Some may have not caught my earlier message. In 1935 or 1936 Chevrolet issued a highway safety film that I caught on the internet from a railfan mailing that made my mouth water. Lots of wonderful shots of steam-hauled highspeed heavywieght trains, some cab shots, a diner shot, and an excellent shot from a train window of a Chevy on a parallel highway. Only one streamliner, the 4-4-2-hauled Hiawatha! No references to the Zephyr or the UP pioneer City trains or the IC Green Diamond or B&M Flying Yankee. All steam. The message was that a personal auto’s driver had the same responsibilities for safe operation of his/her vehicle that a locomotive engineer does, and parallels were drawn with signals, maintenance, rules, etc. A very good film with a message that of course is as true today!
And I just read that GM, Chevy again, has come out with the Volt. A hybrid that uses the electric motor (s?) to power the wheels without a mechanical transmision, and the small gasline engine charges the battery when required. It can also be plugged in to house current for recharging and gets 65 miles on a charged battery, so commuters can use it to drive to the station without going to a gas station until a long trip is planned. Sounds terrific to me and I hope they have success with it and that some day I can afford one!
Something I like about cars you can charge with a house-hold plug–they would be the same as free gas. Do you know all of the public places with plug ins. If you had an extension cord, you would never have to pay for fuel again.
I am not saying I would be so cheap, but I might do something like that out of principle.
Since power isn’t “free” now, I don’t see how we should count on “free” plug-in power for a few millions of charging amps all over the continent any time soon. So, while our fuel consumption might be reduced in automobiles, we would have to net the difference in electrical production in order to power hybridized or purely electric vehicles.
Then there is the small matter of recycling all those batteries/storage devices, and their exotic materials (read toxic), which will use still more energy, ad infinitum, ad nauseum…until we realize that you can’t fill a bathtub when the plug is not in place. That is what we are trying to do when the “plug” of population control is not in place.
I am not saying that these enterprises have no value, but the net effect, over time, will be what we think it is now if we don’t curb our growing absolute numbers, all of whom legitimately claim their share of energy. While it would be nice to say that it is less all the time, our demands still seem to outstrip our technology’s ability to save us from the inevitable.