Hey, all you people that read this site to learn what car to buy: the Green Car Journal says that your 2009 green car of the year is the Volkswagen Jetta TDI. Treehugger gives us a report:

The 2009 Jetta TDI is a quiet-running, diesel-powered car. It beat out hybrids and mini-cars to take the title. The Jetta uses a technology called “clean diesel” which actually lives up its name pretty well. It has a very clean tailpipe, and an EPA estimated 41 mpg highway fuel economy.

Also, it’s a Jetta, which means that you can drive it and it makes you trendy and hip, automatically.

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It’s easy to run around convincing people of the need for alternative energy sources when they’re being forced to pay over $4.00 for a gallon of gasoline.   But now that oil prices have nosedived to about $74.00 per barrel, just slightly more than half their record all time high of $145 per barrel reached earlier this year, the job of pushing for alternative energy becomes all the more challenging.

The facts remain the same.   Regardless of what you’re paying at the gas pump, the emissions spewing out of the tailpipe of your vehicle are speeding Global Warming and destroying the environment as we know it on this planet.   And if environmentalism isn’t your thing, keep in mind that the money from your gasoline purchases is still going straight into the bank accounts of some of the most repressive governments on the face of this earth.   They may not be getting a flush as quickly as they were at peak prices, but that’s still money that could be staying here in America to pay for energy resources like wind, solar and tidal that are readily available every day across this country.

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Lexus is trying to make the luxury car even more luxuriouserish by going hybrid, according to treehugger.com and Reuters news.   The managing officer of Toyota, which owns Lexus, “intends to introduce hybrid versions of its Lexus luxury vehicles as early as possible,” says the news report.   He went on to say that the firm is “considering making the Lexus lineup hybrid-only.”

This is certainly great news for the future of green cars, if Lexus follows through.   But what really caught my eye when looking into this story was this quote from treehugger:

The cause of this change of strategy is probably higher fuel costs (even if they went down a bit lately) and, especially, the fact that the global sales of Lexus fell 9% on the year to 310,000 in the January-August period.

That obviously makes sense, but did Lexus really sell only 310,000 cars in half a year?  I think I saw 310,000 Lexus ads in that timeframe.   Literally.   And I mean that in the Joe Biden sense of the word, which of course means not literally at all.

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by Kerry Trueman

Iconic rocker Neil Young, always on the cutting edge, is more electrifying than ever these days–he’s converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental into an ultra efficient hybrid electric car. When the transformation’s complete, he’ll drive his “Linc-Volt” from Wichita, where the operation’s taking place, to Detroit, and, he hopes, onto America’s radar.

Young’s documenting his alternative auto odyssey for a film, “Linc-Volt,” that he plans to release in 2008. By turning his two and a half ton, 19-foot-long vintage gas-guzzler into a 100-mile-a-gallon hybrid, Young hopes to demonstrate the feasibility of hybrid-powered cars. Long may he run!