I have seen a lot of speculation on cars that run on corn oil or hydrogen or electricity or many other sources. All very interesting, as we all have grown weary of our oil addiction. Thanks, oil, you served us well, but it is time for us all to move on. Which is the right way to go? What fuel do we move to?

I don’t know all the answers but I do know one thing.

We need to separate our concept of energy creation from energy usage.

I have not seen this concept offered anywhere, so I will offer it here.

What happens if everyone comes up new, unique, and creative cars that run on all types of interesting fuels? That would be great, right?

No, that would be terrible. This path means that fueling stations would need to have a lot of different fuels, and you would fracture the car market into all different types for vehicles that run on all types of fuels. Then, what? We all buy new cars or modify our old cars whenever someone comes out with a new and better fuel? This is a situation that would not work. You do not get the economies of scale you need to build a market for the next generation of vehicles.

Pick One Energy Source For All Autos…
In order to create an infrastructure to support our future cars, we need to pick one energy source that the cars will run on – and use that standard. We would also need to have engineers create standards, etc for creating connections to these cars that use this energy. Also, this energy source would be one that all other fuels could be transferred into… for example it may be easier to turn hydrogen into electricity… than to turn electricity in to hydrogen. So, conversion would need to be taken into account.

So, I am thinking we should create cars than run on electricity and create standard interfaces, including form factors, etc – to input this electricity into the electrical car.

This would allow us to all buy an electric car once – as opposed to trying to get everyone to buy the latest car that runs on the latest fuel. Also, fueling stations could offer the standard energy source for autos – like batteries or ways to charge the car batteries quickly.

…Then Innovate in the separate areas of creation, storage, and usage

Innovation can occur at different paces within the distinct areas of:

• Energy creation
• Energy storage, and
• Energy usage (the actual car)

This is how it would work better. I can buy one car. When someone discovers a new type fuel, a centralized plant (or one at my house?) convert that fuel into potential energy (electricity) – to be stored in the car. When advancements occur in energy, we don’t all buy new cars… we allow the energy producers to turn their fuel into electricity. We may have a mix of fuel energy inputs – but they all get converted into the standard. When innovation occurs in storage/ battery technology, we trade out the battery in our cars, but not the whole thing.

So, I think that the separation of the root source fuel from the end-product energy – for the automobile is something we should do. We all get one type of energy (like electricity) as an input source for our cars, and the latest energy source is the cheapest and best will just be converted to whatever the standard is.

This is my opinion on the best path. Perhaps our technology is not there quite yet, especially in the electricity storage arena, to do something like this. But, this path also allows people to actually be willing to purchase the next generation of cars. There are hurdles to overcome with in all these areas, but this is one way to think about energy, energy distribution, and energy markets –  in a way that could help give us a good start.