That’s about 800 horsepower.  Can you imagine something like the Prius with 800 horsepower, or even 200?

Stephen speaks for me when he says that batteries (of whatever chemistry) are the way to get away from increasingly scarce and expensive petroleum.  Solar power has been close to the per-mile price of gasoline since last year, and people are already making grid-fed hybrid cars.  Do you think that speed freaks are going to ignore the performance possibilities of these ultra-low-resistance batteries?  The demand for plug-in hybrids is about to become too big for the automakers to ignore, and Toyota looks set to lead.

I hold out hope for electric cars because they are not limited to power harvested under the hood of our cars from a single resource – gasoline.

Gasoline has been hard to beat. The amount of energy it takes to pull it from the ground, refine it, and put it our gas tanks is remarkably low compared to the energy we get from exploding it in internal combustion engines.

I hope someday we can do better. Imagine an electric car battery that doesn’t need to be replaced often, has a range comparable to a tank of gas, can be recharged quickly, holds its charge well, and that can be sold at a reasonable cost.

If we had batteries like that we wouldn’t have to limit ourselves to the most efficient power that can be produced by explosions in a mobile engine. We could use power from any source. Hopefully this would give us greater latitude in coming up with cheap and environmentally-friendly power.