Oh hell, there are TONS of people that "can't". If you live in a city where you're less than 5, or even 10 miles from everything, you should bike, end of story. (assuming it is possible)

My sister, who is overweight, lives 1 mile from her school. She had been getting my mom to drive her to and from school, everyday. 4 miles, and 2 hard starts for a car. I bought her a very cheap mountain bike, she now rides her bike to school and is steadily losing weight with all the extra riding she can do.

I've tried that with Allstate, but the best they could offer was "low mileage", which means... under 7,000/yr. I probably haven't done 700 in each of the last two years. The discount was a whole 10% or so, or 3-4 bucks.

If more people would be asking for pay-as-you-drive, I think we'd see more of it offered.

Maybe I should have started off with a Hallelujah, *closes eye* *opens one eye* converted yet?? ... No? good because that isn't what i was saying!

I'm not trying to make your dad cycle 60 miles a day. If you want to buy $5000 can opener I have a deal for you!

4-7miles is what these plug-in cars are designed for and i think it is a fraud.

Please re-read the post

If you live in a city you are 4-7miles from everything! Do you need to take your plug-in electric to the grocery store 2miles away? Are people going to call me an evangelist or radical because i suggested not doing something like that? Apparently so. Suggesting somebody use a bicycle for anything other than recreation is still a radical statement in north america.

Re: Cars

"We'll run them on electricity!" (nevermind the problems posed by adding more demand to an already stressed, aging, and largely fossil-fuel dependent system)

"We'll run them on corn!" (Unstated: grown with fossil fuels. This has to be the dumbest project we've ever undertaken.)

"We'll run them on the sun!" (or, maybe just the ventilation fan on some of our new Priuses)

"We'll run them on switchgrass!"

"We'll run them on biomass!"

"We'll run them on compressed air!"

"We'll run them on natural gas!"

"We'll run them on hydrogen!"

"We'll run them on... dark matter!!111!11"

Folks, this isn't really the place for this, (and I note that I am speaking to the choir here, to some extent) but the answer to this "problem" ought to be obvious. Not driving. Or even driving less. It's really sad to see so many, especially our "leadership", not even be able to fathom an inkling of this. Instead of obsessing on how to keep the cars running, why aren't we talking more about walkable communities? Bicycles? Mass transit? Getting off your ass? These concepts don't require waiting around for a techno-fairy to save us - they can be done today, and they have been done already. When are we, collectively, going to understand the most critical component of our energy predicament - the scale? And the fact that natural resources are finite? It's one thing to have a few celebrities in Hollywood running fuel cell cars. Or to get a single "rolling laboratory" going on energy source x in university y. It's a totally different thing to replace 200+ million cars. And that's only in the US. And that doesn't even get into the prospects of being able to afford such a conversion if it is even technically possible, which is probably even more laughable. Even the Prius is well out of reach for most people - how can people think we're going to be able to make a big switch to even more advanced technology? Especially in a nation that is ever-increasingly defined by people who complain about lack of employment and then turn right around and gorge on Chinese products at Wal-Mart - a store where, btw, cashiers are replaced by machines? How's that going to generate enough wealth to afford $40,000 Chevy Volts? Especially when so many are already six-feet-squared deep in debt for their oversized suburban house and existing oversized vehicles?

BTW: remember when president Bush promised us a hydrogen economy? How irresponsible, and unqualified, was that statement?*

*I don't subscribe to the belief that Bush made us more oil-dependent - we chose to do that ourselves. It would be nice to see more people taking responsibility for our collective problems instead of continuing to do exactly the same thing day in and day out, all the while waiting for "they" or "them" to come up with a "solution".

End rant.

Right. Sure. You bet.

That's quite a blanket statement you're making there.

I hope you're just being sarcastic... Most of one's everyday needs can be found inside a radius of 7 miles in an urban environment.

I agree with all the urban replanning and other eco-friendly alternatives to eco-fuel and EV vehicles.

Reality is though, you need to bridge that (big) gap between the current status quo and an ideal greener future.

And hybrids are DEFINITELY 1000x better than the SUV-Hummer megacar trend that was all the rage 5 years ago. Hopefully it'll stay that way long enough to make a difference.

