Yes. Fuel cells have efficiency and durability issues. Zinc-based batteries also have issues due to shape change of the zinc powder and dendritic growth. Believe it or not, alkaline batteries (MnZn) are actually rechargables, but only for two-five cycles.

Yes. I should have put it in the first post. Here is an article by the Antiplanner on the costs of cars. I don't agree with everything he believes (like private roads), but he does have some good points about costs and efficiency. He does this calculation based on numbers from the US Government.

Sure. Here is a source for the bus per person data. The numbers are extracted from a giant British report, see the "How Can This Be" section.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Nope. It never will. First, lets take a trip to Japan, the country in the G8 with the biggest transit market share. There, we find a rail system that uses an average of 160 watt-hours per passenger mile. In testing of electric cars, it has been found that on the highway, an electric car (like the leaf, Rav4, etc.) average around 250 watt-hours per mile, higher than the train. However, in city driving electric cars average about 150-160 watt-hours per mile. It gets even better for the cars, in which contain 1.5 passengers on average in the united states. Now, that Japanese train is a hell of a lot better than most gas cars, but that is the difference between gas and electric, not the difference between rail and cars.

Buses are worse. Advanced diesel hybrid buses get 5.5 MPG, city. In the best case where fifty people are on the bus, that's 275 MPG. However, this rarely happens. How many people are actually on a bus in transit loving Europe? 10. So the bus gets 55 MPG. Basically, it's a Prius.

If the Nazi's, New Zealanders and South Africans can do it, so can we. But electric cars are shipping, so it is a moot point anyway.

Do you really think that oil powered cars will exist anywhere outside of museums and historical societies by the time this thing even gets rolling? I think not.

As a side note, Leafs have shipped, Volts have shipped, and Rav4 EV Version 2 ships next year. An electric car, with the average 1.5 passengers, is more efficient than the Japanese rail system.

Roads and planes are subsidized at 0.5-1.1 cents per passenger mile, while rail in the USA is subsidized at +20 cents per passenger mile. Since road and rail will use similar amounts of electricity, roads make sense.

It's a legit project. video. There are several problems with the idea, and that's why it was stopped.

1. It's not efficient. Because of inefficiencies in the air electrode and oxygen evolution electrode, the system is only around 54% efficient round trip. Most battery systems are 70-99% efficient.
2. It requires heavy automation. They had to build a factory to reduce zinc oxide to zinc, and load it in to the cars.
3. It's expensive, because the air electrodes contain a lot of unobtainium.

Please try zinc instead. Zinc-air technology is amazing. It is the most efficient round trip fuel technology I've seen. If we moved all (or even some) hydrogen research dollars to zinc air, it would win. See for example, this bus: zinc air fuel cell bus.

Yep, but I no long call myself an environmentalist. I call myself an eco-capitalist or an eco-libertarian so I won't be associated with orthodox environmentalist. By the way, here's some proof of what I'm talking about:

It wasn't ever free, that's a lie to attempt compare ad-based web radio to piracy. We already support the business by listening and looking at adds. Foolish business try to demand payment, and get replaced by better ones that don't. The music industry makes less in a year than what Sergey has in his personal bank account. I personally think that Google is going to steamroll the media corps soon. Look at youtube. We already get all that stuff for free. Oh, and corps can take over the Internet. It'll be gone the day after, and we'll be back to sqaure zero (over dialup and mesh networks).

But I gotta plug these guys: ZaReason. Good systems, no bloatware.

Two points:

Wind power is growing at an average rate of 30% annually. That means that in 15-20 years if the current trends continue, it will be the sole source of electricity in the USA.

Environmentalists don't support clean energy. They pretend to, but what they really want is no energy, back to the dark ages. Give them a solar powered car, and they'll tell you to redesign your life around bicycles. Give them a solar power system, and they'll tell you to turn out the lights. Fortunately for the environment, clean energy is a profitable business model, and will triumph not out of ideology but out of capitalism. Because of this, the future of energy and industrial production, and maybe even general life is in international waters.

Please ignore the above post. Slashdot is acting weird by being slow to respond to posts and I did not see that it had already been posted above.

Google world domination? Free Soda, 20% time, Plug-in hybrids and robots for all? Bring it on.