cars

Toyota Prius sales down 55% compared to March ’08

Today, Toyota Motor Sales reported March ’09 sales numbers, which showed a 55 percent decline for the Prius brand.  In March ’08, Toyota sold 20,635 Priuses, but in March ’09, only 8,924. (Maybe everyone is holding out for the 2010 model?) Overall, Toyota numbers were down 36 percent from March ’08, but up 19 percent […]

Oregon’s successful mileage tax experiment worked smoothly — and helped curb congestion

Recently I’ve been flogging the concept of a mileage tax, a system of per-mile road usage fees that over time can replace our dysfunctional gasoline tax as a way of funding transportation infrastructure. Although people have raised a lot of interesting objections, I’d like for now to skip ahead and simply describe Oregon’s successful experiment […]

Obama considering ‘cash-for-clunkers’ program

President Obama discusses the latest efforts to aide the U.S. auto industry. (White House photo) Did President Obama endorse a “cash for clunkers” program today? Maybe. In detailing the government’s latest efforts to shore up General Motors and the U.S. auto industry, Obama said this: Finally, several members of Congress have proposed an even more […]

Solar roadways

Randomly stumbled across this Solar Roadways idea yesterday. Doubt it will ever happen, but it’s a pretty nifty notion. AutoblogGreen also has a couple of posts on it: an introduction and an update from last year. See also Green Car Congress.

Umbra on burning wood and gas

Hey Umbra, I’m from Quebec and there is a movement underway to prohibit the new installation of wood burning fireplaces. I’m curious about how much carbon is produced by burning a cord of wood in a fireplace, compared to a tank of gasoline burned by an automobile. Ron F.Montreal, Quebec How does firewood stack up? […]

Time to get charged up about advances in smaller, faster lithium-ion batteries

Battery advances seems to be flowing as fast as electrons these days — and super fast charging batteries may hit the market in as little as 2 to 3 years. And that’s critical because the car of the very near future, plug in hybrids, are a core climate solution (see here). And electricity is the […]

Senate committee rocks the house on ‘sustainable transportation’

All the youths are buzzing about the fact that C-SPAN now allows their video to be embedded. Wicked roasty! (That’s what the youths say these days.) To get a sense of the hottness this is going to bring to the interweb streetz, check out this video of a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, […]

New breed of houses makes use of carbage

Guess what will save the economy and the environment? Buying a new car! Cadillac ranch? OK, maybe not save — but according to the folks at Oregon-based Miranda Homes, it can help. The automobile industry has lost some half a million jobs and $50 billion in revenue while we hang on to our old jalopies. […]

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed

The ChiPs are down for the hydrogen highway cul de sac -- literally. The future Ponches and Jons of the California Highway Patrol won't be policing the hydrogen highway.

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed. This dream was embraced and elevated by President Bush, who said in his January 2003 State of the Union address:

With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free.

I have explained at length many times why the first car of child born in 2003 -- or the last car, for that matter -- will not be a hydrogen fuel cell car, most notably in my best selling book, The Hype About Hydrogen [Note to a picky semantic people: The book was not a best seller, but it was the best-selling of all of my books]. Maybe my best (and certainly my most widely read) paper available online [PDF] is "The car and fuel of the future," published by Energy Policy back in 2005. It is still worth reading if you want to understand why plug in hybrids, not hydrogen fuel cell cars, are the car of the (near) future.

The last vestiges of a hydrogen economy are collapsing. First, we had Honda's new FCX Clarity, which the company optimistically billed as "the world's first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production." If so, the Clarity has demonstrated to the world how distant the whole enterprise is (see here, here and here).

Now Greenwire ($ub. req'd) has a long story on the collapse of another one of the few remaining pieces of the dream, "Has Schwarzenegger's hydrogen highway gone bust?" excerpted below: