Celebrating clean cars

The vehicles on display at the third annual AltWheels Alternative Transportation Festival in Brookline, Mass., included probably a dozen Toyota Priuses, a pair of tiny and cute Smart cars (evidently part of the package when you buy an "eco-loft"), Weston’s (Mass.) compressed natural gas school bus, a hydrogen-powered golf cart, a bio-diesel Volkswagen that did indeed smell like french fries and assorted electric bikes and scooters.

The festival is held on the grounds of the Larz Anderson transportation museum, which features a very personal and oddball collection of French-built cars. One of the highlights for me was the chance to finally ride on a Segway. I’ve been curious about these gyroscopically balanced one-person transporters for years and finally got on one owned and ingeniously modified by Karl Ian Sagal of the Segway Enthusiasts Group. He installed headlights, side pouches and even a remote camera for looking backwards.

Within seconds I was tooling around, hampered only by the non-intuitive turning mechanism: Instead of twisting the handlebars, you turn a small thumbwheel. I scattered a few pedestrians before getting that straight. But the Segway is the least-threatening motorized vehicle and easiest-to-use ever. Only President Bush could fall off one.

There was a very serious dimension to the AltWheels Festival, which featured panels on everything from the future of driving and alternative fueling options to fuel-cell technology and sustainable transportation for New England’s cities and towns. Speakers included Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey (who pointed out the U.S. has, at most, 3 percent of the world’s oil, so it better get serious about alternative transportation) and Portland, Maine, Mayor Jill Duson, who is doing her bit to make her city less car dependant.

I was on a panel discussing alternative fuels for the future and I liked what I heard from Mike Manning of Keyspan Energy Delivery. He noted Americans today use three times the electrical energy they did in the 1970s and consume a quarter of the world’s oil (despite being only 5 percent of the world’s population). And now that we’re close to reaching the peak of global oil production, he said, Americans are in for a rude awakening.

It’s disheartening some environmentalists feel they have the luxury to oppose nearly all energy projects, including wind farms and offshore liquefied natural gas terminals, while simultaneously continuing to drive cars and draw down power from the grid. The panel briefly touched on the fact some brave greens are publicly wondering if we will have to start building nuclear plants again. Nobody likes nuclear, but it is one of the few technologies with an answer both to peak oil and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

A changing mood

The public continues its slow divorce from gas-guzzling SUVs. An Opinion Research Corp. survey reveals four out of five Americans want Detroit to start using fuel-saving hybrid technology in its future vehicles and three out of four want the federal government to impose tougher fuel-economy standards.

A bill recently introduced by Congressmen Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and the aforementioned Markey would do just that. The standard for cars would go from 25 to 33 mpg over 10 years, saving 2.6 million barrels of oil a day by 2025. Of course, the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute opposes this move to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, calling it "a deadly blood-for-oil tradeoff."

But Americans are switching to smaller cars and hybrids without federal regulations. A car dealer I encountered at the festival told me he can’t give away big pickups and SUVs these days. Even nearly new ones are selling for $15,000 below list.