330 MPG! Aptera Hybrid

It's worse than that: it's a three-wheeler. That is the most unstable configuration ever developed for a motor vehicle. Motorcycles can be kept stable by leaning into the turns. You can't do that with a three-wheeler, and the inside wheel comes completely unweighted in a brisk turn. Watch a motorcycle sidecar race. The passenger has an elaborate set of handles so he can "sailboat": lean his entire body out beyond the edge of the vehicle on the inside of turns, in order to keep all three wheels on the ground. Even rolling office chairs that never exceed 1mph now have five legs because four support points aren't enough for stability!

Notwithstanding all that, this vehicle will surely be popular in the Third World, where motortrikes are already common. Probably in Europe too, where energy conservation is taken seriously. Never in America, our safety regulations would make them impossible to import. At present, three-wheeled vehicles are classified as motorcycles, but that will quickly change if their popularity increases. The occupants of an automobile must be able to survive a crash into a brick wall at 30mph (48kph) without injury. There's no way this vehicle can every be made that sturdy.

No no no. Hybrids use the internal combustion engine to charge their battery. Duh! Every gasoline or diesel car has a battery and a generator anyway, so it's just an extension of the existing technology. If the battery charge drops below a certain level, it just starts the main engine and runs until the battery is adequately recharged. You're welcome to keep it plugged in overnight to make sure you start off with a fully charged battery, but it is not necessary.

Electric motors are most energy-efficient in heavy traffic at slow speeds with frequent stops, because they have constant torque at all engine speeds, turn off completely when the car is not moving, and start instantly with full power. Their advantage diminishes in steady-speed highway traffic, so there's not much loss in running on the internal combustion engine under those conditions, in order to keep the battery charged. In fact, at least with today's technology, hybrid vehicles are not cost-effective for people who do mostly open-road driving. They'll never recoup the original investment in fuel savings. Which is just fine, because people who drive all day at 70mph (112kph) are not going to want to do it in one of these little Tinkertoys.

I can see motorsports enthusiasts gleefully preparing to race these things at 100mph (160kph). But the rest of us probably will never want to take one on the freeway/expressway.

I don't have enough information to make up my mind, but many people insist that biofuel is a practical technology, and it can be produced without taking over farmland that should be used to feed the starving millions in the Third World. The key is to reduce petroleum consumption. Building cars like this that use less petroleum--even when they use the engines to charge the batteries--is one way to do this. Switching from gasoline to diesel is another, although America is strangely reluctant to do this despite the peppy performance of turbodiesel engines. The price of diesel fuel is poised to go higher than the price of cooking oil so I may start buying the fuel for my old Mercedes in the supermarket.

But the real key to cutting petroleum consumption in America is to stop making people drive to work every day. We all have computers and telephones at home, and I daresay 90% of us rarely get an assignment that can't be completed with those two devices. Around one-third of our petroleum consumption is directly wasted in commuting. That doesn't even count the second-order effects of a steady diet of convenience food, the congested housing in cities, and the nannies and other expenses that accrue to families in which both parents must work to pay the mortgage on that inflated urban or suburban real estate.

As I said, hybrid vehicles by definition charge their own batteries. They convert chemical energy into electrical energy. Railroad locomotives have been working that way for sixty or seventy years. Those diesel engines don't turn the wheels, who could possibly design a variable-speed transmission to handle a 160-liter engine? They run at a constant speed for maximum fuel-efficiency, and turn electric generators that are used to power huge electric motors that turn the wheels.

The hybrid car is a variation on the same technology. It stores the electrical energy in a battery but it can run the motor directly if the battery charge is low.