Students from the University of British Columbia hope to set a record for the fastest coast-to-coast drive across Canada in an electric vehicle, range anxiety be damned. Better yet, they’re making the trip in a slick home-brew electrified classic VW Beetle.

The students set out from Vancouver last week on their 4,000-mile trek in E-Beetle, a ‘72 Vee Dub the UBC Electric Car Club converted to run on electricity. With a three-phase AC induction motor hooked up to a lithium iron phosphate battery, the car has a range of around 185 miles at 60 mph and over 340 miles at 30 mph. Top speed is around 85 mph, and recharging the pack takes about four hours. The car sports four wheel discs with regenerative braking.

Those are impressive specs, but Canada’s roads can be unforgiving. From winding mountain passes in the west to deserted stretches of highway across the prairie provinces, driving across Canada requires forethought even in a gas powered vehicle. That’s why the team carefully mapped out places to spend the night and plug in the car. You can follow their progress on the team blog.

So far, they’ve made it up to the summit of the steep Coquihalla Highway — a challenge for any car — but had to recharge at a convenience store the next day after discovering their remaining range was about half the distance they had left to travel.

Be sure to say hi if you happen to be in any of the major Canadian cities where they’re stopping, and we’ll be following their journey online. If all goes well on the cross-Canada trip, the team plans to enter the car in the next Zero Race.

Photo / video: UBC Electric Car Club

See Also:

• Wired.com Builds An Electric VW
• Here’s What an Electric VW Golf Looks Like
• Biodiesel Hybrid Beetle Gets Juiced By The Sun
• Gallery: VW Passat Shifts Gears, Going from Gas to Electric
• DIY Electric El Camino Is All Kinds of Awesome

Volkswagen is diving into electric vehicles with the goal of selling 300,000 annually by 2018, and it has tapped an early pioneer of the modern EV to help hit that goal.

VW Group hopes to move 10 million vehicles a year worldwide by 2018, and company boss Martin Winterkorn says cars with cords could comprise 3 percent of that.

“In urban centers, this share could be a lot higher,” Winterkorn says, according to Reuters.

Volkswagen announced earlier this year that we’d see an EV by 2013. The Up! E-Motion electric city car and an electric Golf are the two vehicles under consideration. “One of the two will be the first all-electric VW in the U.S.,” Winterkorn said, according to Motor Trend.

Winterkorn says battery costs remain the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption of electric vehicles — a point he is hardly alone in making — and says lithium-ion packs cost 500 to 1,000 euros ($647 to $1,294) per kilowatt hour today. The upper end of that range is a bit high, but his figures are in the ballpark we hear others are playing in.

VW, which is working with Chinese manufacturer BYD on battery tech and has opened a lab at its Electronics Research Lab in Palo Alto, California. It is led by none other than Martin Eberhard, the co-founder and first CEO of Tesla Motors. Volkswagen quietly tapped him for the job 18 months ago, and he’s almost sold his bosses on using commodity cells in VW packs.

“They’re slowing coming around,” Eberhard told Motor Trend.

Using off-the-shelf lithium-ion batteries is the same approach Tom Gage and Alan Cocconi of AC Propulsion pioneered and Tesla Motors adopted to create the Roadster. Although VW is exploring a similar approach, the technology it is using is vastly different, Eberhard says.

The electric Golf concept unveiled earlier this year has a motor that produces 50 kilowatts (69 horsepower) continuous and 85 kilowatts (115 hp) peak. Top speed is 135 km/hr, or 84 mph. It’s common to govern the top speed of an EV to maximize range.

Speaking of range, VW says the 26.5 kilowatt-hour pack in the e-Golf is good for 150 kilometers, or 93 miles. The pack uses 180 cells and weighs 315 kilos, or 795 pounds. No word on the recharge time, but VW says the plug is in the logo on the grille even though the diagram shows it in the fuel filler door.

Price? Who knows.

Photos: Volkswagen

See Also:

• Honda Discovers Cars With Cords
• Toyota, Tesla Resurrect the Electric RAV4
• Nissan Leaf Electric Vehicle Is Surprisingly Affordable
• Here’s What an Electric VW Golf Looks Like
• VW Redefines ‘Car’ With A 170-MPG Diesel Hybrid

Volkswagen’s made the sixth-generation Jetta longer, leaner and cheaper than its predecessor and, for the first time, it isn’t a Golf with a trunk.

