“There’s a red-hot fight brewing in the green-car world,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
Proponents of the two most hyped technologies — hydrogen fuel cells and plug-in electric hybrids — are squared off in an increasingly bitter fight. They are vying for publicity, manufacturer acceptance, favorable regulation and, especially, funding for research and investment in infrastructure and marketing.
The battle has been simmering for several years, but with the technologies coming tantalizingly close to commercial reality, the stakes are higher than ever. Whoever gets the upper hand now could determine what kind of cars we all drive in the future.
The camps are competing for potentially more than $2 billion in federal funding over the next five years and are lobbying for regulations that could have a profound effect on which type of car winds up on dealer lots.
“It’s just unfortunate that there has to be so much infighting,” said Patricia Monahan of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls itself “agnostic” on which technology holds more promise. “Sometimes it seems almost personal.”
Fundamentally, the disagreement is over which technology is more viable.
Plug-in hybrids are charged by plugging the car into the electrical grid. They also typically carry a small gasoline- or diesel-powered generator that can charge the batteries and extend the range of the vehicle - while cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells don’t also use fossil fuels.
Still, why not both? We currently have cars that run on gasoline and cars that run on diesel. Why not cars that run on electricity produced from hydrogen fuel cells and cars that run on electricity from plug-in hybrid engines? Then let the marketplace - the car-buying public - decide which technology it prefers to buy, own and drive.
I’m predicting, though, that the winner won’t be cars powered by ethanol made from corn. Here’s why: Technology already exists to produce hydrogen locally, that is, in the garage of each the car owner - or even to produce it on-demand on board the vehicle. And plug-in hybrids already have a distribution infrastructure for their “fuel” - the electric grid.
Ethanol, by contrast, can not be distributed through the existing gasoline distribution infrastructure, nor produced in each car owner’s garage.
One Comment
Recent breakthroughs in solar panels and batteries make me think that we’ll soon be using solar-generated electricty to charge electric vehicles. We need not bother with fossil fuels or ethanol for transportation. It’s just that simple.