The Alternative Fuel Car: The Wave of the Future
Not too many people are buying new cars these days. For one thing, they’re expensive. If you don’t have perfect credit, financing can be difficult in the current credit market. However, most important is that no one is sure what the cars of the future will be. It seems certain that, in the near future, the alternative fuel car will make its debut, but how will this all fall out? There are a number of viable alternative fuel car developers, each with a possible solution. With this in the offing, people are reluctant to spend upwards of $20,000, plus interest, on tomorrow’s dinosaur.
You would think, if ordinary citizen entrepreneurs are coming up with workable solutions, surely the engineers at the big car companies would be able to design and produce an alternative fuel car in a heartbeat. There were a couple of high school students who fooled around with a car until they managed to make it run on old grease from fryers at roadside diners! Not only that, but the diner owners were happy to be rid of the old grease and gave it to the boys for free! Now that’s ingenious.
Some farmers in southern Oregon had an algae covered pond on their land and somehow came upon the notion that the algae could power an alternative fuel car. It worked. Last I heard, they had built artificial ponds, stacked one upon another, inside a greenhouse structure in order to mass produce their fuel. As everyone knows, if it works, don’t fix it. Why doesn’t somebody give these poor Oregon farmers a grant to test the viability of such an alternative fuel car? I seem to remember some earmark bill which funded the counting of fish in a certain river. Who knows that this isn’t the most efficient solution? We need to find out. Algae is nothing, if not renewable!
The electric car seems like an OK idea. Surely there could be charging stations as conveniently placed as our current gas stations. If the government has $700 billion to throw around, surely they can make this an investment in the infrastructure.
The ethanol and corn alternative fuel car ideas seem OK, but it requires a heck of a lot of agricultural land in which to grow this fuel. There are too many people starving in the world, so this idea goes to the bottom of my list for now.
The hybrid alternative fuel car is already in production, but it’s possible that the car makers are just holding on to the oil fuel concept as long as they can, until a truly efficient alternative is decided upon. These hybrids are costly, too. We’re told that this is due to the high development costs and that prices will come down later on. This doesn’t make a good case for buying now.
How about a solar powered alternative fuel car? This could be another hybrid. When the solar ran out, you’d switch over to algae! Or is that fryer grease?
Personally, I find the idea of wind intriguing. The windmill farms are cool. Perhaps some bright teen will come up with a way to power a car with wind, the ultimate renewable resource.
Category: Going Green