The latest edition of Lotus Engineering’s proActive e-magazine is now out and available for free download. It includes a particularly interesting feature on City Cars first published in Automotive Engineer that is well worth a read. It’s key reading for anyone seriously interested in the segment and the fundamentals that drive design in small cars.
What else is in the latest edition? As John Cleese would say in Monty Python, ‘And now for something completely different…’
I interviewed the head of a company in the Netherlands that is about to commission the world’s largest second generation biofuel manufacturing plant (BioMCN makes bio-methanol from glycerine that is a by-product of biodiesel production). BioMCN’s CEO, Rob Voncken, was certainly an interesting interviewee: a trained scientist with a business brain who is also motivated by the idea of doing something good for the environment.
He was charming and cool as a cucumber when I talked to him, but it’s quite a project he is in charge of. He could be forgiven a bit of stress as commercial production inauguration approaches. The business opportunity? In the short-term it’s about substituting bio-ethanol for bio-methanol in the gasoline alcohol blend (it can be mixed and we get ‘A85′ rather than E85 with all its food chain incursion woes). There are some pretty powerful interests behind ethanol though.
And there’s also a fascinating insider view from the Lotus marketing department on how they approached the press launch for the Evora. It’s clearly a highly targeted exercise and they don’t do model launches often, so when they do, they put some serious thought into it. And they don’t exactly scrimp judging by the pic of the hotel on Loch Lomond. I just hope the Scottish weather was kind.
If you are signed up already for proActive, you should automatically receive an email with a link for the pdf. If not, why not get yourself signed up – it’s free.
