Hybrid future
Having a hard time focusing on work today. Found an article on hybrid cars and fuel cells that suggests that the major automakers take both technologies very seriously; looks like everyone's gonna have a hybrid vehicle to market within the next two years (including a hybrid version of the Honda Civic, due out later this year!), and one company rep is quoted as saying that they expect fuel cell-powered cars to be economically viable by 2010. That's pretty darn cool—not just because the technology itself is cool, but also because the companies sound serious about it. I had been kind of assuming that a lot of the alternative-powered-vehicle stuff the big automakers are doing was designed to be able to say "Hey, look, we tried that, and there was no demand for it, so stop asking us to do this." But these folks sound like they're actively pursuing these options, and fully expect them to be the way the future goes.