Can the ultimate car be built? That is the question. I drive around and get annoyed at gas prices. Just the other day I had to pay 28.00 dollars for gas. It is crazy how high gas prices have risen. I think about trading in my SUV but then I come to the conclusion that there are no SUV’s out there I would want to buy, and that have good MPGs. I like having room to pack my stuff in and I like being able to drive around in the winter with few getting stuck problems. My truck has a Hwy 25, city 22 mpg, which a lot of people say is a great MPG. But whenever I go to the gas station I feel like I am once again personally paying for buying this SUV.

It’s even more annoying knowing that it will take a couple of decades for a switch over from Gasoline to hybrid to plug in hybrid to full electric cars to happen. The infrastructure needs to be built and the batteries need to be worked on until we get affordable long distance mileage out of them.

The problem is we are at the beginning of a long road. I keep thinking of the first time the automobile was introduced, and all the heckling from horse drawn carriage drivers they got. I can still think of what they must have said, “Get a good horse!”

 “What a waste of money and resources.”

 “You can’t even get it started!”

 “Get that contraption out of my way!””

And yet a century later, we have millions of them on the road, with more being produced every day.

Now here we stand on a new precepts with new vehicles coming out to change us over to a new fuel, electricity. Oh sure there were talks about Hydrogen being the fuel of the future. But I don’t think that is going to happen for some time. It costs two to three times more to produce and sell a Hydrogen fuel cell car and the hydrogen would come from Natural gas!

But electricity is simple. We use it every day in our homes and on personal electronics. The problem is the battery. We need to come up with one that can pack a punch and charge up fast. If we are to plug in our cars no one wants to run the chance of having to run an electric cord out from the garage or front door o the street. What if someone as a joke unplugged it or plugged their car in and stole your electricity?

 So the problem becomes better batteries and a way to recharge them easily without criminality. Today we use gas stations to fill up our cars. Tomorrow we will plug in our cars and charge the batteries up in a few minutes. Crazy you say? If you go into the local hardware store you will find battery chargers that do this already. Energizer cells a charger and batteries that can be charged up in 15 minutes to an 80% charge rate. It takes another 10 minutes to chare the battery to 100%. And they last at least a hundred charges before the batteries need to be replaced. These batteries are made out of lithium a scarce metal that only a few countries in the world mine and export. Could these countries be our next Saudi Arabia of Lithium? There is of course the idea that like previous chargeable batteries, you know the one that took first 16 hours, then 8 hours, then 4 hours, then 1 hour, then 30 minutes, then 15 minutes, etc, to charge up we will continue to produce faster and faster battery chargers and batteries.

So lithium batteries are just the more recent rechargeable battery in a line of previous rechargeable batteries and we will see newer faster batteries in the future.

The question begs when will we see faster rechargeable batteries and when will they get into affordable cars and trucks, especially SUV”s? Well if we look at where we stand now. The car companies will roll out a plug in hybrid within a year, electric hybrid within 2 years. It may take at least a decade or more for a truly electric car that can go long distances to emerge. By long distance I mean longer than 40 miles say 700 miles like today’s gasoline cars. I am hoping that by 2030 we will have such a car and it will be affordable. Now I say 2030 because I hope that is far enough out that all these things come true, affordability, long driving range, quick recharge ability, and multiple charging times, but like flying cars by 2015 in “Back to the Future” I may be wrong.

But it may take that long and even longer if the car companies drag their feet.