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© Bob B. Brown

Food trucks will now be doing business on the streets of Seattle. In about a month, Seattle will be one of the cities, which will legally allow trucks selling food, beyond private lots.
According to councilor, Sally Clark, this will enable small business to flourish, as food trucks take over street life.
Approval will also come for the kind of food that will be sold, from these trucks, in the form of a detailed menu, as well as, methods to be adopted for preparation of food.
At the moment not much has been happening and the food trucks which are operating in Seattle are estimated to around 30 or less.
Food trucks are very popular across the breadth of US, from Los Angeles and Portland, to New York and Washington D.C.
To enable the business to start, Seattle City Council has prescribed certain guidelines, to prevent congestion and overcrowding. A lottery system is envisaged, in case there are two or more aspirants, for the same location or time slot.

© Toyota Motor Europe

The new Toyota electric-gasoline hybrid cars and their technology will prove to be useful in easing power shortages in Japan's struck northeast which was struck by the disaster. Toyota Motor Corp. said that it will donate emergency power supply systems associated with its Prius hybrid cars to the states of the Tohoku region which were affected by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11.
The system will be connected to around 40 Prius hybrid cars. Hybrid cars can be utilized to store and generate electricity and will run on a high quality battery. Toyota's technology of hybrid cars has started working in in the areas mostly affected by earth quake. Estima hybrid minivan, has relectrical outlets and it can run household appliances for two days.

© shannonkringen

It is known by utilities that they will have to adopt various measures to meet the demand of electricity if electric cars become popular. They need to find out the types of new technology and incentives for customers that will be needed. The time frame for the same will also need to be worked out. This is a challenging task for the industry that is highly regulated and averse to investments in new technology.
A report of Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) points out the impact of plug-in electric cars of both, the all-electric variety and the hybrid version. Some of the key findings of the report are –
The number of electric cars will range from 3.1 million to 12 million by 2020, and 15 million in 2020 to over 65 million by 2030.
The electric cars will have a share of around 1% to 3.9% of the total cars by 2020, and around 4% to 17.7% by 2030.
The cost to run electric cars will be about one-third of the cost to run a gasoline car.