OTHER POSSIBILITIES

The reason for the high expense of EV's (doubly high in view of their inferior performance) is the investment in a new industry; if Detroit could produce EV's without retooling, there would be no such problem. But once retooling is accepted, there are other possibilities. There is the external combustion engine, for example. Steam engines are not very efficient, and neither are gas turbines by the time they have been cut down in size to fit a car, but much research is now going into the Stirling engine, which uses a gas such as helium or hydrogen. The gas never leaves the engine; it is heated in a furnace to expand and drive a piston, and having cooled by the expansion, it is returned to the furnace.

The beauty of external combustion engines is that they can burn anything that provides heat for the furnace¾most probably coal, but wood if necessary, or even tomes of Commoner's thermodynamic abracadabra. None of these are pollution-free, but since the fuel burns continuously, it can be burned completely. (Present hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles are mostly due to incomplete combustion.)

And then there is hydrogen, which can run present cars with only a change in the fuel tank (the hydrogen would be held in hydrides¾metal alloys that will store hydrogen chemically), and which need no $100-billion synthetic fuel experiments. Hydrogen can be extracted from water, by electrolysis, for example, and as with the electric car, the load-leveling effect would enable part of the present electric generating capacity to be used. For additional power, there is no obstacle to more nuclear plants other than ignorance and political perversion.