The batteries develped for these vehicles were originally invented by a scientist for precisely that purpose, they are the NiMh variety and are recycleable in a way which inferior ni-cads are not, so no toxic waste products to anything like the same degree. Gm bought the rights to production of the car batteries when they were building their cars, afer scrapping the cars, they sold 61% of the shares in the batteries to..... TEXACO! Now there's a company who really want to make batteries!
Actually, an oil company is probably a good owner. The pundits are saying that we have reached peak-oil, the oil is getting more and more expensive to extract. So they are facing growing costs and falling yields - more than that, there will be growing pressure to limit output, all of which will affect profits. To maintain cashflow, they will need to find new market places - what better than one of the main potential oil replacement technologies.
Hybrid, IMHO is an empty technology - it is style over substance.
All the alternatives to oil that I can see ae going to relay on large quantities of electricity - in the short term this means nuclear - there is no other viable bulk energy source. Renewables will improve, but they will not offer the same energy density. The size of plants will be much bigger so there will alot more real-estate required.
Wom
As far as power requirements for charging go, unless we see a reduction in world population or a massive drop in demand for power, the nuclear option is apparently (so we are told) the only one we have and if this is the case, there would be plenty of 'freely' available generatiing potential for recharging our transport. If that were dismissed, then another solution would be to switch off most of the uneccessary street lighting at night and use the available surplus to fuel our vehicles for the trip to work thenext day. If the government really wanted to make this work... THEY WOULD.
It doesn't surprise me that they take no action, nor am I amazed by the lack of it, or the manipulation which goes on in boardrooms to perpetuate polluting industries, I just get more angry about it. Is it any wonder we have the demonstrations going on around London right now? Although I don't agree with a lot of what is going on there, there are some very intelligent and enlightened people out there and some may know a lot more about the political manipulation of our lives than we do and thats why they are there.
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