A century of gasoline-powered automobiles

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The Prius has been great, no problems, easy to run and fun to watch the miles-per-gallon indicator on the dashboard. I have wondered how and when an improvement on the hybrid Prius might be announced. And it just has!

An upgrade of the Prius called "The Electric Car" was recently described in the press. How might you upgrade the hybrid Prius? Toyota and General Motors have done it in a very interesting way. Both companies are now testing samples of what is called "The Electric Car."

A hybrid car uses gasoline, primarily, and also has an electric motor to drive it. Sometimes both are in action and sometimes only the electric motor is doing the driving, especially on a flat or downhill road. The electric motor is driven by a battery with a warranty of 100,000 miles. Not bad! And the battery is recharged while the car is coasting, and occasionally by the gasoline engine. It is always in good shape.

In the new electric car things are different. It is the battery only that drives the car. A fully loaded battery will drive the car for 40 miles or so before it needs to be recharged. Here is where the gasoline comes in. A small gasoline engine recharges the battery. That is the only function of the gasoline. So, you can see, the car is electrically driven.

Since the gasoline is used only to charge the battery, the amount used is quite small compared to the gasoline used in ordinary cars where the gasoline drives the car's engine. In the electric cars now under testing, the gasoline used amounts to about 150 or 160 miles of travel per gallon. What a difference from the ordinary non-hybrid car, and even from the hybrid Prius.

Now the inventors of the electric car are working on a method to run the car at about 400 to 500 miles per gallon of gasoline, which is used only to charge the battery. Can you imagine the change in everything when such cars begin to be driven by the entire public? Even the Prius, which has saved me much money over the past four years, will become a gas guzzler.

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Such things are what technology is all about. Technology is the use of science to make changes and improvements. As the world moves along more and more, technology involves smaller and smaller components. The term "nanotechnology" refers to science doing things in microscopic sizes to create new processes and new products.

What intrigues me about the future are the accomplishments and effects of this nanotechnology.

I look at the development of our earth sometimes with awe and amazement. At the present time we can do things that the genius Archimedes couldn't even imagine doing during his lifetime in the years of 200 B.C. His inventive mind came up with many new ideas but nothing like what is going on now. He has been considered the greatest inventor of his time. One of his best inventions was called the "water screw." It was a giant screw that was used to pull up water from a pond, a lake or the ocean. When you turned the screw in the proper direction, the angled cavities in the screw would drag the water up to the top and then release it.

These days our thoughts are much more complex and much more interesting as well. It has taken men and women with inventive minds to dream up new and sometimes "idiotic"-sounding ideas to move our world forward in growth. And it gets more and more challenging, and successful, as people move forward with their ideas.

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In R&D magazine (Research and Development) there was a recent article about the world's 10 best R&D companies. Toyota was listed as No. 5, with IBM, General Electric, DuPont and 3M leading the way. But the listing of revenue earned by each of the 10 companies showed Toyota very far ahead of all of the others for the year 2006 with a total of $203.8 billion. General Electric was second with a total of $168.3 billion and none of the others reached the $100 billion mark.

How long it will take for the electric car to become our standard is unknown now. But I am convinced that it will be here within the next five or six years because of the determination of engineers and scientists in the various automobile companies, in the United States and overseas. In fact, General Motors talks about its plan to begin building a sedan that will be called the "Chevrolet Volt" electric car by 2010. Let's hope they make it.