The bicycle is the ideal tool for exactly this, IMO. It certainly has been for me.

Nope, not being sarcastic at all.

Yeah, you can get everything from furniture to apples within seven miles or less, but if some important destinations are far enough away, you're gonna wish you could drive instead of spending half of your waking hours pedaling around.

Come on and join the rest of us in the real world sometime. Life's a lot more harsh than in that pretty little cocoon you've built for yourself.

You have obviously misread what i wrote. So let me spell it out - A typical person doesn't need a plug-in electric designed for 7mile trips around the city. That is what bicycles are for.

Peace.

Compared to what? A Corolla? A Dodge Challenger? Camaro? Please re-read my post. I was comparing the Tesla roadster to its donor brethren the Lotus Exige/Elise whatever that is.
Do you know that my old WRX handled better than Porsches? Does that mean anything to you? No. Why because I didn't say which Porsche model. But I can claim that can't I? Heck today's V6 Accord can outgun 911s too. But which circa 911?
cheers!

Okay, 7 miles.

7 miles here, 3 there, 5 over there, a short 1-mile hop there, 15 over there, 15 back, 4 there, 5 the long way home.

That's a half-century of riding. How much stuff are you going to get done in one day with that much riding? How much merchandise will you carry, and how many passengers will go with you? What if one of them is in a wheelchair? Have you got a bike for that?

Does this mean you'll stop talking?

You have some valid points there. Planning ahead to reduce extra mileage becomes a second nature very quickly when biking to places. At least for a utility cyclist such as myself, as I'm not primarily looking for the exercise. But even if I drive, I still plan the trips. Driving less is far more efficient than trying to decrease litres per 100 km (or increase MPG).

One issue I have when biking for errands: there are often times when I cannot freely choose the order of places I need to visit. If I have two panniers of groceries to buy, and need to drop by in several other places, there aren't many options. Going to restaurants/offices/library/whatnot with two panniers full of foodstuff is not going to happen for many reasons, so grocery will be my last stop. No matter what that does to my route planning. It's sometimes easier to spread the errands along weekdays than trying to get everything done in one go.

--J

See above post. Hydrogen is just a battery, and it's not actually even that good a battery. You have to pump more energy into making hydrogen than you can get out the other end. Using the electricity to charge a battery then using the electricity out of that battery is actually more efficient than using the electricity to make hydrogen.

The reason hydrogen gets hyped is that there are a lot of petroleum companies that have a hell of a lot of money tied up into infrastructure designed around moving physical fuel sources around and distributing them to consumers with cars (refineries, pipelines, truck and rail cars, gas stations) and they are very concerned that if the future is electric cars, their investment will be useless. So they want the future car to be something that takes a fuel that needs to be moved around and sold as a physical thing, not electricity on a wire.

The point is, America (and a few others) could use more cyclist.

Let me try to understand this.
It is ok to deal with all the inefficiencies of importing hybrids such as fuel used to import them, pollution created by building, recycling and destroying batteries etc. etc.

We can deal with all the inefficiencies of hydrogen cars. Does anyone think about how much energy is used to create or collect hydrogen to use in a vehicle?

Electric cars are fantastic as we will only create more pollution by upgrading the national electrical grids in order to carry our oil/coal fired or nuclear generated electricity to those electric cars.

But ethanol fuel is bad because the vehicles used to grow and collect the ethanol are not yet converted to ethanol.
Just think of all the carbon being recycled each and every time the corn, sugar, grass, poplar tree, what ever becomes the most efficient, is grown to REproduce the ethanol.

Maybe we could put ethanol in all the vehicles used to transport the equipment used to build the new electrical systems and then burn the ethanol to create the electricity.

Once the tractors, trucks and other vehicles involved are converted to ethanol and the ethanol is distributed to the rest of us to consumed. When the plant matter creation and transportation is ethanol driven the pollution problem would look small compared to paying what? $0.50/khr for electricity.

Right now the inefficiencies of ethanol are not really any different than electric, hydrogen/hybrid fueled vehicles.

