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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (3474)	5/21/2004 1:26:05 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Respond to of 36921

Did you happen to watch PBS's Scientific America Frontiers program " Future Cars" Wednesday night? Future Car Premieres May 19, 2004 Alan Alda begins this show driving a Model T - because, as he puts it, "A century after Gottlieb Daimler built the first Mercedes and Henry Ford founded his car company, the car industry has finally realized that the technologies it's relied on for those one hundred years are as quaintly outdated today as was the Model T back in 1927." Alan visits the research labs and testing tracks of the Big 3 automakers - including DaimlerChrysler in Germany - to find out what will replace today's car technologies in the cars we'll drive 20 years from now. What he finds are cars that will understand their drivers and anticipate problems (like driving through a stop sign!) as well as cars that are far more fuel efficient, like the gasoline-electric hybrids that are already appearing on our roads. Most significantly, Alan test-drives cars that no longer rely on the internal combustion engine and gasoline but instead are powered by fuel cells running on hydrogen. He meets many in the auto industry - like General Motors' VP Larry Burns - who argue that only way to sell more cars in the future - including to the fast growing market in China - is to free cars from oil, "taking them out of the environmental equation." Alan's investigation of the prospects for a quiet, fast, safe, exciting and non-polluting fuel cell car in every garage takes him from Stuttgart to California - and to Iceland, which is attempting to become the first nation to entirely replace imported petroleum with domestically produced hydrogen, generated from the volcanic heat that lies just beneath the island's surface. len