Teaser image of the baby Prius concept Toyota plans to introduce in Detroit next week.

At next weeks Detroit show Toyota will reportedly debut a baby Prius, a subcompact version of the Prius hybrid that comprises 75% of Toyota’s hybrid sales.

Up till now, Toyota’s additional hybrid sales have been split between an assortment of bigger and frumpier hybrids like the Highlander, or the luxury hybrids in the Lexus line. But all seven of those models together only account for the remaining 25% of sales.

So, perhaps wisely, the company is changing direction.

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Pictured above is a solar charging station under development by Toyota. The company has plans to open the first of 21 in the Spring of 2010, signaling a move by Toyota to become a vertically integrated company. First, make the plug-in car. Then, build the charging station that it plugs in to. It’s comparable to the same company both digging up the oil, and building the car that runs on the oil. But better.

In many ways this is an understandable move. Toyota has held a leadership position in the hybrid market, and, as such, the company has long resisted any mention of a future move to plug-in vehicles. Why cut sales short, with all the expense that that entails: retooling assembly lines and so on – when yours is the market leader?

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Sven Holthusen runs the EDISON project at Siemens’ Energy Sector in the Denmark branch of the international engineering giant. The EDISON project is working on raising charging power to as much as 300 kW so that batteries can be recharged on the go, in as little as six minutes.

The idea is to replicate the familiar: filling up at a gas station in 6 minutes or so, not in order to replace long slow overnight charges in home garages but to have an alternative to meet the needs of those apartment-dwellers who don’t have garages (and those who do, but who don’t sleep at least 6 hours at night) by making on-the-go-charges as available and as quick as filling up at a gas station.

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Under President Obama’s Executive Order demanding 30% Federal fossil fuel cuts, many Federal Agencies are now beating the rest of us to extraordinary heights of tree-huggery.

The Military has been signing contracts for dazzlingly climate-friendly items like the largest solar plant in America (Fort Irwin just signed up for a whopping 1 GW of solar) or million-dollar tests of advanced jet fuels that have practically no carbon footprint.

But here’s something even the non-military agencies with fleet-purchasing needs will appreciate as they hunt for solutions to reducing fossil dependence 30% by 2020.

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Let’s say you really need a little tax deduction to get your 2009 taxes down, and let’s say you also have spare $50K jingling in your pocket.

Now might be a good time to hop in your jet and pop back to your ski vacation home in Colorado and pick up a surefire winner of a green Christmas stocking stuffer: a nice little 2009 Tesla Roadster that runs on electrons. Gasoline cars are just so 20th century.

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Sainsbury’s has been testing a fleet of 20 Smith Electric Vehicles for delivering groceries for several years and has found that they easily get the job done. Now it’s just ordered 50 more of the three and a half ton Edison vans—making the grocery chain (at least for now) the world leader in EV grocery deliveries.

Online orders will be delivered in the carbon-conscious all-electric delivery vans and will cover an area that makes it possible to serve an estimated 60% of people living in central London.

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The U.S. Energy Information Administration has just released the figures comparing 2008 with the previous year and found that greenhouse gas emissions, from just the transportation sector, dropped 4.7% between 2007 and 2008.

The EIA attributed the drop not just to the gas price rise of the summer of 2008, but also in the Fall to the near-depression-level econo-apocalypse that denuded neighborhoods of many of the businesses that we take for granted as part of the landscape.

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GM has announced that it is investing another $336 million to fix up its Hamtramck assembly plant in Detroit, now bringing its total Detroit plant investment in building the Volt extended-range electric car to $700 million.

First they’ll clear out the cobwebby remains of the Cadillacs and the Buick Lucernes they used to build there, and then they’ll rework those assembly lines to start rolling out something more in line with the times.

The American people are not asking for so much. Just an electric car with four wheels that we can fit at least a few kids into, that can be fueled with electrons from the solar panels we’ll soon have on our garages.

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In the US, Ford is still behind the 5 major foreign auto makers in fuel efficiency, surpassing only GM and Chrysler. Yet Ford of Europe already achieves dazzling mileage that we Americans can only dream of.

