How to pick the best Hybrid Car for you

(c) 2006 by Rick Tamlin

If solar power collection finally took some major strides forward in the near future, it would be likely that all we'd need to power our vehicles with is electricity alone... A battery array and the ability to collect energy from roof-mounted solar panels would be an ideal design for a car, but to date, solar panels have never been designed with nearly enough efficiency to supply the large number of watts that a typical car would require to drive to our standards.

That leaves few remaining options, the most noteworthy being a hydrogen-electric vehicle. Since hydrogen gas is already present in the atmosphere, there would be very few, if any, side-effects to our using a hydrogen-powered fleet. The problem now is collecting it, as hydrogen gas is still pretty expensive to collect and contain properly.

Two possible problems with this design are both in dealing with the containment of the gas, which in liquid form, must be stored in a container at extremely low temperatures. This would mean that if the tank was ruptured in any way, the result would be devastating, or possibly completely fatal to all passengers. (Anyone remember the ending of Terminator II?) Once the compressed hydrogen hits the air, it becomes highly flammable, too, as the Hindenburg Blimp so valiantly gave us a stunning example of. Clearly, using hydrogen as a primary fuel source still has a few 'bugs' to work out.

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