Heavy lead acid battery technology is obsolete.

Fast charging lithium batteries will take over. Recycling of tires is
now standard, as will become recycling of old batteries, once the plant
gets rolling that can do it economically. Old tires are used to make
rubber products like cow beds, truck liners and even ashphalt.

Oil can now be cooked up from agri waste, but there is plenty for quite
a while. It is expensive only thanks to rapacious monopolistic
marketing and lobbying and outright spoofy lies to protect the big oil
guys.

A car with electric wheelmotors and batteries can easily outperform
pure i.c. engined cars, especially if short trips and high
accelleration is the aim, because the i.c. engine carries all the
weight of sustainable output with much inefficient complexity, whilst
electric motors can provide more torque at lower weight and regenerate
charge with the braking action. Batteries will become cheaper than
gasoline before gasoline prices will decline.

Long range is a little different, but range enough can be achieved for
town use, especially if local smog is considered, and pure energy
efficiency is costed in. Refining oil to gas is only 50% efficient, and
i.c. engines are only 25% efficient at the user end. 12% overall
efficiency is deplorable, especially considering the smog. The oil
would better be used for lightweight, recycleable structural uses.

Legally, do those in huge cars have some inherent right to scare off
lightweight personal vehicles, by intimating that it's better to run
over little guys on the road with huge tanks? If I choose to drive a
raintight one seater, does a tank driver have the right to ignore me on
the road, especially if his brakes are just not up to stopping him more
quickly than he can accellerate?

Is there a law that says petro fuel is the only one allowed on publicly
paid roads?

If the gov legislated some efficiency requirement in the interest of
our environment should that carry more authority than some peniphilic
rich ******* in a personal hummer? Do you really think that driving a
semi around town should be acceptable social behavoir, for personal
safety or prestige reasons? Perhaps for a hated politician or oil
magnate?

Pure alcohol is a very good fuel, invisible fire flames or no. I wonder
if reverse osmosis or some other process will turn out to be more
efficient than distillation in the production of high grade alcohol.
Solar power could increase the efficiency of the distillation process,
since alky brew needs be heated only to 85 celcius to accomplish
distillation, and the water can be re-used for fermentation. Cellulosic
alcohol can now be made very cheaply.

All oil came from life forms. All fuel depends on solar power
transformed one way or another. Technology is showing us the way to
localise and accellerate the natural process. Considering the
efficiencies of making oil and making alcohol, we can do better than
nature.

We can certainly do better than the profit wringing oil monopolists
would have us believe. The competition of alky and electric or hybrid
plus home charge vehicles using the combination of alcohol and fine
tuned i.c. battery chargers, lightweight lithium batteries and small
powerful lightweight wheel motors is our best weapon against the oil
monster, and it for that reason alone, not any actual or contrived
temporary or long term oil or gasoline shortage, that I feel it must be
supported. Government will never protect us against the oil guys,
since it is they who own the government, and it is they who will oppose
nuclear generation for the same reason, by whatever emotive arguements
are convenient, including promoting fear of "The Bomb", or terrorist
states, or waste recycling, or burying fusion advances.

Only innovative enterpreneures can save us from the oil monopolists,
who will naturally oppose any market share penetration by any means
contrivable, wether commercial propoganda, undermining subterfuge,
political means, or even environmental arguements, as twisted as that
logic may become. Lip service aside, oil producers have no interest
whatever in promoting fuel efficiency, or petro derived packaging
efficiency, for that matter. For them, only our increase in
consumption is paramount. Their arguements can all be discounted except
those that do not need promotion by advocates, as the truth will out
itself in the end. Probably, some farmer will cook sileage and turkey
guts and run his tractor on it and patent the process and get rich in
his own way. I think it's actually been done, except for the getting
"RICH!!" part.

Can we not do better than requiring everyone to commute long distance,
or go faster, or for both parental partners to work all day and hire
sitters, an impossible economic requirement?

Our societal model needs revamping. People are surely more important
than their automobiles, and our society is failing at providing mass
transit and local work opportunities.

Terry K