[lbo-talk] The War on the Car

W. Kiernan wkiernan at ij.net
Tue Nov 15 05:06:05 PST 2005


Jordan Hayes wrote:

>

> but hey: this is fun!

The intent of all this is to improve the fuel efficiency of transportation. At the present moment, while the efficiency of existing hydrogen-powered cars themselves is very high, the efficiency of the entire consumption path from the original energy source to the car's drive wheels is, as you say, lower than that of an ordinary gasoline-powered car.

Should engineers give up on hydrogen cars altogether, then, Jordan? Keep in mind that at one time in the nineteenth century, when the world's production of petroleum was a hundred-thousandth what it is today, between limited oil supplies, crude refining techniques and the cost of transporting gasoline long distances (by sailing ship?), the efficiency of the overall consumption path of gasoline-powered engines would have been worse than that of existing steam engines. Technological pessimists like you would have us starting our morning commutes by shoveling coal into the furnaces of our Chevys and Toyotas today.

Obviously _today_ it makes no economic or engineering sense to scrap the gasoline-based transportation fuel system in favor of a hyrdogen-based one. Fifty years from now engineers may have invented and built a hydrogen-based transportation fuel infrastructure which is, overall, more efficient than what we've got now. Then again maybe not; if a comparable amount of hydrogen is leaked in refueling a hundred million fuel-cell cars as the gasoline that is spilled today fueling our fleets of gas cars, you'd get a pretty bad air pollution problem; maybe using electric power lines for distribution as Gar suggests would ultimately be preferable to setting up hydrogen stations for motorists.

Gar: If a hundred thousand people in California want to buy pure electric cars and fuel them in their driveways off the domestic power grid, that wouldn't require any major changes in the grid. But put fifty million pure electric cars on the road in the U.S.A. and that would certainly require the grid to be upgraded.

The point I was trying to make is that you don't need to wait however many years for a new fuel infrastructure, which is what Gar suggests, nor do you need to throw up your hands and give up on the entire project of improving transportation fuel efficiency, as Jordan seems to suggest.

_Right now_, if the market existed, Daihatsu could start tooling up to mass-produce hybrid cars which top 70 MPG, and when those cars start rolling off the assembly lines, _right now_ people could start using them with the currently existing gasoline distribution network. (Governments concerned with their nation's dependence on unreliable overseas oil producers could make that market exist with taxes and regulations.) At the same time, engineers could continue research into grid-powered electric cars or hydrogen-fuel-cell electric cars, with the potential for yet higher fuel efficiency.

None of this precludes also improving public mass transit so that it would be practical for Americans who don't happen to live in Washington D.C., Boston or New York. I sure wish I could ride a bus or a subway to work instead of fighting my way through those God-awful Tampa traffic jams every day. I'd get a lot more reading in, that's for sure.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net



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