By John DeFore

While this past weekend’s Los Angeles Auto Show had autophiles lusting after tomorrow’s hot wheels, a very different California event just celebrated a company working to make yesterday’s cars a lot greener.

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By Clint Williams

With highway fuel economy of 30 mpg, the Suzuki SX4 certainly conserves gasoline. And, more importantly these days, this compact sedan conserves cash. A comfortably well-equipped SX4 - complete with standard touch-screen navigation system - rolls off the dealer lot for less than $16,000. That makes it financially competitive in its class, and as economical as most cars featured in our “30(cars) Over 30(mpg)” gallery.

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By Clint Williams

Don’t be fooled. Gasoline prices won’t be bumping around $2 a gallon for long. Driving a car with good fuel economy still makes sense. Higher mpg means lower operating costs for the household budget and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Happily, car shoppers today have a myriad of options among fuel frugal 2009 cars. You can find something getting 30 mpg or better on the highway at nearly every dealer lot. In some cases, you’ll have to settle for a trim line with a smaller engine and manual transmission to hit the 30 mpg mark.

Here are 30 with 30 mpg:

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By Tom Kessler

Green Car Journal editors have chosen the five finalists for the 2009 Green Car of the Year award. They include two “clean” diesels — the BMW 335d and Volkswagen Jetta TDI — the Ford Fusion Hybrid, the Saturn Vue 2-Mode Hybrid, and the Euro-bred smart fortwo. The winner will be announced Nov. 20 at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

According to the Journal’s experts, the five models are important milestones for their manufacturers. The VW and BMW clean diesels signal the advent of highly efficient, advanced diesel sedans that meet emissions requirements in all 50 states. Ford’s Fusion Hybrid is the American automaker’s first hybrid sedan. Saturn’s Vue 2-Mode represents the first time GM has used its two-mode hybrid system in a V-6 front-drive platform. The smart fortwo is fuel efficient micro car from Europe that just made ti the U.S. in recent months.

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By Clint Williams

Jennifer Drukker expected people would stare at her new car. What she didn’t expect was this: “I was at the first stop light after I’d driven off with the car. It was literally the first time I came to a stop after driving off with the car,” she recalls. “The driver of the car next to me rolls down the windows and starts shouting questions.”

If it seems an extreme response to a Chevrolet Equinox, a fairly mainstream SUV, consider that the paint job includes the word “fuel cell” on the sides.

Fuel cell vehicles that turn abundant hydrogen into electricity are one promising alternative to gasoline-burning, toxic-fume-spewing internal-combustion engines. Widespread availability of such cars - which emit water vapor instead of greenhouse gases and stuff that’s flat out unhealthy - is years in the future.

But for Jennifer Drukker, Jamie Lee Curtis (yes, that one) and a handful of other drivers, the future is now.

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By Tom Kessler

Just as the iPod has become synonymous with digital music players, Toyota’s Prius is the only car people tend to think of when it comes to hybrid electric vehicles. The Prius alone accounts for 75 percent of the hybrid cars sold in the United States, according to Toyota.

With Honda taking aim at the same market with its redesigned, very Prius-looking Insight, it appears Toyota may try to extend its lead by turning Prius into a line of cars much like its Scion and Lexus brands. The New York Times reports that James E. Lentz III, president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., is lobbying Toyota executives in Japan to make the move.

Lentz may well have the clout to pull this off: Americans buy 65 to 70 percent of all Toyota hybrids sold worldwide. The Times says Lentz doesn’t know when Toyota might approve the project but talks will continue next month in Japan.

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Chrysler’s 2008 ecoVoyager Concept is a four-door, four-passenger vehicle that is simultaneously sleek, futuristic, and distinctively American. Its one-box design - and the absence of a traditional powertrain setup - allowed designers to make uniquely efficient use of the cabin’s parameters. The ecoVoyager also mates an advanced lithium-ion battery pack to an advanced hydrogen fuel [...]

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By Clint Williams

Let’s be honest: For most folks, conservation implies sacrifice. Maybe even a little discomfort. Turn down the thermostat to save energy, your feet are cold.

There is no sacrifice involved driving the 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid. Not after you write the check, anyway. In fact, Honda this year is adding some nice touches. The most important addition is electronic stability control, now standard. Options now include leather-trimmed interior, heated seats, navigation system, XM satellite radio and Bluetooth® HandsFreeLink®.

The Civic Hybrid is powered by a 1.3-liter four-cylinder engine and a 15 kilowatt electric motor, producing a combined 110-horsepower. That horsepower is harnessed by a smooth continuously variable transmission. Acceleration is best described as adequate, but this isn’t a sports car.

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By John DeFore

While automakers and garage-based inventors work on replacing the car as we know it, a scientist at Temple University claims to have found a way of squeezing more out of the ones we already own with a process tongue-twistingly dubbed electrorheology.

A team led by professor Rongjia Tao implemented the principle for a small device that creates a strong electric field to make auto fuel less viscous; that allows much smaller fuel droplets to be injected into the engine for combustion. As the authors explain in the introduction to their paper: “Because combustion starts at the interface between fuel and air and most harmful emissions are coming from incomplete burning, reducing the size of fuel droplets would increase the total surface area to start burning, leading to a cleaner and more efficient engine.”

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By John DeFore

Honda is shifting gears in its strategy for hybrid cars. Judging from announcements at last week’s Paris Motor Show, the automaker has decided that the hybrids most likely to succeed in the marketplace are models with a standalone hybrid identity — like Toyota’s Prius, which is not available with a conventional gas engine — rather than those, like Honda’s Civic, that are already familiar in all-gasoline incarnations.

So while Chrysler’s new plan will speed up electric vehicle roll-out by building on existing cars, Honda will now focus on “dedicated” hybrid models like the new Insight Hybrid, which it expects to have in showrooms early next year. (Perhaps confusingly, this new car recycles the name of a previous Honda vehicle, a gas/electric hybrid that was discontinued a couple of years ago due to poor sales.)

The five-passenger car will be followed by two other dedicated hybrids — within the next four years, Honda intends to introduce both a compact similar to its Fit and a sports car resembling the CR-Z. The Insight’s fuel efficiency figures are not yet public, pending full EPA review, but company spokespeople have said its performance should be comparable to the existing Civic Hybrid, which gets a combined 42 mpg.

Though no price has yet been mentioned, in a press release the company boasts it will offer the Insight at “a price significantly below hybrids available today” and therefore expects to sell 200,000 cars a year, with half that in North America.

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By Clint Williams

Imagine a day of running errands - grocery shopping, dropping off the dry cleaning, hauling the kids to T-ball practice - that doesn’t include a stop for gas. Now imagine a week. A month. Three months. Six months. A year. Five years.

That’s the promise of the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in electric car expected in dealer showrooms November 2010. Powered by a T-shaped lithium-ion battery pack, the four-passenger Volt will be able to travel 40 miles on a charge.

That’s enough range for the bulk of daily driving, GM officials say, citing a U.S. Department of Transportation survey that found 76 percent of drivers commute 40 miles or less daily.

Drive a Volt and the only reasons for stopping at a QT are Slurpees and microwave breakfast burritos.

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Green Right Now auto writer Clint Williams and GM’s Cristi Landy talk about the landmark Chevy Volt at an appearance at Texas Motor Speedway outside Dallas.

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