The 2011 Jetta ditches the wildly prolific Golf platform for its own architecture, which VW calls the New Compact Sedan. It’s handsome enough in a conservative German kind of way and more chiseled, but it’s really staid. The styling riffs on the New Compact Coupe concept car yet lacks the concept’s aggression. The result is a car that looks like a 7/8 scale CC and is essentially the same size as the Toyota Camry.

Choose one of four engines. The list starts with a 104-horsepower 1.2-liter gasoline mill. Then there’s a 121-horsepower 1.4-liter,  the top o’ the line 200-horsepower 2.0-liter and our favorite, a 2.0-liter TDI diesel. The oilburner produces 138 horsepower and 236 pound feet of torque. The diesel and biggest gas engines are available with a six-speed DSG. Look for a hybrid in 2012.

There’s no mention of a wagon or 4Motion version in any of VW’s press material.

Starting price is around $16,000, which makes the new Jetta a bit cheaper than the current Jetta, which starts at $17,735. VW sells about 110,000 Jettas a year in the United States and sees the 2011 model as a centerpiece in its campaign to triple U.S. vehicle sales to 800,000 by 2018. That is a key part of VW’s plan to become the world’s largest automaker within eight years.

“Today marks a new era for Volkswagen and for Jetta,” Stefan Jacoby, CEO of VW Group of America, said in a statement, adding that the car “is a class-up driving experience” and “sophisticated” and… yada yada yada.

That’s all well and good, Stefan, but when will we get the Scirocco and the sweet Polo GTI?

UPDATED 2:15 p.m. with additional info and photos from VW.

Photos: Volkswagen. More after the jump.

If Walter de’Silva designed the Toyota Camry, it would look like this.

Because the 2011 Jetta is 3.5 inches longer than the 2010 model, there’s more interior room. VW promises “best in class” rear leg room.

For the sake of comparison, this is the 2010 Jetta.

Working towards an on sale date of the last week of September, Volkswagen Canada is giving us more and more info on the new Jetta, previewed by the New Compact Coupe concept from last year’s Detroit auto show (above.)

VW Canada’s Peter Viney confirmed with The Crank that to go head-to-head with the compact top-sellers like the existing Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic and Mazda3 and forthcoming Chevrolet Cruze and 2012 Ford Focus, the new Jetta is going to be bigger and offer more engine choice.

Don’t worry diesel fans, one of those mills will be the popular Jetta TDI diesel (TDI sales represented over one-quarter of all Canadian VW sales last month.) And while the U.S. market won’t get the Jetta TDI right away, Canadians will.

“This is a very important model to us. So we want to make sure Canadians get the TDI—along with the other new 2011 Jettas—right at launch,” said Viney.

Hmm…more room, more engine choice and more upscale styling…

Has VW done enough to get you out of your Corolla or Civic?

Phase One is the new, Mexican-made 2011 Jetta compact sedan coming this Fall. It will allegedly sell for thousands less than the current model's $18k-and-change base price.

Phase Two is replacing the two-generation-old Golf City (the Jetta City died this year) with a real, honest-to-gawd subcompact to take on the likes of bottom-feeders like the Yaris/Fit/Accent/Fiesta, et al—specifically a Mexican-made Polo, a car that’s been on sale in Europe since 1975.

VW’s been scant on the details of the forthcoming Canadian Polo. But this week’s debut of a new Russian-market version, pictured above, gives us the clearest hint yet of the Polo heading our way in the next year or so.

Yup. It’s a sedan. Not a hatchback, like the über-fun 180 hp Polo GTI, seen right. You can blame our hatchback-hating friends to the South for that for that, I guess. But details from the Russian Polo presser could easily be mistaken for a car heading to the Great White North:

“The specific demands of Russian drivers and the climate and street conditions in Russia have both been carefully taken into account during the new [Polo]’s development: long-term tests were conducted in different climate zones, and the street conditions in the most variegated regions in Russia were examined. Thus the vehicle has been equipped with an up-to-date and reliable engine [a 103 hp 1.6-litre gas four] that is ideally suited to those operating conditions prevailing in Russia, a galvanized, non-corrosive body and a wheel suspension geared to bad roads. Particularly robust paints were used for the car’s paint job, and the chrome parts are also highly resistant to aggressive agents.”

