The Green Car Show is an exciting feature of the South Coast Earth Day Festival. This show serves as a showroom featuring the latest technologies in hybrid and advanced-fuel vehicles.

A Prius that gets over 100 mpg? A school bus that uses electricity as a clean fuel? See how the technology that we once thought “futuristic” is now coming online. The big story this year: conversion kits that will turn your Prius into a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) – like a regular hybrid, but with a much larger battery pack and a place to plug in to a normal wall socket. These vehicles act like electric cars for most daily driving, and for longer trips the gasoline engine kicks in.

Electric motors can power a car around three times as far as internal combustion engines per unit of energy. Furthermore, using electricity as a clean fuel results in zero tailpipe emissions and allows cars to run on solar, wind, or other renewable energy. In addition to plug-in Priuses, the CEC recently was awarded a $50,000 grant through the EPA to bring the first plug-in school bus in Southern California to Ventura Unified School District.

This year’s Green Hero Award will go to the California Cars Initiative, a group that has worked to demonstrate plug-in hybrid technology, and has been very successful in educating the public, policy makers, and the auto industry about plug-ins. Thanks in part to their efforts, the Green Car Show will feature two companies, Edrive and Plug in Conversions, that can convert customers’ Priuses into plug-ins.

You’ll also see hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and the latest models of gas-electric hybrids, electric vehicles, and vehicles that run on ethanol, biodiesel and compressed natural gas. Interested in biofuels? Talk directly to the people who make biodiesel from local waste, including UCSB’s “Fryer Oil to Fuel” program.

And it’s not all about the car. For those who are ready to take the car out of their CARbon footprint, find out about car-sharing programs, the commuter Bike Station, and MTD’s biodiesel-electric hybrid bus.

Download a 2008 flyer of information about the Green Car Show / Advanced Transportation Marketplace.

Download the 2008 exhibitor application (for all exhibitors, including Green Car Show).

If you would like to participate in the Green Car Show, please complete and submit the exhibitor application per instructions listed on the application. We ask that you also please contact the Green Car Show Coordinator, Arjun Sarkar, at sarkararjun@hotmail.com.