I’ve been following this debate for some time now. The various proponents of different propulsion technologies for our automobiles have a wonderful propensity for conspiracies and paranoia, and when they discuss things like this everything soon dissolves into a shouting match with lots of name-calling and little intelligent debate. Like everything else in the private sector, this should be decided by the market. The problem is that the technology involved is so expensive right now that spending money on it, without some sort of government guarantee, would mean probably the death of the hydrogen fuel cell technology (mostly being developed at GM, Bailout Central for the auto industry). Proponents of the electric car, of course, want this to happen, and are adamant that *their* technology, alone, is the one America should pursue. Several of the people connected with the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” movie are behind the “Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car is a Fraud” movement. Each will assert, if you read far enough into the literature, that the other is a cat’s paw of the oil industry, designed to keep fossil fuels in use for longer than if their chosen technology was chosen.
Hybrids are a sort of bridge technology. They still use fossil fuels, but not as much as an electric would, if they ever developed an electric car that was viable. One advantage of a hybrid is that you don’t have to plug it in. There are now people trying to develop, or developing, plug-in hybrids. This would make the previous comments, and Mr. Stork’s complaints, about “fraud” irrelevant. The conditions that he cites–charging up the battery before the mileage test is started–would be the actual real world situation, much of the time. Of course the people planning plug-in hybrids have to get past government regulators, still. Hopefully they’ll be more open-minded that Mr. Stork.
