it up to 50 Km per hour which is perfectly respectable for getting around town. Eco-car are based in Barcelona and are part of the Elektron Group.

The thinking is, with gasoline prices hitting record highs and traffic in the nation’s major cities becoming increasingly congested, Americans are likely to buy fewer gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks and gravitate toward smaller, more efficient vehicles like the Smart Car - a mere 8 feet, 2 inches long and just over 5 feet tall - according to ZAP's CEO Steve Schneider.

"The market timing for what we are doing couldn't be better," Schneider said. "Fuel prices are at all time highs, and social responsibility about global warming is something that's more in the mainstream and not a left-wing thing," he added. "And there's the issue of our dependency on foreign oil too - all this makes our business plan very timely."

The only question is-which Bush are we going to get on this issue? The "let's not and say we did" Bush who provides lip service to alternative fuels while signing an energy bill-like the current one pushed by House leaders-that commits 94% of its funds to the oil and gas industries, or the resolute cowboy Bush who can embrace new ideas so crazy they just might work.

The PHEV Car is a hybrid vehicle driven by a compressed air engine combined with electric motor. PHEV CAR is driven by expansive force of compressed air and it also uses a battery driven motor when it is necessary. Compressed air engine is operated by two strokes (suction (expansion)-exhaustion) when the internal combustion engine is operated by four strokes (suction-compression-explosion- exhaustion). Compressed air engine is operated during the start, acceleration or going up a hill where the electric motor consumes a great deal of power rapidly. The compressed air engine converts back to the electric motor when the vehicle reaches a speed of 20-25 km/h.

Earlier this year, GM unveiled the Opel Astra Diesel Hybrid, a sedan concept vehicle the company claims would increase fuel economy by 25 percent over a comparable diesel car, or approximately 59 miles per gallon. The vehicle uses a hybrid system with two electric motors being co-developed with DaimlerChrysler, according to GM.