Of course we could use hydro electric there must be five or 6 creeks left in North America that hasn't been blocked up with a dam yet.

I'd argue that the "pretty little cocoon" is the lifestyle of driving everywhere and almost always being in a temperature-controlled box.

But anyway, your points about traveling long distances are valid to some degree, which is precisely why we should be talking more about mixed-use, compact, walkable communities.

I am confident that the suburban arrangement of traveling gargantuan distances will eventually be realized as a temporary facet of an incredibly special and temporary time when even relatively poor (in the US, anyway) people were blessed with tremendous amounts of cheap fossil fuels at their disposal.

No, hydrogen is bad too. ESPECIALLY if it's used in an internal combustion engine. In that case it's really horrible, far worse than burning gasoline. If burned in a fuel cell, it's not really so bad, but it's still not great, and the big problem is that hydrogen is not dense. You need a big, expensive high pressure tank to hold enough hydrogen to go more than a few dozen miles.

Ethanol will be bad even if tractors and transport convert to burning ethanol. In fact, at that point it will become blatantly obvious how bad it is, because right now it takes nearly a gallon of fossil fuels to make a gallon of ethanol, and a gallon of ethanol doesn't have as much energy as a gallon of gasoline. The system will have to run full time just to produce enough ethanol to run their own systems, with hardly anything left to sell.

Ethanol is not a bad idea. Making it out of corn is. The only reason it's even vaguely viable is that it's getting the bejeezus subsidized out of it by the government. That, and it's largely produced using fossil fuels, which are cheap because they are also being subsidized by the government (primarily in paying for externalities out of other funds).

The panacea is cellulose ethanol. That takes something that we can't eat and throw billions of tons of away, and makes it into something.

Next best is sugar based ethanol; sugar cane is a pretty good source of ethanol. The government doesn't want to go that way though because then we'd have to buy sugar cane from places we don't like and haven't subverted (yet).

Best respond!

I think trying to have more efficient and smaller cars, and walkable/bikeable cities is a good thing.

However, one thing I wonder about is: What happens in the future, if/when someone discovers an energy technology that is clean, cheap/free, environmentally sound, aesthetically appealing, and safe?

"Sustainable cities" are a good thing, but I imagine if an energy technology like I described is invented, it will become harder to justify utility of sustainable cities and sustainable living, as we currently imagine them.

I can pretty much guarantee that this will never happen within our lifetimes. Sheer laws of energy conservation stating that you can't have something for nothing will ensure this. Nuclear fusion is the only realistic possibility, but don't expect to see it any time in the next lifetime or beyond.

While I'm all for cyclists everywhere (see Belgium!) cars, trucks, and motorized transport will always be a necessary evil. Even the most die-hard car free people are fooling themselves if they think they're buying their groceries, getting their mail, and living in a house that was completely free of intensive motorized vehicular construction and involvement.

That pretty much describes the extent of the energy policy in the United States: running on wishes. I maintain that it makes far more sense to depend on concepts that have already been established, and focus on using less energy on doing different things instead of using a different type of energy to keep doing the same thing.

Leno was drinking water condensed from the exhaust pipe of his hydrogen BMW...

Hydrogen is wonderful and the way of the future - maybe not the "next week" future but certainly the future.

Hydrogen has a lot of wonderful properties:

- Hydrogen fuel cells and electric motors are not constrained by the carnot cycle mimit of heat engines.
- Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density per unit mass than hydrocarbons
- Hydrogen is one of two energy intermediaries (currency - like money) that can transition between the energy source and the useful service for society
- Hydrogen is incredibly safe to store and transport
- Hydrogen is everywhere
- Hydrogen can be rendered from many places with near perfect yield


Hydrogen has some downsides:
- rather difficult to store at the moment

People like to offer examples of how busy their lives are and why they need a giant SUV todo all their shopping at once. You get people bemoaning and being vicious because they think that they could never survive buying a bag of milk and a loaf of bread without 120 liters of storage space and 250hp. People certainly don't need a car designed to travel short distances exclusively while having less storage space than a cargo bicycle.

I was just surprised that companies are going to make these mini-trip plug-in vehicles, to me it is indicative of a certain level of sloth - not progress.