Automobile magazine, popular science and popular mechanics, i dont remember the issues, have had several articles on alternative feuled vehicles.
they mentioned methynol as one of them and the main drawback was the amount of land necessary to grow the feul. however there are plenty of farmers that are being paid not to grow crops, why not just ask them to grow the feul instead.
as mentioned earlier in the thread hybrid vehicles are out now and they are icreasing the gas mileage, particularly in non hiway driving where it runs off the electric motor instead of the gas one (i think the maximum speed is 35mph on the electric motor).
also europe has a couple of cars that are coming out that help reduce emissions but that wont be available in the us for a while. it mentioned that one of the drawback was low acceleration and that most americans probably would not like that.
another good thing about alternative feuls is it would reduce the reliance on the middle eastern countries for oil. thus maybe the us will keep its nose out of other peoples problems over there. after all that was the main concern during desert storm, the welfare of the people was a secondary concern of the government. also they would not be able to support terrorists if we arent paying them huge amounts of money. (rant over by me on this little subject)
imo within the next 5-10 years i think alternative feuled vehicles will replace most oil based feuled ones. of course it is also going to cause problems as people will have to by new vehicles as they phase out oil based feuls. (which is another scam similiar to the one mentioned about hdtvs in another thread
and the big 2000 scare of computers crashing
)
[ January 29, 2003, 17:05: Message edited by: desdinova ]