11 Responses

1. The best alternative car is the one that have not built yet. The Koreans is the closest to making it happen though. It is a car that runs only on magnets. They have a working prototype engine that has up to 300 hp, but it is too low on torque to be practical. There is a guy in Oklahoma who used this technology to charge the batteries of his EV while driving. Most EV’s you will find are to slow for highway use or for short distances only, Under 100 miles between charges. Hydrogen cells are good, but potentially dangerous due to the fact you have a hydrogen bomb in a major accident. Remember also though that EV’s and Hybrids that are now available have a terrible downside. When the batteries go bad, they are expensive to replace and have a some potential dangers in getting rid of them. A diesel hybrid would be the best bet.for todays world. Especially if you wanted to add the few hundred bucks it would take to make it run on old vegatable oil. (You know, like McDonalds and Burger King cooked everything in) And would be very economical until everyone decided to run on veggie oil. Hope this helps a little in what you were looking for.

2. hydrogen is used to power a fuel cell that produces electric.

   hydrogen needs energy to produce, the simplest non-fossil fuel method is electrolysis.
   So is hydrogen the best way of transferring electric from the primary source to the electric motor, or is a large Li-ion battery charged at home or work supplied through a national grid?
   hydrogen is very light it leaks easily and takes up a lot of volume (unless it is compressed using more energy) so is difficult to distribute.
   Large Scale LI batteries are currently available to meet our transport requirements http://www.altairnano.com/profiles/investor/fullpage.asp?f=1&BzID=546&to=cp&Nav=0&LangID=1&s=0&ID=10700, fuel cells still need development.

   Hydrogen can be centrally controlled by global corporations (oil companies) and governments, you can generate enough energy for average motoring from a 20 sq m solar Panel

   So battery electric is better for consumers; hydrogen is better for oil companies

3. For now, the electric car.
   It doesn’t suck in good clean cool air and blow out contaminated, super heated air.
   Battery technology is getting better.
   The electricity to recharge batteries can be produced by clean cheap renewable sources such as solar voltaic, solar thermal, wind, geo thermal, tidal and gravity.

   But it would be good if cities were designed compact and people friendly and we traveled about the way the Elohim do.
   You can find out how The Elohim do in the Message at rael.org

4. Electric.

   96% of our hydrogen comes from fossil fuels.

   There is virtually no hydrogen fueling infrastructure, whereas the power grid is already in place.

   Electric cars are about 3 times more efficient than hydrogen cars.

   Electric cars are also cheaper than hydrogen cars.

5. electric is better especially those self charging design type,anyway i may not live to see them on the roads.project are going at snail speed.

6. It takes energy to make energy. An electric car’s battery would have to get it’s energy from somewhere. You plug it into your outlet and charge it from your local utility, which buy’s it’s power from a coal, Nat. Gas, Nuke, or oil-fired plant.
   Also, batteries have nasty chemicals which will eventually end up in a land-fill.
   I’ll go with hydrogen power created from splitting Nat. gas using power from a nuke plant.
   Having said that, why would you want an ‘alternative car’ ? Pound for pound nothing can match the energy in oil. Net or Gross.

7. What is “better” is dependent upon your point of view. For a large person a “better” car may have a lot of room inside. For a frugal person, fuel economy will put a gleam in the eye. What is “better” is a “value judgment” and as such depends upon which of your interests you are attempting to satisfy.

   The same may be true of corporations and politicians. An electric company is going to give a different answer than an oil company or a car manufacturer that wants to sell spare parts. It is sad but may even be true that the politician is going to look to see what companies are in his district, who has contributed to his reelection campaign, and what favors he needs or is paying back rather than what is “right,” most efficient,” or even “good.”

   I might even have my own agenda. My research may have been on compressed air powered vehicles with flywheel energy storage and to validate this I could hail this as number one. Maybe I might be “old enough” to remember electric cars in the 20’s and that strikes my fancy.

   But our options of alternative cars will not be determined by, “what is better” any more than the choice of an internal combustion bus or an electric trolley was available in the 20’s 30’s and 40’s. It was a business decision by “GM combined with Standard Oil of California (Chevron), Phillips Petroleum, and Firestone” to eliminate electric trolley’s and substitute some buses.1 More recently GM acquired the worldwide rights to the ovonic NIMH battery: A major battery breakthrough that enabled the RAV 4ev to go over 100 miles on a charge and many have lasted over 100,000 miles of use.2 They sold the rights to Texaco who were acquired by Chevron 6 days later. The battery is said to be available for use in EV’s but lawsuits prevent it from happening.3 Same bedfellows.

   We would like to think that available technology and best choices will determine options but more often it is power politics that rules. By looking at the “why not” of “better” we can’t even get to alternative vehicles. The power of popular opinion is never given the option.

   But what we can have is a dream. A dream of vehicles powerful enough to takes us where we want to go, that satisfies our needs if not our desires, that does not impose taxes, choices, or pollution on others. That can be so simple that anyone can operate it but with complling technology that will intrigue the clever. To fit these requirements no option seems to have the potential of the electric vehicle. This power train is versitle enough to accept energy from the grid, solar cells, fuel cells, flywheel storage, an internal combustion engine or even compressed air. Electric motors are 95% efficient.

   But some environments might make efficient use of by products of other motors. Compressed air can give air conditioning as a byproduct and with no heat is good for hazardous environments. A refinery may have hydrogen as a by product and this could be a cheap source of fuel for the neighborhood. And in some places only an internal combustion engine will satisfy what is required.

