I actually think that GM has a good idea in the 'Volt'.
It's an electric
car with a bay into which you (or GM) can install an
electricity source like
a genset (diesel or spark), a fuel cell stack or even
more batteries. The
flexibility is the value added.

Pure electric vehicles are slowly emerging as quite
possibly the final
answer. There has been rapid fire announcements of
lithium ion battery
technology advancements in the key areas of energy
density and charge time.
Toshiba and others have Lithium Polymer cells that
can be fully charged in
less than 5 minutes and still last 20,000 recharge
cycles. Charge time is
just as important as driving range with electrics with
one offsetting the
other. If the vehicle can be recharged in 5 minutes
at convienient
locations, who cares if it only goes 150 miles between
charges. For serious
'off grid' driving, the Volt approach looks good.

The so called 'hydrogen economy' is just bafflegab
from the Bush
administration to delay any action. Hydrogen is not
likely to be part of
the solution. An 'electric economy' however is easy
to imagine.
Electricity is extremely flexible. An electric vehicle
can be slowly
recharged overnight at home or quickly at a charging
station. The
electricity can come from almost any source.

My original thought is that even an electric could
tow a glider trailer if
the trailer itself supplied some of the power. Imagine
side boxes ahead and
behind each trailer wheel containing batteries and
wheels containing
electric motors. The trailer then powers itself and
the 'tow' vehicle just
guides it.

Bill Daniels



To add some hope to this situation, albeit down the
road, and some fuel to this debate, check out this
bit of emerging technology:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/5192/

It is a carbon nanotube capacitor, and the article
I linked does a much better and fuller job of explaining
it than I should here. If this technology is 'allowed'
to develop and be distributed, the future does not
look so bleak.
BTW, for those of you who don't already, spend some
time navigating around the parent site the article
is from, www.gizmag.com , with it's many sections (including
aero gizmo). There is a LOT of info there, with wonderful
(and of course some lame ones) new inventions and emerging
technology, updated often. It actually feels like it
is 2007, like the future IS here, when you check out
some of these things, instead of the year 'nineteen
ninety seventeen' we seem stuck in presently. This
site is everything Popular Science and Popular Mechanics
ever wished it could be.

Paul Hanson

"Do the usual, unusually well"--Len Niemi