Skip to main content

Make Way for the Lincvolt!



Will Neil Young be the next Elon Musk with his Lincvolt?  To read his 2011 biography, Young has a very wide range of interests that keep him going between albums.  One of them is his dream of a big car that requires no fossil fuel, so he and a small group of engineers came up with the Lincvolt, transforming a vintage Lincoln Continental that had many fond memories for Young into a hybrid automobile.

He has taken the classic car on the road, recently visiting Stephen Colbert in New York, where he plugged his innovative car, which is fitted with a pono stereo system that plays much higher quality digital music than the conventional MP3's.  This kind of retro engineering is really cool and fits well into the American imagination.  Oh, and he did a new song with Stephen, which one hopes will come out on Pono early next year.

What Neil is doing is nothing new, but it helps to have a Rock-n-roll icon pushing these CO2-friendly conversions, as it will draw more attention to this new hobby that is sweeping the country.  Many have adapted vintage cars into hybrid and electric automobiles.  Electric conversion kits run about $11,500 for vintage VW automobiles.

Young gets into some of the history behind ethanol-fueled and electric cars in Waging Heavy Peace, noting that Henry Ford was keen on the idea, but that the fledgling oil industry offered an affordable fuel at the time that was hard to beat.  So long corn and hemp fuels, and hello gasoline.  Young opts for biomass as his fuel source, which provides a good alternative to ethanol that relies almost exclusively on corn.


The idea of a hybrid car is that the fuel combustion engine charges the battery pack on the road so you don't have to stop for recharging.  Elon Musk has dealt with this issue by exchanging battery packs at selected stations around the country, which takes as little time as filling up your tank.  I don't think Elon has anything to worry about in the Lincvolt cracking into his market, but it will make for a great show piece on the road.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!