L.A. Auto Show: Audi picks up award for cleanest car

Still in its opening days, the L.A. Auto Show is producing a clamor in the auto industry. While Hybrids and BEVs have been getting most of the press attention recently, Audi picked up the Green Car of the Year award with the A3 Turbo Diesel or TDI.
The diesel version of the A3 gets 50 percent better mileage per gallon of fuel the gas variant, delivering 42 MPG on the highway. It is also cleaner emissions-wise than traditional diesels.
Audi’s A3 TDI isn’t what we normally think of when we think ‘green’. It looks like a perfectly ordinary car, a nice one. It doesn’t have any specially sourced batteries weighing several hundred pounds. The engine doesn’t just turn a generator, and if you hit the gas, you’ll hear it. In fact, this car has nothing at all in common with a Prius — except a Lilliputian carbon footprint. What the Audi does is bring a little refinement to diesel’s image. No longer the exclusive realm of long-haul driving Hank Williams fans, diesel is beginning to get the credit it deserves. The Audi has a feel of elegance that current popular hybrids like the Prius and the Volt are unlikely to match. It just happens to get 30 MPG in the city and 42 on the highway, burning 5 percent biodiesel.
Meanwhile, the Nissan V2G won the Youthmobile 2030 design contest — the car is part Blade Runner and part lobster but all electric. It takes up about as much space as a traditional auto layout but only has room for one person.
The V2G was designed as a concept of what the cell phones and web cams generation will expect from a vehicle. Apparently, those who adopted these technologies in their adulthood are not the intended audience of this car. The most anyone has said of its design is that it “showed passion,” according to the press release. Maybe I’m being too hard on it. The contest did emphasize the inclusion of “futuristic design elements,” and the V2G is clearly futuristic.
And in other Auto Show news, the third largest auto supplier in Europe and eighth in the world, Faurecia, showcased a line of vehicle interior components that could shave 130 lbs off the average car by 2020. By old hot rod math, this means 13 less horsepower could accelerate a vehicle at the same pace. Read: energy savings.
The traditional formula for fuel savings goes something like this: minus aerodynamic drag, minus fun, plus combustion efficiency, minus weight = MPG. Lately, hybrid and battery systems are providing an alternate route to get those MPG ratings. Of course, weight is still an issue — and Faurecia’s new line of auto interiors can be part of the solution. Currently Faurecia components can save, on average, 66 lbs on a car’s weight. Faurecia also makes advanced engine controls that can use waste heat to reduce CO2 emissions.
In all, the show is making one thing clear: The traditional auto industry is crumbling, and the future is green. The Alternatives & Hybrids section had 49 entries for this year, up from about 25 in 2008. Warren Buffet’s prediction of 100 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030 still sounds a bit optimistic, but I wouldn’t have predicted the hybrid field to double in 12 months, either.