COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A team of students from Ohio State University took first place in the first milestone of the three-year EcoCAR challenge. The 17 teams in the challenge must take a 2009 Saturn VUE and alter it into an electrified vehicle, improve its fuel economy, lower its emissions and maintain its performance and appeal to consumers.

DEARBORN, Mich. -- Ford's 10th annual sustainability report shows what progress the company is making on its goals related to the environment, vehicle safety, human rights, workplace safety and more. While the company is on its way to meet vehicle emissions goals, it was unable to meet its manufacturing-related energy efficiency goal.

Simply adopting already-existing technologies can save the U.S. trucking industry $7.6 billion dollars per year and cut its fuel use by one-half or more.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Making good on U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to accelerate the greening of the federal fleet, the U.S. General Services Administration has ordered 14,105 fuel efficient vehicles this month and will use $210 million in Recovery Act money to pay for them.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM -- Rental car company Hertz is relaunching its Green Collection throughout Europe, offering fuel-efficient vehicles at 70 airport and downtown locations. The company has also committed to setting fuel economy goals, reducing its fleet's emissions and improving its sustainability reporting. Those acts have gained the support of shareholder groups that are pressuring another rental car company to set similar goals.

Even in these tough economic times, there are ways companies can boost their fleets' efficiency without resorting to snake-oil technologies: changing driver behavior can have the biggest impacts of all.

What to make of this week's bankruptcy filing by General Motors? The beginning of the end? The end of the beginning? A death? Rebirth? Something in between?

STOCKHOLM, -- The company developed a mobile phone-based program that details the greenhouse gas emissions from daily commuting; employees testing out the tool changed their commute habits to cut emissions by 30 percent.

NISKAYUNA, N.Y. -- General Electric plans to open a $100 million state-of-the-art, heavy-duty battery manufacturing plant just north of New York's state capital, where it is expected to be the core of the firm's new battery business, the company announced today.

OSLO, -- A proposal from the country's Finance Minister this weekend would halt all sales of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2015 as a way of spurring the development of clean car technologies.

John Viera, Ford's Director of Sustainable Business Strategies, explains the one, soon to be ubiquitous piece of technology in Ford vehicles, and how the company is planning for a low-carbon future in uncertain times.

GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther provides an inside look at Fortune's Brainstorm Green Conference, which is he co-chairing, and comments by Paul Hawken on his work with Wal-Mart and Ford, Better Place's Shai Agassi and more.

The agency last week chose Navistar Corp. of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to evenly split the cost of a three-year demonstration project to develop and deploy roughly 60 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles