In 2000, Honda and Toyota both started selling "hybrid" electric cars that evade those bothersome range limits. You never plug in these cars to recharge the battery -- you simply fill the gas tank.
The Toyota Prius, a five passenger hybrid about the size of a Corolla, gets 52 miles per gallon around town and 45 on the highway. The smaller Honda Insight gets 70 miles per gallon overall, making it the highest-mileage car ever to hit the mass market -- ideal for today's soaring energy prices.
Hybrid technology also works on a larger scale. In 1999, five hybrid busses ran up to 18 hours a day in New York City. The 40-foot busses used a diesel engine running at constant speed. The hefty batteries were used to accelerate and recover energy from braking.
Hybrids combine the best of electricity and gasoline. Instead of recharging through a plug, the batteries get their juice from a small, light gasoline or diesel engine. When you hit the brakes, kinetic energy is converted into electricity, then stored in the battery. At a stop light, the engine shuts down entirely.
Incredible shrinking battery
Because the battery is not the car's sole source of support, so to speak, it can be much smaller than the weighty, costly monsters used for battery-operated cars.
Hybrids sound good -- they are, for example, exempt from the range limitations of battery-powered cars. But even hybrids could seem passe by 2004, when major auto makers promise to start selling cars powered by fuel cells.
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