Search Results for: cars

THE EUROPEAN car manufacturing industry has overcapacity stretching to 30% to 35% and this may lead to further layoffs, Ivan Hodac, secretary general of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) has warned. Speaking in an exclusive interview with wardsauto from his office in Brussels, the European car industry boss said: “We cannot continue running this industry with 15 to 20 factories [operating at] below 50% of their capacities.”…

As transportation technology in the United States continues to become more intelligent and efficient, traffic managers are turning to innovative software to organise increasingly complex networks of infrastructure and communications. 

For example, the world-ranking higher education institution the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been researching enabling traffic simulators to not only show potential impact on traffics flows of new roads, bridges and traffic lights, but also to suggest the best infrastructure changes from a range of options, said Carolina Osorio, assistant professor at MIT’s department of civil and environmental engineering.…

THERE are many ways to maintain and repair a road, so it always makes sense to look widely at good practice examples. Here The Surveyor has used its foreign correspondent team to assess techniques in some diverse pars of continental Europe.…

A EUROPEAN Commission green paper on the EU’s medium-term energy strategy looking ahead to 2030, suggests that renewable energy might not need to be protected by growth targets in future. These have been a key plank of EU energy policy to 2020, but Brussels’ paper on ‘A 2030 framework for climate and energy policies’ noted renewables would be more mature in the next decade and “competing increasingly with other low-carbon technologies,” such as carbon capture and storage.…

THE FORMER Soviet, Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan is being wooed by the West for its oil and gas reserves, but attention is increasingly turning to its solid mineral wealth. According to the country’s State Committee on Statistics, explored mineral reserves are put at USD3.27 trillion and from a key plank of the country’s economy: in 2012, according to the committee, metals processing accounted for 17% of all the country’s industrial output and was valued at Uzbekistani Som UZS8.6 trillion (USD4.2 billion), a rise of 12.4% on 2011.…

BRAZIL’S growing economy has given many Brazilian motorists purchasing power they have never had before. This – plus effective social welfare policies and an end to past hyper-inflation – has grown Brazil’s middle class, which is now about 54% of the 196 million population, according to the country’s presidential office for strategic affairs.…

WITH the Brazilian government actively deterring automotive imports and working to encourage the construction of auto plants on Brazilian soil, domestic and international car companies are setting up new plants in Brazil at a steady clip.

The country is already the world’s seventh largest automotive producer.…

THE QUESTION of whether publicly-supported refuelling and recharging stations are needed to jump-start demand for electric, hydrogen and other alternatively-powered vehicles seems almost as old as the conundrum about the chicken and the egg. Yet, a clear answer has yet to be supplied – and with green vehicle sales still generally weak – the European Commission has decided that for Europe, it might as well push ahead with proactively creating refuelling/charging networks anyway.…

COLOMBIA industry associations and politicians have warned the country’s automotive industry is at risk following the signing of a free trade agreement with South Korea in February.

The free trade agreement, which is expected to come into force at the end of this year, will eventually allow South Korea-made vehicles to enter the South American country free of the current 35% tariff.…

With the dust now settled from last month’s handover of power in Beijing, policymakers responsible for China’s auto sector seem to be plumping for backing hybrids as a stepping-stone strategy to encourage green vehicle use.

The initial stage of the much-heralded push to promote so-called new energy vehicles (NEVs), and with them a differentiated technology standard that China can export, is now widely acknowledged to have failed, at least regarding promoting China sales of pure electric vehicles. …