Here's Your Technology Perspective

[shatto]

[bowtieguy]

some early cars ran on steam, electricity, and 100% veggie oil. you could say we have regressed?!

[IndyFetch]

Originally Posted by bowtieguy

some early cars ran on steam, electricity, and 100% veggie oil. you could say we have regressed?!

Those vehicles also had no power and/or range. If you want that, buy a new Smart electric car.

[Sludgy]

Originally Posted by bowtieguy

some early cars ran on steam, electricity, and 100% veggie oil. you could say we have regressed?!

Some 1940's cars also ran on wood!

http://www.postcollapse.info/oil/gasifier/content.html

[Jay2TheRescue]

A model T could run on more than gasoline... It could run on kerosene, ethanol, and I think diesel as well.

[madnessspirit]

Originally Posted by Fetch

Those vehicles also had no power and/or range. If you want that, buy a new Smart electric car.

Quite the contrary. Steam powered cars had great range and power. Veggie oil cars were early diesels... and at the time, diesels were not that efficient, but neither were gas cars. Problem with veg oil is they were fairly unreliable when it came to cold weather, and very hard to start. You had to use burners to preheat, which was one of the drawbacks of steam cars, preheat time. Not that it was real long on either, but gas an electric meant you didn't have to wait that 10-20 minutes. Electrics didn't have great range, no. Only reason we went to gas was because it was SOOO cheap.

[goofy1]

very true. Imagine if we were all still using hand cranked starters!

[trollbait]

Steam powered cars had great range and power.

The main reason we moved away from steam locomotives is because diesel-electrics had lower operating casts. Steam ones were still running into the '60s even then.