I have been reading numerous reports on car safety, accident-prone personality disorders (I have a few such disorders of the neurological system), car weight, car size, and US-Canadian road base soils--which dictate uneveness in road surfaces, as well as European versus North American driving patterns. If the United States and/or Canada were to switch to very high miles per gallon micro-cars, in order to save crude oil, traffic fatalities per year would at least quadruple, under the most conservative estimate I can devise. Under some circumstances the death rates could easily increase ten-fold or more. For most North Americans it would be safest to use heavy, long-wheel base, wide-track vehicles, preferably powered by something other than imported petroleum. Nanotube Carbon Paper batteries as developed by Renselear (sp?) Polytechnique Institute, NASA, and Florida State University come to mind. They should be very cheap and last the liffespan of the car. They can be instantly recharged from a larger battery at home hooked up to a rooftop or backyard solar system array. in about five years the price of solar cell technology might make such a system cheaper than buying power from the power company. An alternative to batteries would be liquid nitrogen propulsion systems using a large nickle steel radiator and a small under-the-hood steam engine in lieu of a gas engine. Power might come from a neighborhood fusor to separate and liquify nitrogen from the air. See Wikipedia for details under various terms.
I have been reading numerous reports on car safety, accident-prone personality disorders (I have a few such disorders of the neurological system), car weight, car size, and US-Canadian road base soils--which dictate uneveness in road surfaces, as well as European versus North American driving patterns. If the United States and/or Canada were to switch to very high miles per gallon micro-cars, in order to save crude oil, traffic fatalities per year would at least quadruple, under the most conservative estimate I can devise. Under some circumstances the death rates could easily increase ten-fold or more. For most North Americans it would be safest to use heavy, long-wheel base, wide-track vehicles, preferably powered by something other than imported petroleum. Nanotube Carbon Paper batteries as developed by Renselear (sp?) Polytechnique Institute, NASA, and Florida State University come to mind. They should be very cheap and last the liffespan of the car. They can be instantly recharged from a larger battery at home hooked up to a rooftop or backyard solar system array. in about five years the price of solar cell technology might make such a system cheaper than buying power from the power company. An alternative to batteries would be liquid nitrogen propulsion systems using a large nickle steel radiator and a small under-the-hood steam engine in lieu of a gas engine. Power might come from a neighborhood fusor to separate and liquify nitrogen from the air. See Wikipedia for details under various terms.