Another good, alternative-fuel car. However... (Score 4)

Excellent. Another type of automobile that is powered by an alternative, renewable energy source. This should have some good effects upon the environment, and the economy - alternative energy means more energy overall.

However, is it really what is best for society?

The automobile, while a blessing for many, has also become a curse, especially when our cities are designed around its use. In some cities in America, for example, people sit around in traffic jams for hours because of the fact that they, along with most others in the metro area, need to travel across the freeways or highways to get to work. If, say, a million people need to get to work in the space of an hour, and they all drive their own cars across the roadway, there are bound to be traffic problems. Millions of man-hours are lost that could've been spent doing other things rather than commuting.

Furthermore, the millions of people commuting using automobiles takes up lots of space. Automobile-oriented cities eventually wind up sprawling across the countryside, replacing lots of important open space near the city with highways, strip malls, and tract housing. Among other effects of widespread automobile dominance are the death of a lot of social aspects of the city (people need the automobile to get anywhere, and thus it becomes expensive and troublesome, not to mention time-consuming, to travel between cities), smog (a la Los Angeles or Houston, though this may not be as much of a problem with an alternative-energy car), unnecessary expense on the individual (if everyone needs a car to get around, they need to pay for the car, gas, insurance, etc) and as a result is discriminatory (not to mention age discrimination, as people younger than driving age or too old to drive are effectively confined to the home without means to go anywhere). The list can go further, but I ramble, and the basic point is that the automobile-oriented city is inefficient. The low-density development provided thus is incongruous with a city (which is what the majority of the people still function in). Perhaps mass transit and 'walkable' cities are better.

At any rate...the point of this whole argument is, when viewed in the grand scheme of things, is this really better? The problem of needing lots of gasoline is solved, but this is only a surface problem - lots of energy is still required to operate these things, and the automobiles still affect their surroundings negatively when there are too many. The only thing that's changed is the fact that a different type of energy runs the car. So, in the long run, would it perhaps be better that it were more expensive to operate a car? The eventual result would be that fewer people would use them (they are more difficult to afford, and thus less widely used), and the structure of the city would change accordingly to one more beneficial to human interaction and transport. We'd also have less energy needed to power our cars, and more energy could then go to preventing rolling blackouts and other fun things. ;-)

OTOH, would IT be a good fix as well? With more telecommuters, this means fewer commuters, and thus less of a need for massive highways and traffic jams and the like, and also preserves more energy for more important things.

Of course, this is a neat technology...I wouldn't mind powering things off of my garbage :-)