I read Joseph Romm's article in today's Salon and I want to respond to it.

Plug in hybrids are a means for car companies to stall on the ZEV mandate that comes up in 2010. They still tie motorists to the gas stations to replenish the part of the car that runs on gasoline. Joe criticizes the EV-1 the same way that GM did when they killed the program - "Battery technology had not matured enough to make battery electric vehicles practical".

I worked on the EV-1 for three years and drove one home from Torrance 45 miles and then 10 miles back to an induction charging station the next day on a single charge. I knew that the NiMh batteries were capable of 100 mile range. Why isn't that better than the Chevy Volt's promises of a 40 mile range with their tiny gas engine and better than the plug-in vehicle with it's gas engine that he endorses. I never had a problem with the EV-1 driving 65 miles an hour on the LA Freeway system. If GM had spent as much on funding battery research as they did and are doing on expensive hydrogen fuel cell research, we would have perfect batteries now.

The new nano batteries that A123, Altairnano, and others have that cost about $5,000 to emplace in an auto are a better trade off than the cost of an ICE, mufflers, smog controller, catalytic converter, tailpies, etc that an ICE car requires?

These new nano batteries do not need more than 15 minutes to charge,will last 12 years, are safe, and are recyclable after use and cost under $5,000. Hasn't Alan Cocconi demonstrated that his 3 tZeros with nano batteries have accumulated 300,000 miles and gone over 300 miles on a single charge - have more to say but over 1,000 words.

It seems like the long charging times hindering electric car adoption could be overcome by having a battery pack that could be pulled out and replaced when it ran down. Instead of a gas station, when your batteries got low you'd pull up to a battery

charging warehouse where your battery pack would be switched out by a forklift. This would spread out the substantial costs involved with replacing worn out batteries, effectively increase the range of electric cars, and the battery warehouses could also be hooked into the grid to even out supply/demand peaks that are problematic for solar and other renewable energy sources.

So we are all going to ride bycicles and live in caves, and spew all these wonderful ideas about how we can all be "green" by changing or giving up our lifestyles, all while the Military Industrial Complex runs on Oil and Depleted Uranium and puts out more emissions than most countries? Wow, that really makes a lot of sense... you people really see the big picture...

Do any of you realize that all of this hybrid, green, electric car babble is bullshit as long as we are running 800+ Military bases in 130+ countrties? Do any of you realize how much pollution would be curbed if we weren't policing the world with fossil fuels and depleted uranium? Why not focus on that first, instead of telling everyone that the sky is falling, that they are evil if they drive an SUV, and that the state needs to basically step in, influence the market with some special interest favor (ethanol), and control our behavior?

Obviously not, as the green babble on Salon pretends like our empire doesn't exist, and that if we drive electric cars it is going to do more than a mousefart compared to the environmental degradation we are putting out with the thousands of tons of depleted uranium munitions we are spewing all over the place and the oil we are burning in order to do it.

Do you honestly think that we can get anywhere riding bicycles while our fucking Military Industrial Complex gets a pass to do whatever it wants and spew DU all over the place? Pull your heads out of the sand and wake up. As long as the American Empire exists, nothing fundamental is going to change. Sure, we might all have to make "sacrifices", ride bikes and ration electricity, but for who? For the Military Industrial Complex? So it can continue with business as usual while we ride bikes and improve the environment out of one side of our mouths, while spreading emissions and DU in countries besides our own from the other side?

Get real.

And it is pure electric - see http://volt914.blogspot.com - despite the naysayers, I can use it for 95% of my driving needs. I still have a gas car for those long-distance trips. And, there are a variety of studies that show that *even with today's coal-fired plants* there would be a net reduction in both CO2 and particulate pollution if everybody switched over to electric cars today.

Also, it is *much* easier to scrub the output of a single large power plant than it is to scrub millions of little, inefficient, power plants. Finally, with electric, when the grid flips to solar, or nuclear fusion, or whatever - my car will still be able to use that without any modifications.

True, it would be an *even better* car with newer battery technology (heck, I'd be happy with the NiCd batteries that GM used, but they killed them and they are not available) but today's lead-acid batteries are sufficient for the vast majority of commuter uses.

I like it so much, I'm about to convert a second vehicle.

I can't wait to buy one so I can plug it in to my solar roof.

Forgive me if I'm skeptical but...

I have clear memories as a boy in the late 60s/early70s reading articles such as this.

The text was frequently accompanied by rather nice illustrations of 'futuristic' vehicles along with graphs and predictions about the world's oil supplies being exhausted by 1980, or 1985, or maybe THE YEAR 2000 (drum-roll).

If you'd told me back then that in the year 2008 I'd be driving a steel bodied car with a gasoline powered internal combustion engine at the front, on four wheels with a manual transmission I'd have been amazed and rather sad. To think that conceptually this vehicle would be virtually identical to the one my Dad drove...

What have I learned since then?

That predictions are almost always too pessimistic (who wants to write or read about a fairly benign prediction?).

That technology is almost always slower to become widespread.

That with over 100 years of intense engineering development behind it, we're not going to be throwing the internal combustion engine away anytime soon.