I was pretty excited about the show "Future Cars" on Discovery show when I found out about it. And, thankfully, I have not been disappointed. I wrote about the show before it actually started, and we are now three weeks into the series. The last episode, number three, is of particular interest to us at AutoblogGreen, because it covered the types of fuels that we are likely to see in the coming years. All of the usual suspects were included: ethanol, biodiesel, hybrids, pure electrics, hydrogen, solar and even compressed air were all considered, and got roughly equal coverage. Left off the list were biobutanol or any of the other bioalcohol-based fuels.

Linton, a frequent poster on Hugg, has posted his summary of each episode, and here is a link to his coverage of the third. I also noticed that the show incorrectly referred to the air-powered car as perpetual motion. The official website of the show can be found here.

The last part of this four-part series will be shown next Wednesday, the 28th of February, at 8pm on Discovery Channel. The show will be replayed later that night as well.

EDIT: After rewatching the episodes of Future Car, I was a bit alarmed at the inaccuracies of their depictions of ethanol, biodiesel and air. Ethanol was presented as merely a form of fuel derived from corn. As we all know, corn is one of the worst foodstocks to use for ethanol production. Also, biodiesel was almost completely describes as vegetable oil. In fact, that point was hammered! "ON VEGETABLE OIL" was shown on title screens something like three times. I already mentioned the fact that they described the compressed air car as perpetual power, which is not the case. Anyway, what damage will be done to each industry? Probably not too much... but miseducation is never a good thing.

¶ 05:11 0 Comments