December 16, 2011, New York Times – IN the world of computers, Silicon Valley is recognized as the spawning ground of technology start-ups. For financial institutions, Lower Manhattan has long been the place to set up shop.
And of course Detroit has historically served as the epicenter of American automaking, evolving in recent times from a manufacturing center to a headquarters city. Still, there is no guaranty that its dominance is permanent.
Among the places vying to become a nexus of automotive development is this college town of 140,000 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, some 1,300 miles from the Motor City. Already it has earned a reputation as one of the country’s leading engine and transportation research centers, digging into the dirty business of civilizing some of the industry’s biggest and least sophisticated engines.
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December 15, 2011, CNET Reviews – Over the roar from a 110-cc, two-cylinder engine, Pinnacle Engines founder James Cleeves (nicknamed Monty), pointed out a window in the block.
“You can see the cylinder sleeve moving for the intake stroke,” he yelled over the din. Mostly what I could see was oil bubbling in the tiny window, hidden behind the spinning bands driving the camshafts. On the other side of the block was a bigger belt, joining the engine’s two crankshafts and spinning at 4,000rpm, the current test speed. The safety glasses I was issued on entering the test room would be little help if the belt snapped.
This was the engine test cell at Pinnacle Engines in San Carlos, Calif., a soundproofed room containing the most recent prototype of this innovative new engine design. The engine sat on a test stand, hooked up to sensors monitoring every aspect of its operation, from torque output to emissions.
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November 8, 2011, TriplePundit.com – It’s been a fantastic year for electric vehicle technology company, Mission Motors. In July this year, the company’s electric racing bike, the Mission R, (at right) won the TTXGP at Laguna Seca by a sizable margin; show-casing their technology against a competitive field of other EV motorcycle developers, while demonstrating comparable performance with gasoline-powered racing bikes.
Subsequent to their success on the track, the bike went on to win a Core 77 design award, recognizing the Mission R for both its cutting-edge industrial design and execution, as well as helping to make electric vehicles exciting and aspirational.
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October 19, 2011, Forbes - Standing on the edge of the Salton Sea in southern California’s sun-blasted Imperial Valley, Luka Erceg surveys a Mad Max landscape—head-high mud volcanoes, hulking geothermal power plants shooting steam into a pale-blue sky and the rotting corpses of tilapia, mouths agape, stranded on a saline shore that sits 227 feet below sea level. The air is heavy with a pungent mix of sulfur, salt and dead fish.
Smells like money.
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October 4, 2011, Xconomy.com - When Ecomotors International set out to change the way car and truck engines are built, it set up shop in Livonia, MI, a suburb of Detroit, in hopes of eventually licensing its technology to the big U.S. automakers. It was a calculated risk. As radical as Ecomotors’ opposed-piston engine design may be, at least the company’s founder, Peter Hofbauer, has unquestionable auto-industry credentials—he’s the guy who helped Volkswagen build its first mass-production diesel engine.
Pinnacle Engines isn’t even bothering with Detroit. The San Carlos, CA, startup, which recently won the backing of the world’s largest venture capital firm, is also developing an opposed-piston engine, one that promises to marry the fuel efficiency of diesel technology with the lower cost structure of gasoline-burning engines. But Pinnacle’s founder, James Montague “Monty” Cleeves, is a veteran of the semiconductor industry; for him, designing engines and tinkering with cars was always an avocation, not a profession. He’s pretty convinced that Detroit will never listen to his ideas—so Pinnacle is looking farther east for its first commercialization opportunities. Much farther east. To India, in fact.
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September 28, 2011, New York Times - A start-up company will announce on Wednesday that it is beginning commercial operations at a factory in Southern California to capture lithium from existing geothermal energy plants, a technology it says has the potential to turn the United States into a major lithium exporter.
The plant, built by Simbol Materials near the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley, will also capture manganese and zinc.
None of the materials that Simbol plans to produce are so-called rare earths, but a study by the American Physical Society in February identified lithium and zinc as likely to be very important in the new energy economy of the future. The society considers them “energy critical elements.”
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September 21, 2011, Bloomberg - Rohini Chakravarthy, partner at NEA, a venture capital fund, talks about the outlook for overhauling the combustion engine. She speaks with Carol Massar on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.”
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Funds will be used to commercialize EV technology offerings to vehicle manufacturers
August 17, 2011, PR Newswire - Mission Motors, a developer of cutting-edge electric vehicle technology, today announced that it had closed on a $9.0 million dollar Series B financing round led by Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm. Warburg Pincus is making an initial investment of $7.5 million in the company and Infield Capital is following on to its original investment in Mission. Warburg Pincus has the right to make additional investments periodically, up to a total of $50 million, at its discretion.
The Series B round brings Mission’s total to-date funding to $15.0 million. Proceeds from the financing will support the commercialization of Mission’s electric powertrain technologies and allow the company to expand its partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
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July 24, 2011, AsphaltandRubber.com - With the micro-weather climate that is Laguna Seca, the skies cleared in time for the FIM e-Power/TTXGP Championship race. Fast throughout the week, Steve Rapp stood on the pole position riding the Mission Motors Mission R electric superbike supersport. Qualifying second was Michael Barnes on the Lightning entry, and rounding out the front row was Michael Czysz on the 2011 MotoCzysz E1pc. With eleven motorcycle on the starting grid, Laguna Seca proved to be one of the most well-attended grids for electric motorcycle racing; but perhaps more importantly, it was host to some of the most professional entries we’ve seen to-date from electric racing.
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