Horses cause more ozone depleting methane than a car. Maybe CARB would start requiring a strap-on catalyst and annual smog checks.

Low-mpg Prius?: The Prius was originally advertised with, um, misleading mpg figures. Heck, I'm witness to a Saturn sedan and a Geo Metro getting 50-55mpg.
Bad marketing-no croissant!
IMO, the Honda Insight starts to get decent milage and shows what hybrid technowlogy can actually acheive 100 years after it's inception. Consumers have been getting acceleration and heavy saftey features over milage for a long time.

That being said, the Prius has proven to be a good all-around design for family commuters.


Planned scrapyard by design: This goes back to GM's Intercity Lines buying up trolleys and burning them in a pile. It goes back to it's corruption of Ovtronics NiMH patents and suing Panasonic which started selling EV-sized batteries. It goes back to the EV-1 debacle and the film "Who killed the electric vehicle."
You can Google those terms and decide for yourself how well "GM" and "Environment" have related to each other in the past.

Fool me once, well, you'll never fool me again.

IMO, there's an element missing from electric cars: Battery heating/insulation and cooling systems.

Once those are standard, electric vehicles will be truly viable for 50-state use.

Instead of a gas/electric hybrid, why not a bio diesel/electric hybrid? Probably going to see that next...

Have a 500cc or 1L diesel engine idle along, charging the batteries as needed.

Yup. Diesel and hybrid are the proverbial horse and carriage.

Many years ago I had an idea for a variable combustion chamber: One that would alter the compression ratio to match any type of fuel with the engine and/or conditions.

After some brief research on the uspto dot gov, I saw other designs that would do the job, though in a different way.
Years later, I still haven't seen any of these on the market.

There are very few original ideas when it comes to the internal combustion engine. It's hard to talk the public into new designs when they expect 150K trouble-free miles.

Direct injection homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) is the next big thing that will ACTUALLY make it to production. If you haven't looked it up, it's like a diesel stroke but using gasoline. More power, more torque, less noise, less emissions, more fuel efficient.

Thanks Kaisen. Hadn't seen that before.

I haven't read too much yet, but it looks like it's trying to acheive what the pre-1973 Honda Civic CCCV combustion chamber was after......complete mixture, but combined with direct injection.

(btw, google seems to have trouble with the "cccv" term in the search results)

Very true. I have an engineering text on Internal combustion engines from the middle 1930's and they had just about everything set, except emission controls and computer controls. Most of the ideas were not implemented because gasoline was cheap and the advanced engine designs were expensive.

At the same time, most car engines were not using oil pumps!