The Future of Driving

Our personal mode of transportation is often the most environmentally negative part of our ecological footprint. Yet does it have to be this way? What is the future of driving and how will it evolve to meet the growing concern of climate change?

Will we all be driving hydrogen powered vehicles in the near future? In a word, no. The hydrogen economy is a myth, plain and simple. Not only is the technology far too complex, but there are storage issues (think big explosions) and one insurmountable problem which is that hydrogen isn't a fuel at all, it is a battery.

There are no hydrogen mines anywhere in the world. You can't dig hydrogen out of the ground.

Hydrogen has to be created and currently it is created using natural gas. So using fossil fuel to create hydrogen isn't exactly a solution to our climate change problem. Certainly hydrogen can be created using nuclear or wind power, but the aforementioned technological complexity and storage issues cancel that out.

So what then will we be driving? Are we doomed to walk everywhere? Well, the coming oil shocks do mean many of us will simply not be able to afford cars. The economy is going to go through some major disruptions and assuming some of us do manage to save enough money to buy a new type of car, you can bet it will be smaller and not have all the technological bells and whistles you might expect. The bottom line is that the car of the future will be simple and use existing proven technologies that can be mass produced efficiently.

Flex-Fuel and Biodiesel plug-in hybrids are the most likely candidates. Flex-fuel cars can burn gasoline (when you can afford it) and ethanol (sugar cane, corn) or any mix thereof in a regular piston driven engine. Biodiesel can burn various percentages of diesel allowing consumers to choose whatever fuel is the cheapest (or even available) at the current time. Hybrid technology lets you use that fuel as efficiently as possible by running the engine only when needed and at its peak level of efficiency. Plug-in hybrid technology lets you charge your batteries overnight and so gaining another 100miles of driving totally pollution free (depending on source of electricity).

All of this technology exists today. For short trips these sort of cars would effectively operate at an infinite mpg rating (they would run off electricity). For longer trips the cars would burn biodiesel or an ethanol mix. Fossil fuel could eventually be entirely removed from the equation as biodiesel and ethanol production finds ways of creating their products efficiently (ie. cellulous ethanol production).

What we are missing is the foresight to make this a reality before it is too late.