Citizen Power

My mission is simple:  Find the coolest car with the best mileage that is so affordable I can still afford solar panels on my roof next year.  Impossible?  Yes.  But it’s fun to look at dream cars anyway.  Here’s a candidate.  (The problem with the best cars is that no one is making them quite yet.)  The car pictured here runs on gas fumes.  I beat them to it — while I was in college I drove my car nearly everywhere on gas fumes.  But it didn’t get very good mileage.

This car somehow makes it work.  (It also looks like it’s made out of plastic).

There is another car, highlighted in this article , that is so thin it can rival motorcycles for parking spaces. And the oddest sounding is the Air Car.  It supposedly runs on air.  All of these cars are entered in a contest for the Progressive Automotive X Prize.  It’s an international competition with a prize of $10 million to see which car can actually be driven regularly and get 100mpg.   My question is:  if these cars work as promised, wouldn’t some car company pay them that much for the patent?  And if they work as promised, I would think they’d be worth a lot more than $10 million.  A car that runs on air is the equivalent of the perpetual motion machine. It sounds too good to be true and it probably is, but if it isn’t . . . . think of the possibilities.  Naturally, none of the major car U.S. manufacturers are entering the contest.   And the reason I looked this up in the first place is that a radio show had a guest on it last week who was talking about how Europe already has 100mpg cars. How can that be true, when we have nothing close?

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