   The best alternative may simply be more diversity in the types of motors than we presently have available. Matching power trains to the environment seems like more sense than trying to have only one shoe for every customer.
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8. The best alternative fuel car is the regular old gasoline or diesel engine car. Both gasoline and diesel can be synthesized from CO2 and H2O as was discovered by Sandia Labs when they set out to find a more efficient way of extracting hydrogen from water. They soon realized that the same benefits of a hydrogen economy could be realized by just synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels instead of hydrogen and using the existing delivery infrastructure and the existing vehicles instead of incurring the environmental costs of constructing new infrastructures and manufacturing replacement vehicles. Synthetic fuels could also be made from gasification of biomass with the charcoal byproduct being sequestered as biochar thereby resulting in a carbon negative fuel.

   So you can be carbon neutral with electric, hydrogen or even compressed air vehicles but only after the carbon footprint of making them or you could actually remove CO2 from the air by using your regular gas guzzlers.

9. The better alternative car? I’ll just assume you mean the type of vehicle that has the least impact on the environment.

   The problem isn’t necessarily the car, it’s the fuel. High efficiency cars already exist, but because most of the energy that powers them comes from fossil fuels, be it hydrogen, electric, gas, etc. they all pollute to some extent so the solution must have either a net-zero emission or a negative net emission of pollution. Also, any solution would have to fit in with the current infrastructure, and be economically competitive with existing sources.

   The solution, Bio-fuel. Synthetic fuel with a hydrocarbon chain that is similar to petrol (bio-butanol) and diesel (bio-diesel). There are a lot of different types of bio-fuels out there, all with draw-backs (competitive with land food, high use of natural resources, use of fossil fuels to harvest, etc.) except for one. Oil from algae. All plants produce lipids and polysaccharides (oils and sugars) in different abundances, but only algae produces them fast enough and with little inputs to make them economically viable (essentially an area the size of the tenth of the state of new mexico could domestically power the whole of the united states fleet).

   Different strains of algae produce lipids with hydrocarbon chain structures that are similar to diesel and gasoline structures. In other words, they can be used directly into existing cars with little to no modifications.

   When it’s combusted, the algae based oil does release CO2 like any other fuel, however because 90% of the weight of algae is Carbon in the first place, it must suck CO2 out of the air to grow creating a net-zero emission of carbon, or possibly a negative emission of carbon. Couple that with a high MPG car and you’ve got yourself a solution my friend.

   Why isn’t it out yet? Oil based from algae still costs roughly $10/gallon at present to make, more research is needed to drive the costs down to the point that it can make this solution economically viable.

   It is and will be the only perfect solution for alternative powered vehicles.

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   Just for fun…

   For the good people that responded from fantasy land, I agree that the best alternative car is an electric car power by stored energy carried by a super capacitor with the electricity generated from “clean” sources (e.g. Hydro-electric, a solar array, or wind generation). But being that roughly 93% of electric energy comes from fossil fuels, it’s not really a viable option just yet.

   For the guy in philosophy town, we can argue what the term “better” means and waste everyones time that reads their post.

   For the people that answered who obviously live in “I don’t know what I’m talking about” world, it could be argued that hydrogen from water through electrolysis is the way to go. However because the process of making hydrogen from water takes more electricity to make than to simply use the electricity to power the vehicle itself, then their is no benefit to using the hydrogen over the electricity. Plus being that the afore mentioned electricity usually comes from fossil fuels also doesn’t help. (Person without common sense says: “oh but you can make the electricity from clean sources, and then use that to make the hydrogen”) WRONG! Hydrogen is simply an energy carrier not an energy source. So people would essentially be wasting energy to make it/use it in vehicles. Then the electric generation capacity that would have otherwise been spent on domestic sources (e.g. powering homes) would fall back onto the fossil fuel based systems in place, generating more pollution to power the vehicle than would have otherwise been generated by burning gas. H2 doesn’t exist in a natural state anywhere on the planet, with the closest source being the surface of the sun, but even if it did, hydrogen can’t be stored unless it’s in a cryogenic absolute zero freezer , or under an extremely high pressures (6000+ psi) liquid state. It can’t be transported through pipes because of it’s physical properties it can escape directly through solid steel, embrittling the metal causing leaks and cracks, and it’s volumetric equivalence of gasoline is 3 times that of normal petrol (i.e. to drive a normal vehicle on hydrogen, you would need a gas tank 3 times the normal size. That’s why only certain busses have them, they’re the only vehicles large enough. Otherwise, you’d have to haul a trailer of the stuff behind you to go even 300 miles between fill-ups. If you decide to make the hydrogen with water on site (i.e. inside the vehicle) using a PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cell, disregarding the fact that a typical PEMFC large enough to power a vehicle would be up in $750k-$1m range (not even including the cost of the actual car around it), PEMFC also have a problem of the cathode inside of it becoming contaminated with day to day driving and having to be replaced after a year or so of actual street (not cont

10. My answer would be the PURE AND ABSOLUTE 100% ZERO EMISSION ELECTRIC VEHICLE THAT CAN TRAVEL OVER 750+++ MILES ON ONE CHARGE ONLY FROM THE WORD “GO” WITH 100 MPH WITH NO OUT OF POCKET EXPENSE ON GASOLINE OR ENERGY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. cAN ANYONE BEAT THIS? i CHALLENGE ANYONE.

11. Well personally, I have a TDI Jetta, which means that it runs on diesel. Its a manual and I can get 50+ miles when run on biodiesel. The fuel lubricates the engine and the exhaust smells a little like french fries. Everyone that uses it says the MPG improves and the engine does not idle as rough. Multiple vehicles are at the top of the list for manufacturers in the next couple of years. For all the racers, the diesel vehicles hold most of the track records, but it uses twin turbo diesel engine though.