Would you like to eat lunch or get a gallon of gasoline?
When it comes to investing or even picking sports games I am absolutely horrible at analyzing and deciding the future outcome. I’m so bad in fact that my friends pick the opposite of what I do and have an 80% chance of winning. So with that being said I forecast four to five dollar a gallon gasoline for 2013. What’s interesting is that Americans have a hard time changing our lifestyle when it comes to sacrificing especially if it’s our vehicles. So having high gas prices is bittersweet because it pushes us into finding better alternatives than gasoline and hopefully these high prices will cause commercial trucking as well as fleets to change over compressed natural gas which we have an abundance of.
I myself will be looking to convert my vehicle to a duel fuel CNG and gasoline. Think of the advantages of having a compressed natural gas vehicle as everyone else has to worry about which insane dictator is pointing his rocket at who. We also see a massive rise in vehicle ownership around the world causing more stress on oil. What’s great is that we are starting to see a downward trend for American fuel consumption and a record number of sales for hybrid vehicles. Problem is that the government is always in need of more tax revenue so therefore if we slow down our oil consumption as a nation that tax revenue from each gallon of gasoline as well as the oil corporations are going to have to start coming from different sources such as natural gas or even that stupid f-ing idea of charging you per mile that you drive. But since our government has grown so massive it needs tax revenue, and we know they are not going to downsize when they can just raise taxes.
I simply want Americans to have the freedom to drive around when they want and to take spontaneously long road trips without having to worry about the massive cost of fuel. I want us to be able to drive around and not have to worry about the environmental impact that we are causing. I look at countries like Brazil that is 100% energy independent as they make ethanol from sugarcane it is wildly successful an inexpensive for residents. Our corn-based ethanol has been shown to be anything but wildly successful as it simply does not make any sense whenever you boil it down to efficiency.
So my thoughts would be to focus on compressed natural gas or diesel technology and incorporate it with hybrid technology as well as the inertia energy retrieval systems from braking and lighter weight carbon composite vehicles and a CVT transmissions or six speed manuals (because manuals are awesome) and thus we should get vehicles that can produce over 60 miles per gallon on the highway. And what’s interesting is we see that Ford Motor Company has already started a project to drop 750 pounds of weight from each vehicle by starting to use more composite materials. And we also see compressed natural gas and diesel vehicles starting to trickle into our market place so get ready for a change in the way we power our vehicles. And as long as they’re fast and look good I will be happy with it.
Let us know what your thoughts are on the vehicles of the future and if you foresee a plethora of joyless bubble cars or a 400 hp muscle car that weighs the same as a Lotus Elise and gets 50 miles per gallon. I choose the latter.
