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Depends on what type of driving you are doing. On the highway in a mountainous area I regularly get about 35-38 MPG in my 99 Corvette. In town I usually pull mid-twenties. I'v ebene able to get close to 30MPG in town when I consistently try to. If people pay attention to what they are doing they can save significant amounts of fuel. If their car has an "average MPG" readout/gauge and an "instant MPG" they can learn to drive in ways that dramatically increase their fuel economy. IMO the Prius having an MPG gauge of some sort entices it's owners to learn to improve their driving = just as it does in other cars that have them.

The primary non-human factor in higher MPG vehicles is mass - weight. It affects two of the three uses of energy expended. GM did experiment with a single-seater, "The Lean Machine" - a play on words. It was lightweight, three wheels (Wheels are rotating unsprung mass, particularly irksome), and leaned into turns like a motorcycle. It reported 100+MPG. In the 80's.

Hypercar shows the dramatic effect of weight on vehicles. http://www.hypercar.com/

If you want to explore the economy of lightweight vehicles yourself, try out some of the stuff from http://www.rqriley.com/.

No, I'm not the experts but I refer you to the: Rocky Mountains Insititute . They are a not for profit environmental think tank who work with corporations and governments (Ford, the US Military for example) to increase profits or reduce costs through more efficient environmental practices. They ran a Design Charrette around this specific question. This is where they take their staff members with general energy efficiency expertise and a whole bunch of industry types (data centre types, power company types etc. and worked at redesigning the entire data centre idea from scratch with energy efficiency in mind. There is a detailed report including return on investment figures and detailed financial breakdowns. The information available is extremely comprehensive and free (as in beer). These guys are excellent and slashdotters might also like to look at similar exercises they have done with cars and energy security.

"It's not going to change the overall vehicle to be unrecognizable from today," Hass [manager of physical and environmental sciences at Ford] said. "But the biggest impact may well be beyond anybody's imagination today."

Are cars you lease rather than buy.

Some of this exists already, but the big car makers have to bring this to its logical conclusion.

If car makers have to pay for maintenance and disposal costs, they will be given an incentive to build the cars so they will be durable. Parts likely wouldn't break down as often, and would be easily replaced, just like you can change RAM on your box. And the whole thing will have to be recyclable.

Or we could simply go with a ten-year-old idea, the Hypercar. (more info)

As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.

By the time you total grid inefficency, battery inefficency and so on, the total CO2 emissions advantage is negligable. You'd do better to add more insulation to your house and drive a little Honda.

The Hybrids, though, are another kettle of fish entirely - they generate their electricity from gasoline, in situ, and that actually (surprisingly) turns out to be a smart thing to do for a long list of reasons.

So, over-all, no great loss and wait for Hypercars - cars that think they are power stations..... (no, I'm not making this up).

Amory Lovins has been pushing this kind of thing for years. Except, instead of a fuel cell, Lovins suggests using an ordinary gas engine whose sole duty is to power a generator; rather like a diesel locomotive. He theorizes that, because the engine can run at a constant RPM and torque load, it can be smaller and reduce weight, so fuel efficiency goes up. Also, getting rid of the transmission and other mechanical linkages reduces weight, so fuel efficiency goes up.

Given that, it's not clear why Detroit is interested in pursuing highly advanced fuel cell tech.

Schwab

I think you mean Hypercar.

Another site about hypercars that has useful information.

The good thing about a hypercar is that the economics of it will eventually force the switch away from conventinal cars.

IMHO, the "best and brightest" and the best of the internet came before the capitalist boom. Money ruins everything. We still need bright people in government and industry. For example, basic automobile technology hasn't changed in 100 years. 4 wheels, 4 pistons, and burns dinosaur. Why don't we have hypercars? Government example: Cars themselves are a technological mistake. What we need are better City Planners. After all, average actual commuting time (20 minutes), and the average maximum commuting time that people will stand for (45 minutes) haven't changed since the Middle Ages. I don't think that market forces are the best way of choosing our technology. We need a GNU method.