Agreed--compare and contrast with Apple's response to the Shuffle's green/orange flash of death. To my knowledge they *still* haven't even acknowledged that little problem.

Actually, I'd say that people need to start bitching and complaining in big numbers, or there won't be a lot of incentive for the government to reign in these clowns. Participatory democracy, and all that...

Not at all. What I'm saying is that we need to broaden our thinking to consider the Transportation Problem rather than merely the Car Problem. The idea of private cars for everyone really only works if you have extremely cheap, extremely dense energy such like oil. It's true that we can run compressors from a variety of energy sources ranging from solar to geo to hydro to what-have-you. But I see two problems to this. First, not everyone is going to have reasonable proximal access to clean energy sources, which means that a nation-wide air-compressor infrastructure is likely to be electrical in order to leverage common compressor designs. This means that we'll be relying on the same basket of energy sources to power them, including natural gas and coal. The second problem is that renewables don't have anything approaching the energy density of oil. This means that as the total amount of energy drops as oil becomes scarcer/more expensive, we need to be smart about how we use, rather than diverting an increasing percentage to charging electric cars, running compressors, and so forth. Here in the U.S. all this means fewer cars (however they're powered) and more buses, better trains, and smarter urban plannin.

Big industrial air compressors don't take the place of alternative energy, because the compressor is just a way of turning one source of energy--say, electricity created by burning coal--into another form whie reducing energy density, if you believe those pesky laws of thermodynamics.

Honestly I'm getting tired of hearing about novel new cars that will save the world, be it those running on compressed air, hydrogen, electric, recycled underarm deodorant or whatever. If you leave out energy return over energy invested calculations and ignore the carbon footprint of the energy production needed to run the thing, it's just a big shell game.