GOOD AND BAD CAR NEWS

I’ve never owned a car I liked as much as my Prius. The novelty of owning an electric hybrid was exciting at first. Now, I want to give it a tender pat every time I check my mileage and realize how much I save on fuel when I fill it up with that expensive juice. I’ve had snide remarks from others about the batteries, their polluting affect and short life. Well, there is good news about batteries.
Read Susan Kraemer’s article at http://gas2.org/ partly quoted below:

ARPA-E funding is for breakthrough inventions that have the potential to radically change the way we get energy. Fluidic Energy holds this promise because a metal-air battery that uses an ionic liquid as its electrolyte (instead of water) would dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries currently on the market.

An electric car with a relatively small battery could potentially travel well over 500 miles on a charge if his ionic liquid research pans out. This advance would leapfrog the electric car industry to well beyond the shorter-than-a-gas-tank range that has restricted the market appeal of electric cars.

Also on Gas2.0 is Andrew Williams piece on a car that parks itself shown on a YouTube video with links to other robotic car videos. These are full size vehicles. Wow! Innovations abound, a carbon free motorcycle race in California, new hybrid vans, and more. I can’t wait for the electric Motor Home to ramble in.

But then comes the bad news. After Chrysler-Fiat took billions in bailout loans from the Federal Government, promising a half-million electric cars on the road by 2013, Chrysler has renegged on pretty much all of its electric car promises after axing the ENVI program.
This just makes me sick.