Imagine a gas-fueled car that gets 62 miles to the gallon: “With start-stop, regenerative brakes and an Eco Mode system, the new Focus gets 62 MPG (U.S.) on the European scale and emits just 99 grams of CO₂ per kilometer” Available in Europe next Spring.

What is even more startling about this achievement by European Ford is that this mileage is achieved with just good old-fashioned tweaks on the traditional ICE gas car. There is no major technological breakthrough.

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In a breakthrough that might change a few minds about the battery-swap concept, Nissan says that they have succeeded in tests that would extend the range of the LEAF and other electric cars up to 186 miles on each charge, almost double today’s range with an improved battery.

Nissan has developed a new battery combination by adding small amounts of cobalt and nickel to the manganese in their current batteries. Now it’s a real mouthful: a lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide cathode battery, or NMC.

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What a humiliating failure the President’s Asian trip was. Not only did the President make the humiliating faux pas of bowing deeply to one tiny Asian leader, but no sooner had he returned than two more Asian leaders made counter-offers of deep cuts in carbon emissions at Copenhagen: India offered reductions of 20% and China offered 40%.

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Two million square miles of permafrost—an area two-thirds the size of the United States has now thawed since the beginning of the 20th century. And all that thawing permafrost is costing the Russian oil and gas industry billions of dollars to repair damaged pipelines and infrastructure as global warming changes the face of western Siberia.

The energy program head of Greenpeace in Russia, Vladimir Chuprov, after interviewing experts at Gazprom, concluded, “For Russia, the biggest threat of the permafrost melt is to oil and gas company infrastructure.” (from Carbon-Based)

Thawing permafrost presents even more of a threat: it could release frozen methane deposits and causing runaway global warming, mass-extinctions, and huge amounts of economic damage to global infrastructure and economic well being. In addition to Gazprom’s, that is.

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If the city council of Downey, CA, approves it tonight, Tesla’s new factory to build the upcoming Model S sedan will be at the site of Downey Studios, just outside of Los Angeles. The plant is expected to initially create up to 1,200 much needed jobs in a city with high unemployment.

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New projected 2009 US fuel economy figures out from the EPA show that we have now reversed a long-term trend of gradually worsening fuel efficiency since 1987—that bottomed out in 2004 at 19.3 mpg.

While our international readers may find an industry average of 21.1 mpg and 422 grams CO2 per mile a laughable “achievement”—this does represent a real improvement over 2004 levels.

Industry wide, average model year 2009 light vehicles overall are projected to achieve the mileage they got back almost 20 years ago in 1991.

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California has just updated its Air Resources Board website to give consumers a wide range of information about all the alternative power cars coming out next year, from electric cars to diesel hybrids.

The new site—driveclean.ca.gov—offers well-organized data that ranks vehicles according to various emission and cost characteristics and provides tools to compare models on a variety of qualities, including the new incentives that low carbon emission vehicles qualify for: up to $5,000 for cars, and up to $15,000 for electric trucks or vans.

One aspect of the site is revolutionary: For the first time Americans will be able to compare models based on how many grams of CO2 each spews per mile.

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Here’s a transformer idea for city messenger services from design student Adam Schacter. This tiny EV would carry small cargo loads efficiently in its upright mode. In that configuration, the vehicle would be able to fit three to a parking space. But for days when you had a larger load, you’d simply flip down the back and pull it out wider to become a little pickup truck. Even flipped down into a truck, it would fit two to a parking space.

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VW’s new electric concept car is not due out of vaporware world until 2013, a bit later than most of the autoworld’s introduction of electric vehicles. But the eUp! may be worth waiting for.

The styling harkens back in time to the original wagon designed for us simple volks—the Beetle. Just as in that class defining car, for the eUp! simplicity, purity and durability are to be the guiding forces, say the design team of de Silva, Bischoff and Manzoni.

For example, that iconic VW logo on the front? Concealed neatly behind it is the integrated charging port.

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Imagine driving from San Francisco to New York City in a plug-in hybrid Prius that uses algae for fuel.

At the beginning of this month the first ever algae-powered plug-in set off on a ten day coast to coast demo from California to show that a plug-in hybrid can be fueled with green crude.

The algae fuel for the plug-in Prius was supplied by Sapphire Energy. They are developing an algae fuel completely compatible with current gas pumps and pipeline infrastructure.

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