Necessity is the mother of invention. But economic necessity is the driver for its introduction and commercialization!
Most car companies, especioally GM, have all sorts of patents sitting on the shelf, but have not put the money into commercialization, because the economic necessity has not been there yet!
The space program speeded up the fuel cell devlopment, made global positioning posible, and introduced a whole new group of materials and instant products.
All these were economically commercialized later to meet consumer needs at an affordable price.
High oil prices will accelerate all forms of energy development, and a practical electric car in the form of a plug-in hybrid will be around soon. Even Volkswagen and Mercedes, long time diesel champions, are woking on plug-in hybrids.
Agree that conspiracy will only work in a closed, dictatorial environment with only a handful of decision makers. Kodak, the world’s leading film maker could not prevent or even slow down the development of digital photography. There are only a handful of photo film makers, and they could have tried to “conspire” to keep digital photography off the market. Luckly they weren’t that foolish.
Ridiculous…that thing should be in a museum somewhere dedicated to “waste and foolishness”…what intrigues me is the American culture for demanding such gas-guzzling extravagance, which the auto companies and their cronies (big oil) play right into. Just because gasoline in the past 30 years has been relatively cheap, doesn’t mean you have to needlessly waste it!!
I can tell you are excited to blame America first but don’t forget Europe in all of this. There are many European Corvette counterparts that suck down at least as much gas and are equally ridiculous in terms of practicality.
What is “gas-guzzling extravagance” anyways? Who gets to decide what “gas-guzzling extravagance” means? How should drivers of these gas-guzzling vehicles be held accountable? Oh, maybe a UN levied “carbon tax” is the answer!! As a US citizen it is my obligation to feed, cloth and defend the peoples of crappier nations after all.
After reading all these posts, what I am beginning to believe is that we are going about this the wrong way. All we hear about now is “alternative fuels”. But the problem is we are trying to use new fuels in old technology; the combustable engine. We need to get rid of the engine and come up with something NEW for these new fuels. Its like trying to stick a car battery inside a horses rear end. Old technology, new energy sources don’t mix well.
Revolutionary change is very expensive and risky, which makes it even more expensive. We have hybrids that charge the battery while braking because battery charge density is not high enough yet for the next generation. When lithium-ion batteries are available for cars, we will see plug-in hybrids with modest range; they will like ly be accompanied with small engines to recharge on the road (e.g., Chevy Volt). We might start seeing fuel cells in the following generation and eventually plug-in only electric cars if battery charge density gets good enough to go 500 miles without a charge. Why should the auto manufacturers take the risk of going out of business to bring a technology to market that isn’t viable yet? They will spend money to develop it and it will come to you when all the puzzle pieces fit together.
Unless you have a technical background it’s easy to be confused about what is possible in the NEAR TERM from a technical and economic point of view, and what we should do in the longer term when all the kinks have been worked out of new technology.
jtsanders explains that a technological leap of faith is extremely risky and is only made when the government or the consumer completely underwrites the development costs.
There are a number of different combustion cycles that produce power from liqiud fuels, Stirling Cycle, opposed piston engine, gas turbine, etc. These have been around for many years. All these have been tried, and for cars and trucks, the diesel and gasoline piston engine are by far the best ones. So, in the near term, we will optimize these with a hybrid cycle added to maximize efficiency.
The next phase of power development, long term, are fuel cells (now being experimentally used in busses and delivery vehicles), plug-in hybrids and all electric cars using high capacity batteries. For fuel cells we need a hydogen network of stations, as well as an economical way to generate it. Both are a long way off. Iceland is the only country that is making aserious attempt to go off-oil. They have unlimited hydro eclectric and geothermal energy to make hydrogen, and only 500,000 people.
I know it’s nice to watch Star Wars and science fiction stuff, and read Popular Mechanics articles on the future. Converting an indutry to new technology is normally done one step at the time, and initially only the military and very rich people can afford it.
I have a 2008 Civic EX with nav and I am getting between 41 & 42 MPG combined city/highway. Considering its competition I’d say this is excellent mileage for a gasoline engine car. Too bad other manufacturers can’t say the same. The car has a five speed automatic which gets better mileage than the manual. I try to keep the tach in the 2 K region, accelerate slowly and can do over 70 MPH at around 2200 RPM.