There are so many technologies competing to be the alternative to oil-based fuels for cars that it’s tough to discern at this point which will eventually gain the upper hand.
This isn’t simply an environmental matter – though this probably remains the main driver at present.
As governments around the world agree to ever tighter controls on carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions, so cars will have to comply. Some manufacturers, like Honda, have taken the initiative without needing regulations to make them.
But there’s also the inevitable decline of oil as the default fuel. The so-called “peak oil” theory has it that the world’s easy-to-reach oil has already been extracted – or is somewhere around the point of being so – and that, as a consequence, the price of oil will continue inexorably up to around $200 a barrel as demand from the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) continues to increase unabated.
So whichever way you look at it, you can quickly see why the world’s major car manufacturers, including Honda, are concentrating on oil alternatives as fuel.
At the moment, the sales of eco cars UK customers are buying tends to suggest two things:
- That hybrid cars are winning out and,
- That the inroads being made are relatively trifling.
Regarding point two, the sales of various eco cars are relatively tiny – but they’re also increasing quickly.
The likeliest of all scenarios, realistically, over the immediate future of, let’s say five years or so, will be that new car offers of eco vehicles will increasingly be hybrids, with the electrical power taking on an ever greater percentage of the load.
That’s because technology uptake is almost always a little slower than envisaged and hybrids are already well established. Further out still and the alternative fuel winner is still anyone’s guess at the moment.