Living in Colorado my skew my observations, but I don't see a lot of small cars on the road. You can go to just about any new car dealership and find small, fuel efficient cars available for sale. Not too many people are buying them. Until there is consumer demand for higher mileage vehicles, manufacturers will want to concentrate on making vehicles that people want to buy. What a concept!

I was at a Honda dealership last weekend having my CR-V serviced (a kinda-sorta SUV wanna be). While waiting, I got a good close look at their little Insight hybrid car. As a technology geek, it's kind of a cool car with a lot of impressive technology inside. As a 2 seater, it'd actually meet many of my driving needs. This one had air conditioning and automatic transmission and was rated at 57 MPG. That's very good mileage by any one's standards. Still, I've only seen maybe 3 Insights on the road in the past year. If people don't want to buy them, well, you can't make them. One potential problem with the Insight here in Colorado is poor road clearance. The Insight rides very low to the road, so it wouldn't take a lot of snow to stop it. Like the cute little Mazda Miata, the Insight might be better suited to sunny climates ("California Car").

Hybrid electric cars are still pretty new to the market but the idea has been around for a long time. I first read about how to build your own hybrid electric car in a late 1970s issue of "Mother Earth News." They'd converted an Open GT to hybrid power using a 5 HP Briggs & Stratton engine and car batteries. It seemed to work rather well. I've read that Honda and Toyota are having a hard time selling very many hybrid electric cars despite the fact that they're selling them at a loss. Ford plans to sell a hybrid version of their Escape SUV next year. We'll see how well it sells.

New technology like fuel cells is being tested right now but is still too expensive for the marketplace. Believe me, when fuel cell powered vehicles hit the market in a practical form (meaning they're multifuel capable so I don't have to go looking for a hydrogen pump for a fill up), I'll look into them. The Bush Administration expressed support for fuel cell powered vehicles earlier this year. According to the article, fuel cells currently cost about $4500 per kilowatt. That will have to drop to about $50 per kilowatt to be commercially viable. Since 746 watts equals 1 horsepower at 100% coversion efficiency (figure on 1 KW per horsepower in the real world), you'll need about 100 kilowatts to power a small to mid-sized car.

I believe the best type of automobile fuel cells are like those produced by the Ballard Corporation that include catalysts capable of splitting hydrogen from fuels like gasoline or natural gas. This would go a long way to solving the hydrogen infrastructure problem.