anonymous

Diesel fuel has a bad rep, but the new technologies allow it to burn clean and efficiently. I have a VW Jetta that my best ever was 58.2MPG. We could make huge strides in fuel economy if we wer to bring over small diesels.

And I can only imagine fuel economy if we were to tie it to a hybrid drivetrain.

No need for segways especially if it jacks up the price. Of course it needs to meet all 50 states emission standards.

Has anybody looked into tiny turbine-generators?

Here’s another thought: electric drive also allows for auxiliary, “helper” charging schemes, such as thermoelectric co-generation (using heat from the engine to produce electricity directly), or solar cells on the roof (much preferable to that solar-oven greenhouse on the Flextreme).

My daily commute is longer than 34 miles, and covers a large mix of road-types. It would be useful to me if the hybrid could somehow know (via GPS?) when it is getting on a high-speed, limited access highway to automatically start the engine, rather than using up the battery in the morning and then cranking the engine to come home. Or maybe the engine could be set to come on whenever the vehicle tops a certain speed (as an option to stretch electrical endurance). Or, maybe just a “turn on engine now” button.

It might not be too soon to start asking employers what their stand might be on charging employees’ plug-ins at work. By reducing their fuel bill, it would amount to a (mostly) free raise, and they could claim “green consciousness.”

As someone said above, the real deal is strategic, not environmental: if you want to travel today, you MUST use oil. Breaking this dependency could change everything.

Perhaps the environmental issue is more of a chicken-and-egg thing: with a large fleet of electric cars, there’d be more incentive to use them as load levellers for the electric power industry (since they’d be mostly charged at night); “baseline” electrical capacity is less likely to need petroleum than peak-generation capcacity. Large, more efficient power plants would lead to better air quailty. Also, increasing numbers of electric vehicles could drive electricity producers to consider green alternatives more quickly.

Instead of Segways, how about an auxiliary lithium battery to bring the electric-only range up?

The following provided by:

Journey to Forever website URL is included (http://journeytoforever.org/).

Using vegetable oils or animal fats as fuel for motor vehicles is in effect running them on solar energy. All biofuels, including ethanol, are derived from the conversion of sunlight to energy (carbohydrates) that takes place in the green leaves of plants.

Plants take up carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere; burning plant (or animal) products in an engine or burning it any other way releases the CO2 uptake back into the atmosphere, to be taken up again by other plants. The CO2 is recycled, atmospheric CO2 levels remain constant.

Thus biofuels do not increase global warming — unlike fossil fuels, which release large amounts of new (or rather very old) CO2 which has been locked away from the atmosphere for aeons.

In fact biodiesel can actually help reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere: for example, growing soybeans takes nearly four times as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as the amount of CO2 released in the exhaust from burning soybean oil biodiesel.