Given the level of concern that people have expressed about reducing their ecological footprint, particularly in regard to greenhouse gases and fossil fuel usage, I thought that I would mention some of the work that's being done in automobiles that you may not be aware of.
This next statement is the kind of thing that's going to get me kicked out of the ecology club, but as Dick Cheney has said, "conservation is a personal virtue." It's something that you can't force on someone else. It's been suggested that everyone ought to proactively -- and with some significant self-sacrifice -- either drive 1970 Tercels or ride bicycles with milk baskets bungee-corded to the back of them. As a practical matter, none of this will ever happen, and it is somewhat foolish to ever imagine that it will. If you want to change the world, you have to do it in a manner that will be economically profitable to manufacturers and simultaneously attractive to consumers. But in that regard, people are farther along at building comfortable, attractive energy-efficient, virtually zero-polluting automobiles than you might think. These vehicles will have not only very close to zero greenhouse gas/pollutant emissions but will also have truly extraordinary mileage, and I thought that you might like to see them. C|Net is a computer-industry site on the web that is somehow associated with the NY Times, but which caters primarily to Silicon Valley. It's either outrightly owned by the Times or it's in partnership with the newspaper. In either instance, C|Net is an excellent, reliable source of news for almost all things technical. Recently C|Net has had several series of photos on its site showing these new cars. One set is associated with Pacific Gas & Electric's corporate advocacy of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV's): http://news.com.com/2300-11392_3-6174671-1.html These cars are likely to come to production quite soon. They require only a small modification to a standard Prius to make them "plug-compatible," using the electricity at your home. Toyota has always known that this was possible, but they purposefully chose not to mention the possibility simply for marketing reasons. They didn't want people to think about the inconvenience and perceived unreliability of a plug-in vehicle while first trying to introduce the concept of a hybrid. Once modified however, the electricity required to propel the car equates to ~55 cents/gallon when taken off of the grid, and although they still burn gasoline (or any other fuel for which the engine is equipped), they average over 100 mpg under driving conditions exactly in the manner you drive now. These cars have been promoted for some time now by a group of California engineering professors and car enthusiastics, particularly in the Bay Area, through an organization called CalCars: http://calcars.org/photos-people.html Hydrogen-powered vehicles are the other technology that is coming to the fore. There was a particularly nice set of photographs on the C|Net site yesterday featuring an array of hydrogen-based cars from a wide variety of manufacturers, but it's unfortunately gone today. However, there are photo sets such as this one regarding Toyota's hydrogen-fueled SUV from a year ago: http://news.com.com/2300-11389_3-6094112-1.html These cars are also electric vehicles, but the electricity is produced by an on-board hydrogen-powered fuel cell. Although no one has yet built a plug-in hydrogen-fueled hybrid, it will be no more difficult to accomplish than it has been with the standard hybrids. In either circumstance, the cars are perfectly silent when operating. There are no moving parts. The only emissions from a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle are water, and once modified to be plug-compatible, the operating costs drop to ~50 cents/gallon gasoline equivalent. The rub at the moment are the initial high costs (approx. $45,000 per vehicle), but these prices will come down with time and manufacturing scale. There are already more than 200 of the Toyota hydrogen-powered Highlanders on the road in California now. Making that number become 200,000 or 2 million is not difficult, given the proper economic environment. Wirt Atmar