Makes the new Polo sound strong, like Russian bear, nyet?

But unlike Ford, Honda, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia, Fiat, Nissan, Chevrolet and Toyota—which all offer subcompact hatches to Canadian new car buyers—VW has only confirmed a four-door sedan Polo for our shores.

So…do you think VW is missing the boat by not bringing over the hatchback Polos to Canada?

Or are you just grateful that VW is giving us the opportunity to but any Polo at all?

[Source: Volkswagen]

We were impressed by the plug-in biodiesel hybrid Beetle students at University of Kansas cooked up last October, but now we’re even more so. Not only have they made the Bug much prettier, they’ve officially topped themselves by designing and building a solar charging station for the car.

The group of green engineers call themselves the EcoHawks and envision a future filled with plug-in hybrids just like the one theirs. But they know the best energy is renewable energy, so the EcoHawks accepted the challenge of taking their car off the grid. That explains the six monocrystalline solar cells on the roof of their workshop (shown above). The panels charge a battery bank the car plugs into when it needs a charge.

“It took a few months for the students to research the setup and find the proper components,” said professor Chris Depcik. “After the purchase of these items, it only took a couple weeks to put the system up and get it running.  The six students working together put it together relatively quick.”

“We can plug two cars directly into the system to recharge at the same time,” Depcik said. “We are currently trying to figure out how long it will take for the Beetle to recharge from empty to full.”

For their next feat, the EcoHawks will connect the car up to the larger power grid and integrate a wind turbine into the charging station. With an EPA grant, the group will make sure the Beetle can charge after dark and give back to the grid during times of  heavy demand.

“The idea is to explore different smart grid technologies,” said EcoHawk Jessica Lamb. “Next year, we are looking to expand the infrastructure technologies.”

Photo: University of Kansas EcoHawks

See Also:

• Old-School Beetle Runs on Batteries and Biodiesel
• Wired.com Builds An EV
• Feb. 17, 1972: Beetle Outruns Model T

Volkswagen is making another run at the 24 Hours of Nurburgring race with its natural gas Sciroccos and released a bunch of photos of the car ahead of the race.

The Germans are sending three Scirocco GT24-CNG racers to run the ‘Ring against conventional cars and alt-fuel racers like two diesel Peugeot CRZs. The two cars VW entered last year swept the alt-fuel field, but then they were the only cars in the class. Still, one of them took 17th overall, which isn’t a bad showing.

Each car has a 2-liter TSI turbocharged engine running on bio-gas VW says is produced from renewable feedstock. VW claims it emits 80 percent less CO2. Car No. 16 has an active electro-hydraulic differential that combines the functional principle of a conventional locking differential with improved handling, reducing the car’s tendency to understeer. VW says it’s similar to traction control but doesn’t limit the engine’s power output.

The action starts Thursday with qualifying. The race starts Saturday.

Photos: Volkswagen. More after the jump.

This is the view of the GT24-CNG that VW hopes most of the field has. One of its natural gas ‘roccos finished 17th overall last year.

Car No. 116 will be driven by suits and scribes — VW board member Ulrich Hackenberg, VW chassis development boss Stefan Gies and moto-journalists Bernd Ostmann (Auto Motor und Sport) and Peter Wyss (Automobilrevue).

VW gets artsy with a photo of the 2.0-liter turborcharged engine under the hood of one of the CNG ‘roccos.

Pit stops won’t be this relaxed, and the guy with the fuel nozzle won’t be this casually dressed.

Insert fuel here.

VW says the CNG was produced from renewable sources and cuts CO2 emissions 80 percent.

Volkswagen has no history whatsoever in Formula 1, but that isn’t keeping it from contemplating a bid to provide engines to the teams.

No one’s sure what F1’s rulesmakers have in mind for the 2013 season and beyond, but there is some talk of adopting a “world engine” every team would use. VW says it has no interest in fielding an F1 team, but if the Fédération Internationale del l’Automobile adopts a world engine, VW could make a play to provide it.

“It is clear we are looking at Formula 1. We are waiting for the FIA’s decision in respect of the use of a world engine for Formula 1,” VW motorsport director Hans-Joachim Stuck told Auto Bild magazine. “If there is [a world engine], we will discuss whether to build it for Formula 1.”

Former FIA boss Max Mosley proposed last year adopting a “world engine” that could be used in Formula 1, the World Rally Championship and other categories. The idea is to reign in costs — something Mosley pursued with fanatical zeal — and have teams spend their development dollars on other areas, like increasing efficiency.

Speculation focuses on a small-displacement turbocharged four-cylinder engine, possibly with an improved version of the kinetic energy recovery systems the teams experimented with last year. Such an engine would be a natural for Volkswagen, which uses four-cylinder turbodiesels in several models. And it isn’t like VW, Europe’s largest automaker, doesn’t have the capacity to crank them out in volume.

Whether the idea flies remains to be seen. As Inside Line notes, none of the manufacturers competing in F1 have expressed any interest in the world engine idea. It’s hard to see Ferrari, Renault or Mercedes-Benz agreeing to put Volkswagen engines in their F1 cars.

Photo: Daimler. Mercedes GP’s Nico Rosberg placed third in the China Grand Prix.

Here’s a pic and a few more details about the Volkswagen Golf Blue e-motion concept, the electric vehicle VW says will be on the road in 2013.

Volkswagen announced the electric Golf yesterday and made a big deal of having German Chancellor Angela Merkel check it out, but for whatever reason didn’t release a pic of the car until today. Turns out it looks just like a regular Golf. Imagine that.

The production model will be part of the seventh-generation Golf family slated for 2013. As we mentioned yesterday, the concept has an 85 kilowatt (114 horsepower) electric motor producing 200 pound feet of torque. Top speed is limited to about 85 mph.

The drivetrain uses a single-speed transmission developed by VW. According to Automotive News Europe, a clutch decouples the electric motor on a trailing throttle to provide what VW calls a “sailing effect” with little mechanical drag. The entire drivetrain is mounted under the hood. The 26.5 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery is mounted in what would be the transmission tunnel of the conventional car. VW says it’s good for 93 miles.

VW plans to roll out a test fleet of 500 electric Golfs next year. We’ll see the car, and an electric Jetta, in 2013 after the electric Up Blue e-motion city car hits the market. Audi also plans to have the e-tron electric sports car on the road by then.

Photo: Volkswagen. VW development chief Ulrich Hackenburg, left, and German transport minister Peter Ramsauer do the grip-and-grin in front of an electric Golf.

Add Volkswagen to the list of automakers hopping on the EV bandwagon.

The company announced today that it will have its first electric vehicles on the market by 2013 and showed off the Golf Blue e-motion electric car to Chancellor Angela Merkel. The electric version of one of the most successful European car ever produced will follow the release of the Up Blue e-motion electric city car (pictured). We’ll also see an electric Jetta.

VW says electrifying the bestselling Golf will help move EVs beyond the niche market help make VW a leader in zero-emissions (yes, yes, we know — at the tailpipe) automobiles by 2018. That dovetails with the German government’s goal of seeing 1 million EVs on the road by 2020.

“Future electric cars give us enormous opportunities for reshaping mobility to be even more sustainable,” said VW boss Martin Winterkorn. “When it comes to the environment, however, we must ensure that the energy used to operate these electric cars is produced from renewable sources.”

And that, he said, will require some action and incentives from the government.

The Golf Blue e-motion concept — which, oddly, VW didn’t provide any photos of — that Merkel checked out is powered by an 85 kilowatt (114 horsepower) electric motor. Like all electric vehicles, the Golf has impressive torque — 200 pound feet, all of it available the second you hit the accelerator. Juice is stored in a 26.5 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery and the claimed range is 93 miles. VW says that easily meets the needs of most German commuters (and American commuters, for that matter). Top speed is limited to about 85 mph.

VW says it will launch a test fleet of 500 electric Golf’s next year. When it hits the market in 2013, the electric Golf will join the Touareg hybrid that’s available now and the hybrid Jetta and Golf we’ll see in 2012 and 2013, respectively. No word on the diesel-electric TwinDrive plug-in hybrid we’re supposed to see next year.

Now if we can get VW to build the awesome 42-mpg Concept Bluesport roadster we’d be all set.

Photo: Volkswagen. Ulrich Hackenberg, member of the board of Volkswagen brand technical development, presents the E-up! electric concept car at the Frankfurt auto show in September.